Manga Glossary
Every term you'll run into reading manga — what it means, where it comes from, and when it actually applies. 104 entries and counting.
Demographics · 5Genres · 26Craft & Format · 21Industry · 27Fandom · 25
A
- Anime Adaptation
- An animated version of a manga, usually produced while the source is still running, which forces structural compromises.
- Assistant
- An uncredited artist employed by a mangaka to draw backgrounds, apply tone and ink, making weekly serialisation physically possible.
B
- Battle Shonen
- Action manga in which a protagonist fights progressively stronger opponents while growing in capability — the commercial backbone of shonen magazines.
- Boke and Tsukkomi
- The comic double act of manzai and manga: one character says something absurd, the other corrects them.
- Boys Love
- A genre depicting romantic relationships between men, written and read predominantly by women, and the current standard term for the category.
- Bunkoban
- A small, cheap pocket-size reprint of a manga, usually of an older series, with more pages in each volume.
C
- Canon
- The material considered part of a work's official story, as opposed to filler, spin-offs or fan-created content.
- Chapter
- A single instalment of a serialised manga as it appeared in its magazine, usually around 19 pages for a weekly series.
- Chibi
- A deliberately squashed drawing of a character, with a huge head and a tiny body, used for comedy and cuteness.
- Chūnibyō
- "Eighth-grader syndrome": the grandiose fantasies and self-mythologising of early adolescence, and the characters who never grew out of them.
- Color Spread
- A colour page or double-page illustration published with a magazine chapter, usually marking a milestone or promoting a series.
- Comiket
- Comic Market, the twice-yearly Tokyo fair for self-published work and the largest fan event of its kind in the world.
- Cooking Manga
- A genre centred on food preparation, using cooking as a vehicle for competition, craft obsession or quiet comfort.
D
E
- Editor
- The publisher's representative assigned to a manga series, with unusually direct influence over its story and direction.
F
- Fanservice
- Content included to please the audience rather than to serve the story, most often sexual but not exclusively so.
- Filler
- Anime-original content not present in the manga, inserted so an adaptation does not overtake its source material.
- Friendship, Effort, Victory
- The three values often described as Weekly Shonen Jump's editorial formula for a successful story.
- Furigana
- Small kana printed beside kanji to show how they are read, used on every kanji in manga for younger readers.
G
- Gag Manga
- Comedy manga built on jokes rather than story, usually in short self-contained chapters.
- Gekiga
- "Dramatic pictures": the realist, adult-oriented comics movement that broke away from children's manga in the late 1950s.
- Gutter
- The blank space between panels, where the reader mentally supplies whatever happened in between.
H
- Harem
- A structure in which one protagonist is surrounded by multiple romantic interests, usually without the situation resolving.
- Hiatus
- A pause in a manga's serialisation, ranging from a single skipped week to an indefinite suspension lasting years.
- Horror Manga
- Horror in comic form, where black-and-white art and reader-controlled pacing produce effects film struggles to achieve.
I
J
K
- Kabedon
- The romance-manga trope of pinning someone against a wall with one hand, named after the sound it makes.
- Kamishibai
- "Paper theatre": street storytelling with illustrated boards, popular before television and a training ground for early manga artists.
- Kanzenban
- A "perfect edition" reprint of a finished manga: larger pages, thicker volumes, restored colour, new covers.
- Kashihon
- Rental books: the lending-library market of the 1950s where many postwar manga artists, and gekiga, got their start.
- Kemono
- Anthropomorphic animal characters, with animal heads and bodies but human behaviour, and the fandom around them.
- Kodansha Manga Award
- The publisher Kodansha's annual manga prize, given since 1977 in shonen, shojo and general categories.
- Kodomomuke
- Manga published in magazines aimed at young children — the genuine children's category that shonen is frequently mistaken for.
- Kohai
- The junior counterpart to senpai — someone with less seniority in a shared school, club or workplace.
- Kōshien
- The national high-school baseball tournament played at Hanshin Kōshien Stadium, and the dream at the centre of countless sports manga.
- Kuudere
- A character who is composed and emotionally flat on the surface, with feeling present but rarely expressed.
L
- Licensing
- The commercial agreement by which a foreign publisher acquires the rights to translate and sell a manga in its territory.
- Light Novel
- A short Japanese prose novel for young readers, illustrated in an anime-and-manga style and published in pocket-sized paperbacks.
M
- Magical Girl
- A genre in which ordinary girls gain magical powers and a transformed identity, traditionally combining spectacle with themes of friendship and growing up.
- Manga
- Comics created in Japan, typically serialised in anthology magazines and collected into paperback volumes.
- Manga App
- A publisher's or platform's smartphone app for reading manga chapters, now a major route for new series in Japan and abroad.
- Manga Cafe
- A Japanese establishment charging by the hour for access to a large manga library, along with drinks, internet and a private booth.
- Manga Magazine
- A thick, cheaply printed anthology that serialises chapters of many series at once, weekly or monthly.
- Manga Taishō
- The Manga Award chosen by bookshop staff, given since 2008 to a series of eight volumes or fewer that they most want to recommend.
- Mangaka
- A manga creator, usually responsible for story and art together, working with uncredited assistants under severe deadline pressure.
- Manhua
- Comics created in China, Hong Kong or Taiwan, spanning both traditional print and full-colour digital formats.
- Manhwa
- Comics created in South Korea, today most often published as full-colour vertical-scroll webtoons read on a phone.
- Mecha
- A genre built around piloted giant robots, frequently using the machines to examine war, politics and the people inside them.
- Moe
- A strong, protective affection felt for a fictional character, and the character designs built to provoke it.
N
- Nemu
- The rough storyboard of a chapter, with panel layout and dialogue sketched in, which the editor approves before the art is drawn.
- Nouvelle Manga
- A movement, named in 2001, that brought together Japanese manga of everyday life and French comics of the same spirit.
O
- Official Translation
- A licensed, professionally produced translation of a manga, as distinct from an unofficial fan translation.
- Omake
- Short bonus comics or extra material added to a collected volume, usually lighter in tone than the main story.
- One-Shot
- A self-contained manga story published as a single instalment, with no continuing serialisation.
- Onomatopoeia
- Drawn sound effects integrated into manga artwork, covering not only noises but also states like silence and staring.
- Otaku
- A person with an intense, consuming interest in a hobby — pejorative in Japanese, largely reclaimed in English-speaking fandom.
- Otome Game
- A romance video game aimed at women, in which the heroine is courted by a cast of male characters.
P
- Panel
- A single framed image in a comic, and the basic unit from which manga builds sequence and time.
- Power System
- The internal ruleset governing what abilities exist in a story and what they cost — the main thing making fights suspenseful rather than hollow.
R
- Reader Survey
- The questionnaire in a manga magazine where readers rank their favourite series, used by editors to decide what continues and what is cancelled.
- Reverse Harem
- A harem structure with the genders inverted: one female protagonist surrounded by multiple male romantic interests.
- Right-to-Left Reading
- The panel and page order used by manga, in which you begin at the top-right of the right-hand page and work leftwards.
- Rival Character
- A recurring figure who competes with the protagonist, embodying an alternative approach rather than simple opposition.
- Romance Manga
- Manga centred on romantic relationships, spanning every demographic and differing sharply in register between them.
S
- Sakuga
- Literally "drawing pictures": the animation itself, and in fan usage a scene of unusually fine or ambitious animation.
- Scanlation
- Unofficial fan translation of manga, produced by scanning or sourcing pages, translating them and re-lettering the result.
- Screentone
- Adhesive sheets of printed dot or line patterns used to add shading, texture and tone to black-and-white manga art.
- Seinen
- Manga published in magazines aimed primarily at adult men, typically allowing slower pacing and more ambiguous storytelling.
- Senpai
- An honorific for someone senior to you in a school, workplace or club, denoting position rather than age or rank.
- Serialization
- The publishing model in which manga appears as regular instalments in an anthology magazine before being collected into volumes.
- Ship
- To want two characters in a romantic relationship, or the pairing itself — shortened from the word relationship.
- Shogakukan Manga Award
- The publisher Shogakukan's annual manga prize, given since 1955 and one of the oldest in Japan.
- Shojo
- Manga published in magazines aimed primarily at teenage girls, with a distinctive visual language built around interiority.
- Shonen
- Manga published in magazines aimed primarily at teenage boys — a marketing demographic, not a genre or a content rating.
- Shonen Protagonist
- The recurring lead type in shonen action manga: persistently determined, socially straightforward, and defined by effort rather than talent.
- Simulpub
- The release of an official English chapter at the same time as its Japanese magazine publication.
- Slice of Life
- A genre focused on ordinary everyday experience, where little dramatic incident occurs and that is the point.
- Speed Lines
- Streaked lines drawn across a panel to imply motion, force or focus in an image that is physically static.
- Splash Page
- A single image occupying a full page, or a double-page spread across two, used for maximum dramatic impact.
- Spoiler Culture
- The set of norms around leaked chapter details, which in manga fandom circulate on a predictable weekly cycle before official release.
- Sports Manga
- Manga built around competitive sport, and one of the medium's strongest genres even for readers indifferent to the sport itself.
- Super Robot
- The giant robot of mecha's first era: a near-invincible machine with named weapons, piloted by a hot-blooded hero against a monster of the week.
T
- Tankobon
- A collected paperback volume gathering roughly nine to eleven previously serialised manga chapters.
- Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize
- The Asahi Shimbun's annual manga award, founded in 1997 and named for Osamu Tezuka, whose Grand Prize is one of the medium's highest honours.
- Time Skip
- A deliberate jump forward in a story's timeline, often used to age a cast and reset the stakes.
- Tokiwa-sō
- The Tokyo apartment house where Osamu Tezuka and a generation of young manga artists lived and worked in the 1950s.
- Tokusatsu
- Japanese live-action film and television built on special effects: giant monsters, masked heroes and coloured teams in suits.
- Tournament Arc
- A story structure in which characters compete through a bracketed contest, generating a sequence of escalating one-on-one matches.
- Tsundere
- A character who behaves coldly or abrasively toward someone they actually care about, gradually revealing warmth underneath.
V
- Villainess
- A subgenre in which the heroine wakes up as the doomed antagonist of a romance story and sets out to escape her fate.
W
- Waifu
- A fictional character a fan claims particular attachment to, from the Japanese borrowing of the English word wife.
- Webtoon
- A digital comic designed to be read by scrolling down a single long vertical strip, usually in full colour.
- Weeb
- An English-fandom term for a non-Japanese person seen as excessively enthusiastic about Japanese culture, used as both insult and self-deprecation.
- Weekly Shonen Jump
- The most commercially dominant manga magazine, whose editorial model has shaped mainstream manga more than any other publication.
Y
- Yandere
- A character whose romantic devotion becomes obsessive and dangerous, often turning violent toward perceived rivals.
- Yaoi
- An older term for manga depicting male-male romance, now generally implying more explicit content than the broader Boys Love label.
- Year 24 Group
- The generation of women shojo creators born around 1949 who transformed girls' manga in the 1970s.
- Yokai
- The spirits, monsters and uncanny creatures of Japanese folklore, and one of manga's richest sources of material.
- Yonkoma
- A comic strip of four panels stacked vertically, built on a set-up, development, turn and punchline.
- Yuri
- A genre depicting romantic relationships between women, spanning subtle emotional intimacy through to explicit romance.