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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   3499 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 25, 2025

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can anyone explain to me the difference between manga and light novels? They seem the same, as they are both comics

Light novels are not comics.

Can you explain? Because I've seen pictures of Durarara and it is most certainly a comic. It's panels of artwork with text bubbles and the like, just like manga. I can't tell a difference between the two, which is why I asked.

Light novels are mostly regular books that have occasional anime-style illustrations in them, maybe ten per volume. They are written at a lower level of language complexity and are aimed at younger audiences; basically the Japanese equivalent of YA novels.

Example 1, from "An Introduction to Light Novels".

Example 2, from "What Are Light Novels? How To Write Light Novels?".

Durarara was originally a light novel, and was adapted into both a manga and an anime. This is completely normal in the incestous media ecosystem of Japan; The Saga of Tanya the Evil is another good example.

In general, the lower the production cost, the more titles there are. So these days there are tons of web novels, the most popular of which get rewritten into light novels, the most successful of which get adapted to manga, and only the very best get adapted to anime.

One notable feature of modern anime is that it often serves as essentially an advertisement for the manga or light novels rather than as an end in itself, so you get one or two cours and then nothing, because there is no point in promoting a print series that has already ended. C'est la vie.

Thanks, that helps a ton. It sounds like we don't really have anything directly comparable in the US, since our YA novels don't have illustrations (or they didn't back in the day, maybe they do now).

One notable feature of modern anime is that it often serves as essentially an advertisement for the manga or light novels rather than as a end in itself, so you get one or two cours and then nothing, because there is no point in promoting a print series that has already ended. C'est la vie.

Yeah I have seen series which don't bother to adapt the entirety of the source material, which can be frustrating when it leaves the story unfinished or rushes the ending. Maoyu was one I saw that was like that - good premise, fun characters, but it managed to feel both rushed and unfinished. My understanding is that the manga was better, but they didn't adapt the whole thing.

According to both English Wikipedia and Japanese Wikipedia, light novels may have some manga-style illustrations but are not full manga.

I'm not well acquainted with light novels, but Durarara was adapted from its original light-novel format to a manga as well as to an anime, so maybe you saw an image of the manga.

I see. Yeah I wasn't aware of that, so maybe my confusion is caused by having seen the manga without knowing.

It's pretty common for works to only get localized to the West if they're popular enough to have a manga version, or sometimes only after they've had a successful anime release. I'll point to Kino's Journey as a particularly extreme example: it went directly from light novel in 2000 to anime in Japan in 2003, you could find it in the US anime in English in 2005ish, but the manga didn't start until 2010 and for stupid licensing reasons only the first volume was ever officially translated in 2006, and it was nearly impossible to find.

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