The Fall 2024 Manga Guide

Giga Town: A Guide to Manga Iconography!

What's It About? 

Manga symbols – “manpu” in Japanese - are iconic or symbolic expressions used uniquely in manga, such as sweat drops, popping veins, and smoke puffs.

Giga Town: A Guide to Manga Iconography! is (probably) Japan's first guide to this manga iconography, collecting and explaining these symbols, with a short manga featuring the frolicking animals of the famous Japanese scroll Choju-jinbutsu-giga to explain each one!

Giga Town: A Guide to Manga Iconography! includes an informative afterward that teaches the flow of manga reading, a great addition for beginning manga readers!

Giga Town: A Guide to Manga Iconography! has a story and art by Fumiyo Kouno, with English translation by Ko Ransom and editing by Andrew Woodrow-Butcher. Published by Udon (September 3, 2024).

Is It Worth Reading?

When I started reading manga at age 12, I didn't know what it meant when a character had a sweatdrop drawn on their forehead. It took guesswork and checking the context to eventually realize that it represented “nervousness.”. Even now, there's still some manga iconography that I could only guess at—that is, until I read Giga Town. Charmingly illustrated with rabbits, monkeys, and frogs, and with an introduction by manga scholar Matt Alt, this cute and educational book is a must-read for manga fans of all ages, whether they've been reading manga for years or they've just cracked open their first volume today.

Giga Town begins with a full rundown of all the manga iconography that it covers, categorized by whether it stands alone, is presented alongside an object, or shown alongside a person. Then, the real magic happens as roughly a hundred different examples are illustrated through a loosely connected story about the daily lives of a school age frog, rabbit, and monkey—and their families. As Alt writes in the introduction, the choice to educate readers about manga iconography with these animals is significant. The Choju Jinbutsu Giga, a thousand-years-old Kyoto scroll featuring animal caricatures, is considered by many to be the first manga. Centuries later, the same animals bring this manga “Rosetta Stone” to life.The nostalgic stories of Ears, Greenie, and Keysie bring to mind a rural turn-of-the-century Japanese setting. It particularly put me in mind of the children's book Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window—a Japanese classic about school kids in the mid 20th century. I wouldn't read this book for its story alone, but it's soothing to watch the animals live their sweet provincial lives while finally learning what all of that manga iconography really, definitively means.

If my review hasn't sold you, you can read Matt Alt's Giga Town introduction for free right now on the Mangasplaining newsletter. Frankly, I'm surprised that something like this didn't exist until 2024. All this time, we've been fumbling around in the dark, asking one another or running Internet searches to ask, “What does it mean when a manga character has a line running through both their eyes?” (Thanks to Giga Town, I can now confidently say this expresses “bewilderment.”) Part reference guide and part manga in its own right, this is an educational manga that's as informative as it is adorable.