by JuicyPuffin

Created on: March 02, 2009

Anime and manga are different types of media, and those who are unfamiliar with the terms tend to mix them up. Anime is animation, as in cartoons, while manga is comics. However, these particular styles of animation and comics are unique to Japan in terms of audience, plots, and art styles.

In the West the prevailing view is that comics and cartoons are for children, but in Japan this is not true. There is a genre and story for every person out there, whether they are an adult or a child, male or female. The stories that have been published in these two media range from slice-of-life, with things such as the daily life of children in elementary school, to gory stories where multiple characters die each chapter, to educational, to philosophical "what if"s, to erotica, to worlds where robots and aliens are indistinguishable from humans. If you can imagine it, it exists.

Manga is classified into different groups depending on the genre and target age. While there are too many genres for me to list here, the target groups you may come across most often are those belonging to either the shojo, shounen, seinen, or josei categories. Shojo is targeted towards girls, typically with more character development and plot, while shounen is targeted towards boys and usually consists more of action or horror, having less character development. Seinen is targeted towards adult men, and josei is targeted towards adult women. Both seinen and josei stories tend to be more mature and less idealistic in their plots and characters compared to shojo and shounen. If you look at a manga volume printed in the US, you may find the name of one of these categories printed somewhere on the cover or inside pages.

The art styles in manga differ greatly from artist to artist. Some are incredibly realistic, even going so far as to insert pictures of backgrounds or objects into the pages, while others seem more like sketches or doodles. The format of the pages in a manga can differ as well - there is a "four panel" style that usually is reserved for gag pages, where a joke is told in a single page that consists of four panels. Another style is similar to Western comics, where panels can be placed in any shape or area on the page. Some pages do not use panels, instead consisting of a single image which may or may not take up the entire paper. In all manga the books and pages are read right-to-left, top-to-bottom because this is how the Japanese language itself is read. Therefore when reading, you

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