Know your manga

What's the best way to read manga?

Manga is produced in many different formats, now including those made for mobile devices, which lets you adapt how you wish to read it. Traditionally, the books are read from back to front and from the upper-right corner to the lower-left corner of a page. Formats include the simple four-panel manga (yonkoma), mostly seen in newspapers or on mobile phones; magazine compendiums of serialised artists (the weekly shūkanshi and monthly gekkanshi); and individual books of specific manga or authors (tankōbon). There are also fanzines and independently published fan-created comics (dōjinshi).

The brilliant artist Kōno Fumiyo recently published the book Giga Town: Album of Manga Symbols in order to help us understand the grammar and symbols embedded within the medium. Drawing animals based on the 12th-century handscroll Chōjū-giga, Kōno makes the manga symbols, called manpu, come alive. Here we see her heroine, a young white rabbit named Mimi-chan, racing a turtle that could be straight out of Aesop's Fables. They also help explain the meaning of the use of spirals in manga – namely to show something spinning, either in movement or in one's head through dizziness.