Manga vs comics: I'm tired of the argument, so here's what each actually does better

Every group chat I'm in has had this exact fight. Someone says "manga is just better." Someone else says "bro, Western comics have actual depth." Then a third guy says "Indian comics are underrated" and everyone ignores him. I'm that third guy, by the way. I'm also the first guy sometimes. It's a mess.

I read all three, and I'm tired of the war. So this is my honest, slightly ranty, non-gatekeeping take on what each does best.

Where I started: Indian comics (and I still love them)

My childhood was Tinkle and a stack of Amar Chitra Katha books at my grandmother's house in Kolkata. Tinkle was funny in a gentle, clumsy, very Indian way: Suppandi, Shikari Shambu, Tantri the Mantri. These characters made fools of themselves for a few pages and you loved them for it. Amar Chitra Katha was the opposite: serious retellings of mythology, history and folk tales in colour. I learned a lot of stories there that later came up in school without me realising I already knew them.

Then there were the superhero comics from Indian cities, with heroes flying over streets that looked like our streets, which my cousin collected. Great fun. Quality uneven. But they were ours.

What Indian comics do well: warmth, humour and local stories. What they lack, honestly, is consistency and staying power. A lot of great series simply faded away. That's sad, and it's not the readers' fault.

Manga: the weekly machine

I got into manga at 13, through anime first (like everyone) and then through the books. A few things about manga that aren't obvious until you read it:

• It's usually black and white. At first this feels like a limitation. After a few chapters you stop noticing, because the art is built around line, shadow and texture.
• It's read right to left, back to front. It takes about ten minutes to adjust and then you feel like a wizard.
• Many series run in weekly or monthly magazines in short chapters and are then collected into volumes. That means each chapter has to end in a way that makes you want the next. This is why manga is so good at cliffhangers, and also why long series can drag: they are made under a constant deadline.
• The sound effects are drawn into the art, and honestly it's one of the most charming things about the medium. A silent panel with a tiny heartbeat sound says more than a page of narration.

What manga does best: pacing, facial expression, and the sheer range of genres. Sports, cooking, detective, romance, horror, slice of life. There's a manga about almost anything. Where it struggles: some series run for hundreds of chapters, and the middle can sag.

Western comics: the shared universe

I'll be fair. Western superhero comics have a particular strength: decades of shared history, with characters passed between many writers and artists. It's like a long, messy conversation. That's cool, and also overwhelming. Where do you even start? There are thousands of issues and a dozen reboots. You don't need to know everything, but the feeling that you do is the biggest barrier.

What they do best: colour, spectacle, and the sense of a living world. Where they lose me: the continuity maze, and the price.

And then there's the European side, which gets forgotten: Tintin and Asterix. Album-style, colourful, funny, gorgeous, great for a lazy afternoon.

What about webtoons?

A whole other thing, mostly from Korea: vertical scroll, full colour, made for phones. Fast and easy to start, with a lot of romance and fantasy. A different pleasure again, closer to a long story you read with your thumb than to turning pages.

My hot take

All this "which is better" talk is like arguing whether a sitar is better than a guitar. They're different instruments. A comic, a manga and a webtoon are different ways of arranging pictures and time on a page. The best readers I know move between them, and nobody who reads widely cares about the war.

I do have two real complaints, though:

1. Gatekeeping. The "it's not real reading if it has pictures" crowd is wrong. Comics demand a specific skill: reading images, and reading what's left out between the panels. Try it.
2. Cost. Manga volumes are pricey in India. Please buy the real thing if you can, or borrow from a friend, a library, or the official reading apps. The free sites that copy translations are unfair to the artists who work to produce them. I won't link any and neither should you.

If you want to start

• Funny and light: Tinkle (it's still published) or Asterix.
• Easy gateway to manga: pick a short, finished series, a few volumes only. Avoid the 100-volume monsters at first.
• Serious and historical: Amar Chitra Katha, still excellent.
• If you only have a phone: a webtoon app, free to read with chapters released weekly.

And honestly, borrow a bunch from friends. Swapping with friends is how most of us got to read anything growing up.

What did you grow up on? And if your answer is "none of this," I'm genuinely curious what you read as a kid.