This morning, I was reading through my feeds to see a translated interview of Hagio Moto by Matt Thorn. I was rather surprised to find Hagio-sensei to be a girl. All this time I thought that the writer of one of my favorite SF stories, They were 11, was a guy. I ahve never read the manga and only saw the anime through a friend and I was breathtaken. I was rather surprised to see that she was a girl. More so, she’s one of the Magnificent 24!! So I just had to read it and sure it was fun to see her experience as a writer and how she is paid this much money for a page (which then made my wonder… “do mangakas take advantage of the amount of cash they earn per page that’s why sometimes… they waste pages on long and pining battle scenes?”) What was interesting to read though was when Moto-sensei mentioned…

“I know how you feel. I know exactly how you feel!”

She said this in lieu of reading Ozamu Tezuka’s Shinsengumi!. For her, seeing characters express their feelings and being caught in their emotions was the heart of being a mangaka. My heart went a flutter just thinking of all these nostalgic moments in manga where I have wept, leapt, and tore my hair out in frustration for the next chapter. And true enough. There is a strength in manga which I seem to not find much in anime. It is this aspect of feeling the character, as though you were that character or his best friend.

Anime is all about the visuals, like a wikipedia entry or a webpage that doesn’t like to use the cut option. Everything is laid out and all the cards are shown. Not all animes are like this, however weekly animes tend to be as predictable as cheeseburger. They expect you to accept the character for who he is. Unlike in manga wherein you grow with the character.

Growing with the character is something that I think you can grasp stronger in manga. It is in manga where page by page you discover more about the character and mangakas make every effort to make a panel say a thousand words. There is an inner mystery that only the mangakas reveal and only those who get affected can discover. And so true. God, I can attest a lot of scenes that have swept me off my feet and have literally taken me to their world.

Ahahaha! I can only imagine a number of anime nuts who could possibly hate me for this entry. But this isn’t an entry about an age old debate. Anime and Mangas are two entirely different mediums and you can’t compare an apple pie and an ice cream sandwhich. Both are great in their own right and have their own strengths and weaknesses.

I wrote this because well, friends always find me silly crying, whining, laughing over a manga. They’ll say “Dude! It’s just manga.” But to me, the emotions felt in a manga are real. The emotional connection between a character and its reader is no different to that of the reader and his friend. Its true and as pure or deceitful as it gets. Just like real life. Hence, I know how you feel… exactly how you feel.