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Literally silly words, manga are Japanese graphic novels analogous
to the American comic book. Unlike the comic book, however, nearly all
manga are black and white, with perhaps a few color sections added for effect.
Whereas comic books tend to come out on a monthly basis with one
episode to a volume, manga tend to contain several episodes in
each volume, which results in the average manga being roughly two hundred pages
long, per volume.
Due to the mode of reading Japanese, manga read right to left, and top to
bottom. This is an exact mirror image of the way comic books read, but
is not hard to adjust to. In much the same way that companies are subtitling
or dubbing anime to release to fans in English-speaking countries, several
companies are releasing English versions of manga with the dialog and
text notes translated, but the art intact. This is an enormous boon to fans,
but it is sadly the case that these editions can actually go out of print
before the Japanese version. To facilitate reading by English-speaking fans,
these translated manga are often mirror-imaged so that the flow of the action
is left-right rather than right-left.
Anime is not a Japanese word. It's a french word for of course animation.
The Japanese use is for the simple fact that its an easy way in saying
Japanamation or Japanimation or Japanese Animation.
Another reason they use Anime is cause the french were the first to dubb
the Japanese Animation, in another language.
from Japanamation Station
In brief, anime is the word for Japanese animation. It has come to refer to
the Japanese animation industry, and the products thereof. The scope of anime
is much greater than that of cartoons in the United States or other similar
nations; it is more comparable to the scope of the Hollywood movie industry in
terms of breadth of subject matter. There are anime targeted at all age
groups, from little kids' programming to full adult movies and OVA's, and
everything in between. Some of the more cultur-neutral childrens' anime have
made substantial inroads in the United States after being dubbed and frequently
appear in such places as Nickelodeon's Nick Jr. programming block. Dubbing
has also brought several older-kids' anime series to the after-school
cartoon scene, including _Thundercats_, _Silverhawks_, and the famous
_Robotech_. In general, however, the amount of anime that has been visible in
mainstream America represents a nearly insignicant fraction of the totality of
anime, and certainly does not represent the pinnacle of anime excellence.
The bulk of the anime pursued by the fans seems to be targeted at the high
school and college age crowd, though this is a general average. There are
numerous television series, Original Video Animations (OVA's), and outright
movies falling into this category. There are many reasons why fans tend to
congregate around certain well-known anime, but some of the more prevalent
concerns seem to be cuteness, plot depth, character design, and hentai
factor. Of these, cute seems to be the most popular concern. The nice
thing about anime is that, being that its scope is so wide, there are anime
which hit all these bases well.
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