Manga

Manga is, literally, the Japanese word for "comic"; outside of Japan, or in Japan, it usually refers to Japanese comics or a style of art which originated in Japanese comics. This style of art is characterised by a wide variety of techniques, especially large, life-filled eyes and interesting hair-colours and styles. This article shall refer hereforth use the term "manga" as referring to the manga art-style.

Manga as an art-style is designed to bring out the emotions and feelings of the characters who are drawn in that style. For example, the direction of the character's eyebrows, the size or style of their eyes or mouth, and other changes in the character's face and body posture can easily tell whether they are happy, sad, angry, annoyed, hateful, or a number of other emotions. The style of manga varies greatly from artist to artist and there is therefore no complete description of its style. Some characteristics which are often found in manga art include:


 * Expressions are often extremely exaggerated. For example, expressions known as "facefaults" sometimes occur in anime when characters are suprised or shocked.
 * Embarassed characters will often temporarily produce a huge "sweat-drop".
 * Angry or "intense" characters may have a vein or stressmark on their forehead. Stressmarks consist of four, stylized, bulging "veins".
 * Angry women may randomly pull a mallet or some other object out of nowhere in order to bash an annoyance over the head. See hammerspace.

The style of Anime -- Japanese animation -- is heavily influenced by manga and has perhaps popularised the style in areas outside of Japan which do not stock manga comics.

To learn how to draw manga, see How to draw manga.

Origins of manga
The first example of manga-style art was probably Osamu Tezuka's manga-comic Astro Boy, which was started in 1952. Astro Boy was later made into the first anime.

It should be noted that manga-comics -- Japanese comics -- actually existed long before the production of Astro Boy in 1952, but Astro Boy represented the beginning of the evolution of the manga art style. Hokusai Manga was the first example of a manga-comic.

Manga fanbase
Manga has a huge following on the Internet, with thousands of fansites, message boards, IRC channels, chatrooms, telnet servers, and other communications. Manga and anime fans have created "smileys" for them to use when communicating; for example,  represents a sweatdrop.