Manga vs Comics: How the Base Influences the Superstructure

John Ohno
6 min readSep 4, 2021

This is actually a great example of how material concerns influence culture. The differences (including this one) between manga & american comics don’t come from “japanese culture” or whatever, but from the economics of selling anthology magazines vs individual books.

In American comics, stuff runs as individual comic books and then may eventually get collected…

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John Ohno

Resident hypertext crank. Author of Big and Small Computing: Trajectories for the Future of Software. http://www.lord-enki.net