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I know that this is a question leading to subjective answers, but I am hoping
to find out if there is some wider consent.

My 13yo daughter is a great fan of different mangas, and she is really a great
drawing artist. Apart from drawing manga characters as stand-alone pictures,
she also began writing her own mangas. She invented manga-style characters and
is now writing and sketching a story with them. In style, she has been
inspired by _Spy Family_ , _Demon Slayer_ , _Pokémon_ and the like. Since she
doesn't speak Japanese, she writes her own mangas in her mother tongue, which
is German, which unlike Japanese is a left-to-right (LTR) language.

Since I do not have any overview of how many and which non-Japanese mangas
there are, I wonder how non-Japanese mangas are arranged, especially regarding
the images and the speech bubbles. Cluelessly searching around with DDG/Google
did not give me a definite answer.

I can think of three possible answers:

  * If the original language is LTR, then the manga should be arranged LTR.
  * A manga is only a true manga if it is arranged RTL, independent from the original language.
  * A manga has to be written in Japanese, originally. Otherwise, it is not a manga but a comic, even if the drawings are manga-style. As a comic in an LTR language, it should be arranged LTR.

### Edit:

To the comment of @sundowner: I did not know the term _bande dessinée_. By
Googling it and taking a look at the drawing style, I don't count bandes
dessinées as mangas. Although some come close, most of them remind me on the
style of _Asterix_ or _Les aventures de Tintin_ (in German _Tim und Struppi_
), which is just different.


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manga-production
Reading direction for non-Japanese manga


This seems to be a "define manga" question, with the points about your
daughter as a pretext. The answer is that reading direction is entirely
determined by the conventions of the language. Manga (very generally defined
by purists as created in Japanese for a Japanese audience) is printed RTL
because traditionally Japanese is read RTL, though, that is changing over
time. If the content is being written in German, it should be LTR following
the conventions of the language; whether it's really a "manga" or not is
entirely irrelevant. Manga are not printed RTL because they're manga, they're
printed RTL because they're printed in Japanese. Translations usually follow
that pattern out of operational expediency, not conformance to any specific
properties of manga.


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Manga is just an inherent style of manga, the reason certain works read in a
certain direction is based on the language it's written for (it applies to
their non-illustrated literature as well). In Japanese (and other Asian
countries) they read in one direction, while in the west they read another
way. There really is no inherent rule one must follow, so don't think too hard
about it. There is no "true" manga. Manga and comics are just a form and style
of expression, much like how the work of Hokusai had an influence on Western
Impressionist artist such as Monet, Manet, Renoir, and Van Gogh. Don't confine
yourselves to arbitrary rules, encourage exploration and expression, let her
find her own style. Manga is a good stating point if she's taken to it, but it
shouldn't be a stopping point if she is an inspiring artist. Manga, comics,
manhwa, manhua, bande dessine, fumetti, etc are all are different names and
expressions comics. It's a big world out there, so take some time to explore
it. Manga isn't everything...


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