Story by Yo Ochi/VOX Media Cafe

Graphic novels are a format that, like comic books, uses comic format and dialogs to describe stories. Times have passed and different novels gain more popularity than others. Currently some of the more popular books for teenagers are manga. Several manga novels gain more popularity than western novels that were made by Marvel and DC. Why is that happening?  

Let’s examine what manga is. Manga is a Japanese styled graphic novel or comic book that uses black and white color, sometimes they also have colors. It is a big genre of entertainment and there are a lot of famous titles you may have heard of like Dragonball. Each series is written by one person, sometimes even a group of people who mostly are to help draw frames of the novel. 

There are a lot of different genres of manga. There could be a superhero manga or there could be a manga about cooking and so on. Each manga series have unique characters with their own origins and impact on the story, Unlike western novels which mostly were made by companies like Marvel or DC. They only make superhero comics which limits their creative vision. Authors who work there have to follow their company guidelines.

Another thing people would prefer manga over western comics is that it is way easier to follow, apart from a few exceptions most manga have a start to finish. No matter how long a few manga have, it eventually will have a conclusion. Western comics however have endless reboots and reworks it is difficult to follow and know which book is the beginning because these companies expect us to know everything about these characters. 

Lets take a look at some of the Jojo manga for example, unfortunately it is in Japanese and I don’t have previous volumes because I didn’t buy those. But you can see that it has several volumes with numbers labeled on it, the number represents the order of the entire story you have to read. This is simple and easy to follow for everyone.

With all these different factors included it is safe to say that a lot of teens are more interested in manga than western comics. And in my opinion it is good to see that manga gained more popularity than modern western comics because the authors of manga have more passion for their work.