branchandroot | The difference between manga and comics

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The difference between manga and comics

Actually, this is a lot broader than that, but that was one of the places this post started. The other was Rana's comment on a different post, words to the effect that the fan-cultures in question seem to divide themselves based only on some very fuzzy Orientalism.

I agree that fuzzy Orientalism is the most regrettably common way Western fans of similar media from different national/ethnic groups (eg comics and manga) express their differentiation. That particular expression is generally a lot of hot air, yes.

But I also think there are real fan-culture differences, touching on though not always rising directly from the mother-culture differences of the sources. This is my attempt to articulate the ones that I've seen. Warning: generalizations ahead, though not baseless ones.

ETA: To elaborate, this post is based on my own and my circle's experiences in various fandoms; unfortunately I managed to phrase things rather more generally and universally than I quite realized at the time. *rueful* None of the following is actually meant to be a Declaration Of How Fandom Is Everywhere. That said, the experience in question is not a narrow one, and I think the following is representative of a significant section of manga (and anime) fandom participants.

One major fan-culture difference is Japanophilia. Not the study of another culture, though it can in a few happy cases evolve into that, but the fad for and valorization of the surface and trappings of another culture. It makes me twitch, but there it is. However much some of us headdesk, this exoticization isn't going away anytime soon and it is a significant fan-culture difference.

Another is what we might call the discussion tropes of the fandoms. These tend to evolve from a handful of defining features in the sources where they cross with the developing tenor of the fandom culture. A recurring discussion in comic fandoms, for example, revolves around the hypersexualization of women, and how objectionable it is to reduce all the women to a set of tits and an ass. Manga fandoms do not have this discussion (ETA: I should have phrased this as something more like "this discussion or similar ones regarding the rendering of women as two-dimensional objects who exist for the benefit of men and not as fully realized characters"), not as a Known Issue, not in the open, despite an at least equal tendency to appalling objectification in the source material. Instead, the discussion usually gets pushed into private mode before it really gets going. See above, re: Japanophilia and valorization, also re: headdesking. On the other hand, the original language itself is a discussion point largely peculiar to Western manga fandoms, as will generally be the case with a translated source. It expresses as everything from language lessons to fights over transliteration systems to the eternal localization vs. "direct" translation battle, and knowledge of those debates acts as one of the shibboleths of manga fandoms.

Then there's actual style and content in the source. There has always been a certain give and take, between this particular two-set, of artistic style, and as US comics (the only ones I can speak to from experience) diversify it's becoming more evident, but there are also story tropes that are still distinct. How else, when they arise from two separate mother-cultures? To name only one, multiple genres of manga have, for decades, toyed with explicit homoeroticism in a way that comics in general do not. The genre diversity itself is another example, and the variety of story-types told in manga format. The symbolic language is, and can only remain, distinct as well. Curiously enough, such story tropes do not result in many fan-culture differences that I have seen, except insofar as manga fandom can, for example, show a more intense defensiveness, sometimes devolving into outright gay-bashing, over reading and enjoying explicit gay (only not real gay, which is a whole nother essay) romance, porn and slapstick. (ETA: I did not phrase myself with enough specificity here; I am aware of the voluble gay-bashing in comics fandoms. What I refer to is the particular "screw for my enjoyment while I deny you the right to live" double-mindedness that shows up among fen who are trying to have their cake and bash it too. The key word, here, is defensiveness.) The different story tropes I would put down as a distinction between the sources, but not one that manifests much in fandom culture outside of the actual preference for the style and content of one group of sources or another.

Now, what I would be interested to know is: do the same kinds of differences show up in the Western fandoms of Western and Asian TV? Or of Western bands and Asian bands? And do they manifest in gaming fandoms? That last especially interests me, since the game sources seem to be the most self-aware of the trans-Pacific trade.

ETA: As per suggestion, I would like to point out that I have not been present for the bulk of wrangler discussions on associated issues. These are thoughts going off in a different (somewhat) direction, so please to be not be bringing other fights in here. I am an unaligned polity.

ETA some more: Will not be replying to further comments on this one because work has descended for the term. Talk among yourselves if you like.

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Well, but that difference is still not between manga and comics, but rather between fandoms.

I still don't think that calling US comics and manga 'genres' works. They're a handy classification, but even then, shoujo and shonen are different. So are Peanuts and Superman.
We could say there are some aesthetic commonalities between manga as a whole and Western comics as a whole but, for example, comics strips also have aesthetic commonalities between them, regardless of which country produced them.

Manga, comics, historieta, bande desineé only refer to national traditions inside the same medium.
Even if The Tale of Genji, the Arabian Nights and El cantar del Mío Cid are really really different, have different story tropes and come from different cultures, we call them all 'literature'. Sculptures are sculptures and dance is dance.

*blinks* Um. To whom are you speaking? Because I have not, in this entry suggested calling comics and manga genres, and I am specifically attempting to address the fandoms and their cultures above the style and content of the source. I had thought I made that distinction about as clear as could be.

So, if you want to discuss what I actually wrote, that's way cool, but if you want to argue with someone who is not me, could you perhaps go argue with them? Instead of me?

And do they manifest in gaming fandoms?

Yes, although the extent thereof and the permutations of it are a whole 'nother post entirely; I'm not capable of writing it now, but the manifestation is there.

Looking at it in a general view, it's not all that different in context of the medium to the comics divide, and - as

ranalore pointed out on the previous post on this subject, if we're willing to acknowledge that large of a gap between the fanbase while still lumping the distinct fandoms under the same media category for games like we do with every other medium, we ... should probably be doing the same for the printed page and animation, until/unless some bright shining star can put forward a sane and non-explosive way to divvy up the other media categories along similar lines.

Of course, AO3 really does need to decide if, category-wise, we're listing by media type or by fandom, because right now it's unclear and it's really producing more confusion and conflict than helpfulness. What we seem to be leading towards right now is a clearer delineation by media type in the initial browsing categories, regardless of whether this ends up leading to more or less simplification on the initial categories page.

One thing that makes this hard to discuss is that, speaking as a wrangler in many of the fandoms that will be affected by this decision, the wrangling staff as a whole and in particular for fandoms with (there really has to be a better word for this) non-Western sources takes a really dim view of the "fuzzy Orientalism" you and Rana point out (as many of us - myself not included, however, for the sake of clarification - are from cultural backgrounds where they have to deal with that kind of racist misinterpretation on a regular basis), and I expect we'll continue to be mostly uninterested in providing a solution that caters to such a mindset.

I myself am uninterested in providing that kind of solution, as well; if there's a way to utilize the AO3's current structure, or manipulate it to work a little differently to cater to the fannish culture differences without pandering to that Orientalist and source-culture-erasing streak, I'd be really interested in pursuing it. I'm falling back on the "let's just categorize it as its media type like we do everything else" option for lack of anything that's actually a better idea, you know? But so far, nobody's provided one.

Sorry if this comes off like I'm jumping you or anything! I honestly am not trying to do anything of the kind; I saw you in comments on

lysapadin's KHR fic and came looking to see what you had to offer on the topic of more of that, please and stumbled into this instead.

*laughs* Well, do feel free to read the fic too! It's all tagged under "fic: khr".

In a way I'm trying to step back from the specificity of "what the heck do we do with this stuff in the archive?" and look at what I have actually /seen/. What I've seen is that there are, indeed, cultural differences in the fandoms which seem to be, how to put this... not always directly linked to the cultural differences of the sources themselves.

Having said that, if I were to attempt to apply the observation to the archive categorizing, I suppose I would say that it seems likely the fandoms in question would resist a media-only categorization. Sometimes that will almost certainly be for reasons I disapprove of a lot! But I do think that will need to be taken into account. That's the self-identification of the fandoms in question, and while some of the reasons for it should and must be questioned I think trying to impose a new identification or organization using the archive as a lever would be unproductive. On the other hand, I very much agree that a schema that perpetuates orientalism is a Bad Idea.

For myself, I think media-based supercategories could combine reasonably well with fandom-culture-based subcategories across the board. Looking at how fast the numbers of fandoms are mounting, I think some kind of subcategory will be needed for most supercategories real soon now! I like the idea of acknowledging the different cultural origins of the sources, because claiming that there is no difference seems to be as egregious an act of erasure as is using someone else's life as one's bling.

Okay, I'm starting to wander off and need to go to bed. Thanks for a thought provoking comment!

Neither comic fans nor manga (or anime and cartoon) fans are really going to stand for being shoved together and there are very good and valid reasons why they shouldn't be (which you cover very well), but seperating them completely, seems very unfair to me, /especially/ if nothing else is going to be handled that way. It continues to foster the animosity that some members of both groups have for each other.

There are also cases where it's not so clear cut where fan stuff based on a specific work would go. What is someone did a fan work based on the X-men manga? Would it get separated from the rest of the X-men stuff, or would it be allowed with the comics? What about OEL manga? Would those type of works get shunted to one or the other, or would it be handled on a case by case basis?

I like the idea of things being better separated, either through using small categories or subcategories withing larger categories. At the very least it would make the manga/comic distinction stick out like less of a sore thumb. I've never seen anything anything else divided purely by country of origin like that, even for video games where the divide between JRPG fans and western game fans can be just as big.

Believe it or not, I actually had a bigger comment written about this. As a fan of manga and comics the hard distinction between the two has always bugged me. People from both sides have given me flack for liking both, even when they know nothing about the particular series that I like.

As an after thought, there are some differences between Western and Asian TV fandoms, but most of that seems to come from the fact that many of the stars of Asian TV shows are 'entertainers' or 'musicians', the fandoms of some Asian TV shows aren't really TV fandoms at all, but are really a subsection of a music fandom.

Err...

Manga fandoms do not have this discussion,

Depends on the individual fandom. I can't really agree that manga fandom in general doesn't, because I've participated in the discussion of this myself, and can therefore conclude that manga fandom has this discussion.

Yes, drek like Queen's Blade won't have the discussion. Mainly because barely anyone who finds the sexualisation problematic is watching it, and discussing it in particular is silly, because people who watch it don't care.
This is not different from western-media fandom not discussing generic porn comics.

for example, show a more intense defensiveness, sometimes devolving into outright gay-bashing,

Uhm...no.

Comic book fandom seems to have far, far deeper homophobic roots, and the homophobia is usually worse and more direct. Gay bashing is frequent, and there is outright cheering when LGBT characters die. I have never seen even anything remotely like that in manga fandom, ever, not even on 4chan, which is probably the vilest, most troll infested part of anime fandom.

The homophobia in comic book fandom is utterly vile. In Manga fandom, it's definitely present, but nowhere near as volatile.

I definitely feel safer in manga fandom because the bashing just isn't that bad.

only not real gay, which is a whole nother essay

One that would be interesting, especially if you can cite examples for the supposedly not-really-gay characters. I for one would love to read it.

*nods* Personally I'm all about doing it across the board, especially if the fan-cultures are distinct all over. Which, really, seems extremely likely to me.

*thoughtful* The "multiple media in multiple locations" is one that I think needs a bit of coding work to fix, actually. I think that many fans would be inclined, when writing different continuities /and/ different media to note that in some way. Sometimes in the tags and sometimes in how they enter the fandom name itself. So there might wind up being a fandom "X-men (manga)" in whatever location anime/manga wind up. But I think it would be a very good thing if clicking on the "X-men" fandom anywhere called up the results of /all/ the 'different' entered fandoms, possibly filterable by media/fandom difference if such exists. (did that make sense?)

Anyway! Interesting info about the TV fandoms. Given what I do know about the "idol" production machinery that doesn't surprise me, I suppose.

I'm glad you have been so fortunate. Not one of the anime/manga fandoms I have been in or through (a couple of the larger ones have been Tenipuri, Naurto, Bleach, Sailor Moon, Clamp of all sorts, Gundam Wing, Weiss Kreuz, Fushigi Yuugi, SaiMono and Utena for pity's sake) have been willing to have the objectification discussion openly. The mechanisms for suppressing and shuffling it off into small personal discussions only it could make a fascinating anthropological study in and of themselves, I suppose, but I can't say I ever really appreciated them.

I don't think you quite understood the specificity of my comments re homophobia. I am quite aware of the rampant homophobia in comics fandoms, especially among the men. What I refer to is that particularly pressurized homophobia that shows up among people, and especially women, who are attempting to keep their claim to normativity while still reading boys screwing. It results in the most insane, double-minded, exploitative "screw for my enjoyment while I deny you the right to live" statements imaginable. I find that more pernicious than the louder version.

*pauses* Okay, are you serious? I don't wish to deliberately offend, but have you really never encountered any discussions about the fact that the "gay" men in BL manga are utterly unrepresentative of any real gay community or lifestyle? That utterly unrealistic stereotypes are being deployed as paper dolls for the pleasure of a privileged majority (straight women)? And that this is a problem?

In any case, if you want to converse further, I'd appreciate a name of some kind.

I've been trying (and failing) to come up with a thoughtful response to this. I think I simply don't have the knowledge to talk about the fandoms so broadly. I have vague impressions and definite opinions but very little concrete context. You've made me think.

I've viewed Japanophilia as a scary and easy trap to fall into. I find other cultures interesting, and I can see the temptation to think that I'm learning a lot about Japanese culture when I read manga or watch anime. I have to remind myself that I'm still looking at what I see through my own filters and therefore missing or misreading some unknown portion of what's there for a Japanese audience.

*nodnod* Despite how generally I've phrased it here, I do think it's very difficult to talk about "anime/manga fandom" at large. There are a few broad strokes I've seen over and over, and so feel reasonably comfortable generalizing about but not many. There's always that tug, in fandom, between the culture developed around each specific source and the looser culture/battles (since you can hardly call it consensus) produced by movement between similar sources in a group.

Yes! I remember the first year or two when I thought "oh, well, it's the popular culture, surely it reflects popular values at least". Which, the longer I do study the actual cutlure... well, the less straightforward that seems!

I tend to lurk on the periphery of multiple fandoms. That means that there's a lot going on among those who're more enthusiastic or more focused that I miss. I think I may also have a layer of selective obliviousness that I use to shield myself from parts of fandoms that I'd find toxic.

'Popular culture' and 'popular values' are slippery at best. I'm now thinking of the Disney sitcoms that my six year old loves and considering what view of US culture one would get from them. There's a certain body of assumed knowledge that provides a framework for understanding what's real and what's not.

*rueful* Can't say I blame you. There are a lot of fandoms these days that I swing through looking for the red flags and back right out of the comms if I see them.

Yes, exactly that! Without the context that tells you what's accurate and what's exaggerated and what's fantasy and what's dredged up from the bottom of the pond, you wind up with this weird phantasm in your head that you might think was the culture. But it really isn't.

There has always been a certain give and take, between this particular two-set, of artistic style, and as US comics (the only ones I can speak to from experience) diversify it's becoming more evident, but there are also story tropes that are still distinct.

I know there's been some anime influence on superhero comics art in recent years, and there's at least one manga artist/writer I can think of whose character designs are occasionally homages to various X-Men characters (I forget his name, but he's the one who wrote/drew Ruroni Kenshin), but the visual storytelling techiniques are often very different, even accounting for the left-to-right vs. right-to-left issue. I had to learn an entirely different visual 'vocabulary' to read manga and doujinshi (then again, I also had to learn a new set of visual storytelling rules for Golden Age comics vs. modern ones).

Which says nothing about the fandoms involved, of course, and I think there is some degree of blending between the two -- most of the comicbook stores I've been in sell manga as well as the classic DCU/Marvel/Vertigo/Dark Horse stuff, for example, and I saw more than one set of Naruto or Final Fantasy or Dragonball cosplayers at NYCC last year. Not to mention that anime and Marvel/DC superhero comics both have international fanbases.

I'd feel weird lumping them all together under a generic "comics" tag on AO3, though, because the term "comics" is so strongly associated with American comicbooks that I feel like other artistic traditions would get erased or subsumed by it (a lot of people hear "comics fandom," and think superheroes -- even other Western comics like Asterix or Tintin or Calvin & Hobbes or Peanuts don't really come to mind).

Just stepping into say, I think if merging occurs, it would be under a more neutral term like "Sequential Art and Animation". At least, I haven't seen anyone propose to call the category "comics". (Am on the tag wrangling team.)

*laughing* Watsuki Nobuhiro, yes! And the first time I read him I thought to myself "this man has Stan Lee syndrome"--having an uninvolved character doing play-by-play for the fights.

It's been a little while since I took a swing through a comics store, but I would definitely be interested to see whether the different manga-genre visual tactics are being taken up and by whom. I mean, the full-body shot with background is a staple of shoujo but the last time I looked it was vanishingly rare in US comics of any stripe. Same with the box-breaking, though I have seen more of that picked up in some places. I wonder if anyone's done a serious study of the artistic and narrative styles recently?

A "sequential art and animation" tag would cover the entire spectrum, yeah. *nods* Plus it would cover things like webcomics that are often their own seperate thing.

I tend to think of Stan Lee Syndrome as Lots! Of Unecessary! Exclamation! Points! myself. That, and a particular kind of playful snark that a lot of silver age Marvel characters display (it often involves irreverent one-liners and giving people cutesy nicknames).

Whereas Frank Miller syndrome is ~~whoreswhoreswhores~~ self-consciously grim and noir-esque internal monologue in square text boxes.

I can't comment on layout, but there are a few comics artists from the late 90s onward who have some visible anime influence in their character design (every now and then, for example, I'll look at a comics panel and think "that's anime hair"). Tracing/photo references and some degree of photorealism seem to be in vogue at the moment, though. Sometime to good effect, as with Adi Granov's Iron Man art, and sometimes to very, very bad effect, as with Greg "I Trace From Porn! And Usually From the Same Three/Five Photographs!" Land.

Huh! The photorealism seems like a /major/ divergence from where cartoon style is going, with the block color and stylized figures. *wry* And there's another difference for us, given how often anime and manga are two versions of the same story and set a premium on copying the art style across both.

But if you did a cartoon based on a Marvel or DC comic, which art style would you copy?

In some ways, the fact that comics titles tend to shuffle artists rather than having a distinctive visual style gives animators more leeway to do whatever they want. On the other hand, I'd kill to have an Avengers cartoon as visually gorgeous as Tsubasa or X. (Okay, I just want CLAMP to do an Avengers manga that's turned into an anime and gives the Wasp a different costume in every episode a la Card Captor Sakura).

That makes a lot sense of actually. It would take more work to set up, but I think in the long run it would make things much more friendly.

I think it's sort of sad that many newer big archives are just following nearly the exact format that the older ones have used. (I'm very fond of the way your archive is set up, but I don't know how well it would work with a huge archive) AO3 is trying to do some interesting things with the tags, but it really seems like baby steps from the standard fic archive format to me. I guess for something huge like that it's better to keep to something people are more familiar with, at least on the surface anyway.

*wry* Yeah, mine works pretty much because it's a single-author archive, to which I have added a few guests. And even then, I'm the one who does the metadata for them. I do think there are some good things, in terms of category and tag schema, that AO3 might take from WordPress, though, and I've already suggested making it possible to make one series the "child" of another, so we can have sub-arcs inside a big project.

There's always that tug of war, isn't there? Between the Really Cool New things we can do as database and metadata coding progresses and people's natural desire to stick with what they already know.

As an explanation, a part of fandom mostly related to AO3 wranglers arguing about media categorizations (but not exclusively!) are having a discussion about the 'western/eastern' dichotomy, that gets translated into a media dichotomy with which many of us don't agree. One of the arguments presented was afaik that the fandom cultures are different.

This is not to say that you're not right, and your post is about something vaguely related but different, but you may want to post a clarification if you don't want people barging in thinking it's the same discussion. It shouldn't be necessary, but I think most of us are kinda used to this kind of discussions continuing themselves across journals and time in a unstructured way. :D

*sighs* I see.

I've caught the edges of that, of course, and the edges were what started me thinking, but yes I certainly don't want people to assume that I've already been participating in that discussion or take what I've said as some kind of shorthand reference to things I was not present for.

Ah, internet. You make our lives so... interesting.

Heeh, yeah. I mostly like it, because I like big discussions, but it can be, as you say... interesting. /0\

I'm really sorry I was so blunt and opinionated. It wasn't my intention at all.

(To actually answer you: I've seen some differences between ASian 'bandom' and Western ones, but mostly dealing with translation.)

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The difference between manga and comics

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