This level of difficulty imo is criminal, and at the least his site should be closed.

“I don’t like calling manga comic books, since they aren’t. Comic are generally only a chapter long, and usually in full colour.”

I know you said “generally”, but this logic is fuzzy. Warren Ellis’ “Crecy” is a self-contained, 48-page story that is NOT in color, but black-and-white. Does that mean it isn’t a comic book? And there are a thousand more I can mention that don’t fit this standard either. What IS your preception of a “comic book”?

Also, most manga begin as episodic installments in large anthologies, and are then collected into TRADE PAPERBACKS (not Graphic Novels) that are then re-sold. Which brings us to your other definition…

“Graphic Novels are the collected versions of these comics, and generally cover a specific arc of the story. For example the Green Lantern GN’s cover specific incidents, such as the death and birth of a new GL and so on.”

While the term “Graphic Novel” has been used by the American manga market to differentiate themselves from the Anglophone market (and specifically superheroes), this use is erroneous (though, I understand the reasoning).

“Graphic Novel” comes from “novel”, and a novel is a self-contained story that normally (and this is flexible) concentrates on the characters over plot, and is divided into chapters. But even these definitions are murky, as Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” has not one chapter break in it, but no one would argue it isn’t a novel.

In the end, the definition, to me, of Graphic Novel, is self-contained story told by pictures and/or words. The fomat doesn’t matter to me, whether it’s a hardcover or softcover, or if it’s English, Spanish, Japanese or Korean language. It’s a graphic novel if it’s a self-contained story. The aforementioned “Crecy”, while only 48-pages and square-bound, is a graphic novel (or, as the author prefers it, graphic novella), just like Eisner’s “Contract with God”, Junko Mizuno’s “Hansel & Gretel” (a full-color manga) or Buronson’s “Japan” (again serialized at first printing, but later collected).

And the Green Lantern story you mention? That’s a “Trade Paperback”, a collection of previously published work singly, now compiled into one book, as part of a larger story or ongoing narrative. “Naruto” and “Fruits Basket’ are trade paperbacks, too; you don’t get the whole story from any single book. It’s episodic, only the episodes are much bigger, that’s all. And yes, each story arc could be called a Graphic Novel, that’s fine, but again, not totally correct.

And sure, these works can move back and forth from these defintions, like Charles Dickens first serializing his stories in newspapers and single pamphlets, and then collecting them, thus transforming them into novels. That’s the main crux of my arguement: these defintions change depending on the format and connotation we as readers and publishers make of them. None are inherently wrong, you can all do what you like.

But the most important thing I wish people would stop doing is saying “manga are not comic books”. These are not words on equal footing, one is the subset of the other. Comic books, for me, is the catch-all superset for all the other words (Graphic novel, trade paperback, manga, OEL, whatever) because they all follow the same principles of comic books: WORDS and PICTURES (as Harvey Pekar said). The language or origin of the creators doesn’t matter, they are all words and pictures. And they all influence each other (Osamu Tezuka loved Disney cartoons; Frank Miller loved Lone Wolf & Cub), because they can mix-and-match so much since they are all using the same foundational tools.

“Gangs of New York” and “Audition” are both movies (or cinema), no matter who made them, where they made them , how or why they made them. Same with music, same with animation, same with books. Style or geography doesn’t change the medium they are all in, we’re still talking about comic books.

COMIC BOOKS…it’s not the coolest name, but it’s the thing we all love.

Jura’s last blog post..Dosei Mansion manga

Amazon Japan currently shows 3 volumes of Oninagi, the latest (link) published last month, so the series is probably still going.

Edit: As you already noted. I didn’t see your update at first, because it was at the top and not at the bottom (and I scrolled down to the beginning of the review without looking).