The first thing that catches your eye is the color palette. Almost all manga are black and white, and even with modern printing capabilities the tradition is not broken. It just so happens that manga flourished in the post-war years, when the economy was just rising from its knees and few people could afford to buy color magazines on good paper every week. But agree, there is a charm to these black-and-white drawings.
The second obvious difference is that manga, like any Japanese literature, must be read from right to left. So, having opened the volume, don’t be surprised if you find the phrase “To be continued…”. However, these are only external differences!
More importantly, a manga is a purely personal work, on which one author, the “mangaka”, is working. The plot, storyboards, sketches, outlines, halftones, backgrounds, sounds and text are all created by one person. In contrast are Western comics, where, to suit the appetites of the industry, the production of a comic becomes the result of the work of a whole team of professionals. Popular mangaka, whose manga have gained momentum and have to be published every week, also hire assistants, but they do the smallest of tasks.
Sometimes working on a manga series becomes a life’s work. For example, the world famous hits Dragon Ball by Akira Toriyama, Naruto by Masashi Kishimoto, One Piece by Eiichiro Oda and many other series on which the permanent author has been working for years. It’s quite rare to find the same character development in Western comics as in manga, because the authors often change each other and the series is fragmented into disjointed parts. There are exceptions, of course, but they get lost in the general mass. In manga, changing authors is unthinkable! Long manga series, created over the years, are an opportunity not to limit imagination and tell the story of the characters from beginning to end.
However, it is not always a sign of quality to be a lone author. When a well-coordinated team of screenwriter and artist takes on the case, each of their work can become a hit. The genius duo of Tsugumi Ooba and Takeshi Obata became famous for their Death Note and Bakuman manga.
Death Note mystery thriller tells the story of a young man, who has an artifact from the world of the dead, which allows with the stroke of a pen to rule people’s fates. The noble goal of eradicating crime leads the protagonist on a slippery slope, collides with an oddball and genius detective and leads to a dramatic denouement. In Japan alone this manga has been published in 30 million copies, a very popular anime series, computer games, several movies with live actors and even… a musical!