Reference pages: honorifics, demographic taxonomies, kanji on covers, panel grammar, the magazine system, reading direction.
All reference pages
Click any title below to open the full reference page.
- Demographic Categories in Manga — Japanese manga is published in magazines that target specific demographic categories: shōnen (boys), seinen (adult men), shōjo (girls
- Japanese Honorifics in Manga and Anime — Japanese personal address uses a system of honorific suffixes that carry information about the speaker's relationship to the addressee, their relative social ra
- Kanji on Manga Covers — Most Japanese manga covers carry the same set of textual elements in a predictable layout: title, volume number, series subtitle, publisher logo, magazine name,
- Manga Onomatopoeia — Japanese manga uses sound effects (擬音語, giongo) and mimetic words (擬態語, gitaigo) more densely and more grammatically than most comics traditio
- Manga Panel Grammar — Manga panel composition follows a learned visual grammar distinct from that of American or European comics. The page is the unit of design — not the panel — and
- Reading Direction in Manga — Japanese manga is read right-to-left, beginning at what an English-language reader would call the back cover. This is a function of Japanese-language text direc
- The Manga Magazine System — Most Japanese manga is published first in weekly or monthly magazines and only collected into volumes (tankōbon) afterward, once a serial has accumulat