If you are a fan of Magna and reading about the latest anime and manga releases and the history of the subject, you will find that there has been a lot of confusion between anime and manga. Fans will often ask others in forums, blogs, or chat rooms what the difference is. But this is like making the blind lead the blind in most cases.

Experts visit these sites and can intelligently answer questions, but since they don’t often leave links to back up their claims, it may not be clear if what they say is true or if they really are experts. If you go to an online encyclopedia, you often find so much information to read with so many important words that it’s hard to make complete sense of it.

Suffice it to say that manga means Japanese comics, or in other words, those cartoons drawn on paper originating in Japan. Like the American comics with Superman and Spiderman, these comics were often made into different series and are still produced in quantity. Anime is animation, or you could say, the animated versions of manga.

Any animation really needs to start out as a cartoon drawing of some kind. Manga artists create the characters and story line, then their drawings are made into an animated film. The animation process is long and detailed, and requires several talented people to achieve the final product. The artists who originally created the character, their personality, and the scene where the action takes place all play an important role in the production of the anime.

Sometimes, in addition to the manga creator himself, the studios take the art and do the backgrounds and other details with the work of other animators. These drawings are combined and photographed or scanned as one piece, forming a complete scene with the character, extras and views of a modern city or whatever is being portrayed. This is how anime is created.

Rumko Takahashi created the popular Inuyasha and Ranma ½ series. She does the original drawings and assists in the animation process along with other artists in the studio who produce the final anime. And so it is with many manga-kas (manga writers).

Which came first, the manga or the anime? That’s easy to answer by studying the history of cartoon drawing. In Japan, the most famous manga artists were in production in the 1940s as they were producing cartoons about the ongoing World War at the time. That doesn’t mean there weren’t other cartoonists before this time. Certainly there were.

In the United States, comics were all the rage from the start. As early as the late 1700s, Benjamin Franklin began the first editorial cartoon. This soon expanded into longer comic strips, the first of which was drawn by Richard Outcault in 1895. Then the 1930s saw the debuts of heroes like Superman and Batman.