This is sort of a suggestion, but one I thought everyone probably has mixed feelings on so I'm putting it here for discussion instead. If there is another topic about the same thing I'd love to read it, but it's a bit hard to search through the forums without a search for keywords feature.

My qualm is with Manga being a genre. When I go to look at the two main pages and see it's segregated into manga and everything else I feel like you're trying to say that manga is not a genre, but it's still treated as one. I think it would be nice to go to the manga main page and be able to see genres such as shoujo, shounen, shounen-ai, shoujo-ai etc or even the same action, romance, comedy etc like for the other comics instead of all the genres just saying manga.

What I'd like to suggest is to have just maybe a checkbox to say manga/not manga which would be sepparate so that you could have a bit more information, but it would be interesting to know other people's feelings on the topic are.

Well, it clearly isn't a genre. The way the word is most usually used in the West, it probably implies a style of art more than anything else.

But categorisations are always difficult. I've even seen "webcomics" and "European comics" used as genres, both of which are just as absurd, if not more so.

In treating manga as a genre, the assumption is presumably that regular readers of manga style comics will be attracted to other comics in that style, with the actual genre being of secondary importance. It's the same logic behind bookshops grouping all the manga comics together in one place and all the US style comics in another.

If they were categorised strictly according to genre, you'd have all the manga horror comics mixed in together with Western style horror comics, manga supernatural stories with Western supernatural stories and manga romances with Western romances (etc etc). Whilst that would be a more acurate way of organising a collection according to genre, it wouldn't necessarily help the reader find what he or she is looking for.

Sadly there are many readers of Western style comics who don't want to read manga and, although it's less widely acknowledged, many readers of manga who have no interest in Western style comics. Keeping them separated by treating manga as a genre may be wrong but, in many ways, it is practical.

Yeah, I don't think it would be that great an idea to sort everything strictly to genre either, but I reckon you could still sort a category like manga into further subcategories, or genres rather, while still maintaining it's distance from Western comics.

Soriyu
Yeah, I don't think it would be that great an idea to sort everything strictly to genre either, but I reckon you could still sort a category like manga into further subcategories, or genres rather, while still maintaining it's distance from Western comics.

I would have to agree. you know, there was this one bookstore I went to one time which lumped all the manga together...should had made it easier for me to find what I was looking for. It didn't. They didn't even put thier titles in the ABC order!

It turned out that they had tons of shoujo titles more than they had any other gernes. I only like some certain types of shoujo, but not the shoujo romance type where they focus solely only on the romance. or the Shoujo (ai) type where it's always set in a School with not much going on. drawn in a flowing style where beautiful characters with huge, intricately drawn eyes become spontaneously surrounded by flowers, stars, and/or bubbles. Bleh.

I actually like shounen, and or seinen... as seeing the characters are then drawn more realstically while still retaining that "manga-ness"... and plus those types tends to have the more serious gerenes such as Fantasy, Horror, etc.

So yeah. it would help if they actually did this:
have a big sign labled Manga over the whole bookcase section. and then on the bookselves, smaller signs which labels them like this:
Row one:
Row two:
Row three:
Row Four: .

Sorting *only* by genre would be useless.

actually there is a way to get around that. There's the manga genre thing, but when creating a comic on the site it gives you the opportunity to put it under two categories. Action-manga. real-life-manga. romance-manga And it's possible to search that way too. It doesn't always work because I'm sure there are comics that fit into more categories than 2, but it's a basic thing.

mechanical_lullaby
actually there is a way to get around that. There's the manga genre thing, but when creating a comic on the site it gives you the opportunity to put it under two categories. Action-manga. real-life-manga. romance-manga And it's possible to search that way too. It doesn't always work because I'm sure there are comics that fit into more categories than 2, but it's a basic thing.

Agreed.

Anyway, I find this manga thing a bit ridiculous... Just like j-rock. Who cares what country it's from? As long as it's good.
Manga isn't a style or genre, just a Japanese name for comics.

And how can we seperate comics to manga and "the rest"?

Well as the guy with the former #1 Manga comic on Drunk Duck, I think I know what I'm talking about. Manga's not really a genre, its just a label americans use to label japanese animation, what we used to call japanimation or anime, has now become romanized further as manga, and not main-guh like I and the rest of everyone pronounce it. Some dorky cosplayers told me its pronounced "Mahn-gah" instead. I shrugged and called them lame for knowing that.

I agree that it isn't a genre. I put my comic there because I couldn't figure out what category it fit into. (I tried on all the hats. None of them fit...) Even the "manga" category is questionable. My style has some influence from Japanese comics -- but I would put money on it not being the same type most others think of, and it has developed into a completely separate style of it's own. I do think people who enjoy certain anime stories and characterizations would find familiarity and enjoyability (is that a word?) in my comic, so it's there for now.

I think it would be cool to define both art style and genre (genre being "story type") as separate searchable categories. They're all kinda mixed together now with a few missing.

This is a little off topic, but I think there should be a Yaoi/Yuri genre thing, or atleast Shonen/Shojo-ai because 90% of those comics lable themselves as "manga" before "romance."

I know a few people who do Yaoi comics who said they'd rather have their own lables as opposed to manga. The reason they lable themselves manga in the first place is because they know that their potential readers will look into the manga catigory for yaoi before looking into the romance one. >o>'

This is not about polit correctness or what you think the definition of manga is. I think the current system is just fine. You can go to manga.drunkduck.com, and then from that you can search for action, romance, RL, sci-fi, whatever.

Truth is that in the USA, where I presume most DD readers are, there is Western and there is Manga. Sure they're each huge inclusions with infinite style variations in each. But there are certain things common to each which the other camp cannot tolerate due to prejudice and preference.

I knew I had to use manga as a categorization for myself, when I remembered that I liked to use sweat drops and all the other "manga conventions." I don't do it to be cool; I do it because I grew up with manga, so it's just natural.

mlai... i just looked up manga.drunkduck and peed myself.











jeebus that was intense.

mechanical_lullaby
actually there is a way to get around that. There's the manga genre thing, but when creating a comic on the site it gives you the opportunity to put it under two categories. Action-manga. real-life-manga. romance-manga

So does that mean you can only do it when you're first making your comic or is there a way to edit it into two categories when it already exists, because on the comic editing main page it says you can have 2 categories but really it's just genre and tone so romance-manga, for example, is an unavailable combination.

mlai
You can go to manga.drunkduck.com, and then from that you can search for action, romance, RL, sci-fi, whatever.

After trialing this it would seem to me that putting the "manga" prefix on the url will only change the main/news page and has no impact on any searches you make.

And many of you seem to be saying that when you are browsing you can look for manga and romance at the same time. But are you saying tick the boxes for "manga" and "romance" or search for one as a keyword. You see, I thought that each result you get would only match one of the genres selected because you can only put your comic in one genre. I suppose that all depends on whether you CAN actually have 2 genres as mechanical_lullaby seems to be saying or if the second one is just tone.

usedbooks
I agree that it isn't a genre. I put my comic there because I couldn't figure out what category it fit into. (I tried on all the hats. None of them fit...) Even the "manga" category is questionable. My style has some influence from Japanese comics -- but I would put money on it not being the same type most others think of, and it has developed into a completely separate style of it's own. I do think people who enjoy certain anime stories and characterizations would find familiarity and enjoyability (is that a word?) in my comic, so it's there for now.

I think it would be cool to define both art style and genre (genre being "story type") as separate searchable categories. They're all kinda mixed together now with a few missing.

I know exactly what you mean. My style has some influence from Japanese comics too, but I didn't list as a manga because my web comic doesn't really tell a story.

Manga is a style of life, you must feel it, it surround us, bind us together XD hahahah.
No now talking serius I think that manga is not just a genre, it's more a style(now it has a lot of things mixed), that should have as a basis 2 things, be in grayscale (or just b & w), and the line art, that last part is harder to explain, but most of the times you can easily recognize some manga influence in the line art.

Now inside of manga there are a lot of genres, just like what we know as comic.
I would like a selection more like
Style: Comic, Manga, Strips, (and maybe another one here, something of an hybrid)
Now with the genre we could have
oneshoots, horror, super heroes, epic fantasy, gakuen/school things, and a lot more.
And as EmilyTheStrange remarked, we need a Yaoi/Yuri genre O_o.

Doing the style division I think would make searches easier.

For example, I love the fantasy theme, that's why I always look for that genre here in DD to see what good things I can find, also I prefer manga to comic (there are exceptions), But If I could just browse manga I would do that. With actual classification you get sometimes random findings of things that shouldn't be there.

Manga is what they call comic books in Japan. The end.

Yep, I don't deny that, manga means just drawings, but it has a completely different origin with some influences from Disney, but it evolved different. Basically is like Impressionism, Cubism, Pop Art, Surrealism, they could be all paintings, but different styles. It even has it's very own way to manage panels. Well anyway just my thoughts =D

spacehamster
Manga is what they call comic books in Japan. The end.

I think that Godwin's Law [en.wikipedia.org] needs a manga corollary.

As an online discussion involving manga grows longer, the probability of the obvious and known fact that "manga = Jpnese word for comics" being mentioned approaches one.

XD haha you made me read about Godwin's Law hahaha.
Yep maybe we need a manga corollary <--- that word made laught a lot when I first heard it on midschool XD

Corollary? Does it sound similar to some slang for a reproductive organ that I don't know about?

(The slang, not the reproductive organ.)

no, it just sounded funny to me, it didn't have the same effect as when hearing we are going to study the teorem of , corollary sounded funny to me XD maybe it's the language, it's really similar in spanish, corolario, but it sounds like a tongue twister XD try fast repeating it 5 times XD

easy- Manga is all three depending on who says it:

its...
-a genre in America and all other countries besides japan and other
asian countries. Genre: Asian Comic
-a medium in Japan, Korea, China, etc (just as "comic" is a medium) Media: Comic
-anime style (since well...anime is mainly derived from manga)
...but style is probably the loosest definition.cause any comic from
Japan, etc can be called manga. Style: ...Anime/Manga style

so yeah...
the definition of manga would be: Asian comic

and well, the definition of manga for an asian would be: Comic

To foreigners its a genre
To asians its a medum
To foreign comickers its a style

...i dunno if i made any sense. ):3

Kxela
...i dunno if i made any sense. ):3

Having a Lucky Star avatar means that you're not required to make sense. :D