Comics and Manga Terms, Explained

Country of origin, and with it the reading direction and the usual format. Manga is Japanese, printed in black and white and read right to left. Manhwa is Korean and today mostly reaches readers as full-colour vertical-scroll webtoons, read top to bottom. Manhua is Chinese, from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. In print, all three are collected into numbered volumes.

Single issues are the story as it first came out, one chapter a month. A trade paperback collects an arc of usually five to eight issues and is the cheapest way to read a series on the shelf. An omnibus is a large hardcover collecting dozens of issues — the best value per page, but heavy and expensive up front. Most readers start with the first trade and move to omnibuses for series they already love.

With volume 1 for manga, which is almost always told in one continuous order. Superhero comics are harder: characters have run for decades, so look for the start of a creative team's run or an edition labelled as a jumping-on point. Our reading-order entries and each series page list the volumes in order.

In the shop, a graphic novel is a comic published as a book — either a story written to be read whole, or a collection of issues bound together. A comic book usually means the thin stapled monthly issue. The art form is the same.

They name the readership of the magazine the manga first ran in, not its genre. Shōnen magazines are written for teenage boys, shōjo for teenage girls, seinen for adult men and josei for adult women. Many readers outside those groups read all four.