By: Peggy Sue Wood | @pswediting

A few years ago a friend and I applied for an open Editor position at Kodansha (US). I made it far enough to warrant a few calls from HR, though not far enough to fully interview (sadly, my language skills were not able to meet the role requirements). My friend, however, has stronger Japanese skills and looked like they may get in. At the time, I told them to prepare to be asked to review a standalone manga volume, otherwise called a tankōbon, but also warned them not to refer to the tankōbon in the layman-English translation (a volume) because the person I had spoken with in HR believed the two are separate things.

However, are they? “Separate things,” I mean?

A tankōbon, by almost every definition you’ll find, is a single volume of a manga. I mean, technically, it’s a standalone volume or book that’s more specific than hon, but in translating for the US manga-publishing industry, it’s better defined as a volume. This is something many already know, but just for clarity of my argument: a tankōbon is typically 4 to 6.5 chapters (the 0.5 usually being a yonkoma and/or author note), while an American comic volume is similarly structured minus the author note.

Are the two forms different? Sort of, but are they different enough to warrant such a specific separation of terms within the industry? Probably not. At least, not in my understanding.

I’ve been seeing this sort of thing a lot in the workspace of comics overall. For example, I was looking at a job with Tapas around that time and ended up reaching out to a few US editors who were insistent on calling comics “sequential art” rather than referring to any series as “comics.”

Sequential art and comics are the same–one is just more art-industry or art-academically aligned in terminology yet there is an insistence in the industry by some companies to use one term over the other and to treat them as non-interchangeable because of small differences. It may have a more defined difference as the industry continues to develop, leading to a more significant separation that might match the “are manga and comics the same thing?” question asked regularly in the anime/manga community but it doesn’t seem to be there yet. 

At least, that’s what I think right now…. However, is this correct? I’m really not sure, and I’d love to hear other opinions. Is “tankōbon” separate enough from the English “volume” enough to warrant being a loanword in the industry? Is sequential art different enough to distinguish itself as completely different from the overhanging genre title of comics?

If you know, please share because I do not.

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Copyedited by: Katherine Cañeba | @kcserinlee