I touched on Project MANGA a little in my last article, but I thought I should make a separate one explaining some of the details.

Project MANGA (working title) will be a slice of life, yonkoma one-shot manga that I plan to release in 2025. For anyone who doesn’t read manga that probably sounds like a mouthful of confusing words. So I’ll do my best to brake it down:

First off what is a manga?

A manga (Pronounced: mahn-gah) is a kind of graphic novel originating in Japan. They are relatively similar to comics though manga volumes tends to be longer and more character driven rather than story driven. Another distinction is the reading direction of manga; it’s read right to left (The words in English are still read left to right, but the panels and pages are read in a right to left order). This is done because most manga is translated and then localised into English from Japanese; and in order to preserve the original artwork publishers chose to keep the right to left reading method used in some Japanese books.

This can often come as a shock to people who haven’t read a manga before, and almost everyone seems to say something alone the liens of: “is this a printing error?” Or “why is this book backwards?” So to help new readers there is often some sort of note at the back of translated manga (the front of a standard English book) stating something along the lines of: “hay, your reading the wrong way!” or “This Way!”

To tell you the truth it caught me off guard the first time I ran into one, but trust me you get used to it pretty quickly as you start reading. 

What is a One-shot?

A one-shot is a short story told start to finish within a single chapter. In the manga industry this is usually done with no more than sixteen pages. They are intended to be a sort of pilot chapter of what could be. Often monthly manga magazines in Japan such as “SHONEN JUMP” or “Nakayoshi” will look for one-shots to test the general idea for a story with out risking months of bad sales. If a magazine decides that they like a one-shot enough they might have the author re-work it into a series or continue it as a series. That was the case for manny well known series such as: Dragon Ball, Death Note, and Naruto.

What is a yonkoma manga?

Yonkoma (pronounced: yon-koma) translates literally to “four-panel”. A yonkoma manga is a type of manga where the story is comprised of vertical comic strips connected via continuity. With this type of manga you read the panels down instead of across. They can be easily identified because the panels are normally all the exact same size.

Some yonkoma manga volumes have a few standard manga pages before leading into the yonkoma. I believe this an addition to the the original story in order to give it a better start when being published in book form; as yonkoma manga tends to originate from weakly magazines and newspapers which don’t really have room for that sorta thing. But that’s just my speculation.

What is a slice of life manga?

“Slice of life” is a genre not exclusively associated with manga. You can find slice of life: books, manga, tv-shows, movie ect. The genre tends to focuses on the interesting aspects of the mundane or normal things in someone’s life; exploring the main character(s)’ day to day activities and often the people they meet.

Such as “K-on!” Which is about a lazy school club band, The main protagonist Yui often goofs-off and she only joined the school club because she thought they played light-hearted music. But she and her fellow class mates have lot of fun playing music together and spending a little too much time drinking tea.

My decisions

I decided on slice of life as the genre for my own manga, because I though it would be simpler to wright a slower paced story compared to something more action based, and I chose to make it a yonkoma magna so I wouldn’t have to worry about making dynamic panels with my first manga. That and a lot of my favourite slice of life mangas are in the yonkoma format such as: K-on!, New Game!, and, Bocchi the Rock! to name a few.

So far I have finished scripting the story, and now I’m currently working on learning how to make character sheets so that the characters will look consistent from page to page. This is probably going to be the most time consuming part of creating the manga. But I’m hoping this will make things smoother down the road, and be a good learning experience for future projects.

Until next time, thanks for reading! |･ω･)ﾉ

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Links:

• K-On! The Complete Omnibus Edition (Manga)
• Bofuri: I Don’t Want to Get Hurt, so I’ll Max Out My Defense. (Manga)
• Pokemon Adventures (Manga)