Comic, manga and webtoon glossary

40 terms, each answered in a sentence before the detail. Written for people making comics rather than cataloguing them.

Formats and media

What the different comic traditions are actually called, and how they differ.

Doujinshi: Doujinshi are self-published Japanese comics and magazines, produced outside the commercial publishing system and sold directly by their makers at events such as Comiket. They may be original stories or derivative fan work built on an existing series.
Manga: Manga is the Japanese word for comics. In English it means a comic made in the Japanese tradition: black and white, read right to left, serialised chapter by chapter in a magazine before being collected into tankobon volumes. Korean comics are manhwa; Chinese are manhua.
Manhua: Manhua is the Chinese word for comics, and in English it means a comic from mainland China, Hong Kong or Taiwan. Most manhua published today are full colour, read left to right, and released as vertical-scroll episodes on apps rather than as printed books.
Manhwa: Manhwa is the Korean word for comics. In English it usually means a South Korean comic, most often a full-colour vertical-scroll webtoon, as distinct from Japanese manga or Chinese manhua.
One-shot: A one-shot is a complete comic story told in a single instalment, with no chapters before or after it. In manga it doubles as a pitch: magazines run one-shots to test whether a premise and its cast can carry a full serialisation before committing to one.
Webcomic: A webcomic is any comic published on the web instead of in print. The word describes the channel, not the shape: a webcomic can be a three-panel gag strip, a print-sized page, or a vertical scroll, and it is usually self-published by the person who draws it.
Webtoon: A webtoon is a digital comic drawn as one continuous vertical strip, meant to be read by scrolling down a phone screen rather than turning pages. The format began in South Korea and is now used worldwide.
Yonkoma (4-koma): A yonkoma is a Japanese comic strip of exactly four equal panels stacked in a vertical column and read top to bottom. Its four beats follow kishotenketsu — setup, development, twist, conclusion — so the payoff comes from a shift in perspective rather than from conflict.

Page and art craft

The vocabulary of how a page is built and drawn.

Bleed: Bleed is artwork extended past the page's trim line so that, after the printer cuts the stack, the image still runs off the paper edge with no white margin. The standard extension is 3 mm, or 0.125 inches, on every outside edge.
Establishing shot: An establishing shot is a wide panel that shows where a scene takes place and how the people in it are arranged, before the comic cuts in close. Without one, readers cannot place the close-ups that follow in any coherent space.
Flatting: Flatting is the colouring stage where every region of a comic panel is filled with a single solid colour, with no shading, so that later rendering can select any area with one click. The result is a flats layer used as a selection mask.
Gutter: A gutter is the empty space between two comic panels. The reader fills it in, imagining whatever happened between the two images, so the width of a gutter controls how much time the story skips and how long a beat is held.
Inking: Inking is the stage where a comic's pencil drawing is redrawn in permanent black line. The inker decides which edges become lines, how thick each line is, and which areas are filled solid black — the choices that give a page its depth and contrast.
Line weight: Line weight is the thickness of a drawn line, varied deliberately across a piece of art. Thicker lines advance towards the viewer and read as shadowed or heavy; thinner lines recede and read as lit or delicate, which is how flat line art conveys depth.
Panel: A panel is a single framed image in a comic that shows one moment of the story. Its border marks where that moment ends, its size controls how long the reader spends there, and the sequence of panels is the sequence of time.
Panel transition: A panel transition is the relationship between one comic panel and the next — how much time, space or subject changes across the gutter. Scott McCloud's six types are moment-to-moment, action-to-action, subject-to-subject, scene-to-scene, aspect-to-aspect and non-sequitur.
Screentone: Screentone is a sheet of pre-printed dots, lines or gradients applied to black-and-white comic art to produce grey values. Originally adhesive film cut with a blade and burnished down, it is now nearly always applied digitally as tone layers.
Speed lines: Speed lines are drawn line fields that convey motion or force attention in comics. Parallel lines trailing a subject read as movement; radial lines converging on a point read as emphasis, shock or impact. Manga calls them ryūsen and shūchūsen.
Splash page: A splash page is a single panel that fills an entire comic page. It spends a whole page on one moment, so it is used for chapter openers, first appearances and the loudest beat in a scene — anything that should stop the reader.
Vertical scroll: Vertical scroll is a comic format laid out as one tall, continuous column read by scrolling down a phone screen instead of turning pages. It is the standard format for webtoons, where empty space between panels sets the pacing.

Lettering and sound

Bubbles, captions and effects — the text layer of a comic.

Bubble tail: A bubble tail is the pointed spur extending from a speech bubble towards the character speaking, which is what assigns the words to them. A tail aimed at the wrong person is the most confusing mistake in comic lettering.
Caption box: A caption box is a rectangular block of text set apart from the speech bubbles, carrying narration, internal monologue, or a place-and-time marker. It has no tail, because nobody in the panel is saying it aloud.
Onomatopoeia: Onomatopoeia is a word that imitates the sound it names — crash, whirr, thud. In comics it supplies the written sound effects, and Japanese extends the device far past noise to words for textures, motions and even silence.
SFX: SFX is the comics production term for the drawn sound-effect lettering on a page — the shaped words sitting outside the bubbles, usually hand-drawn into the artwork. It names the artefact a letterer makes and the workflow around it.
Speech bubble: A speech bubble is the outlined shape holding a character's spoken words inside a comic panel, with a tail pointing at whoever said them. Readers take bubbles in the panel's reading order, so where a bubble sits decides who is heard first.
Thought bubble: A thought bubble is a cloud-edged container holding what a character is thinking rather than saying out loud, connected to them by a trail of shrinking circles instead of a pointed tail.

Genres and tropes

Genre labels readers use to find the next thing they want to read.

Bara: Bara is a category of Japanese comics about gay men, made largely by gay men for a gay male readership. It is distinct from Boys' Love, which is written mainly by and for women. In English the word is also used loosely to name its burly, heavily muscled art style.
Isekai: Isekai is a Japanese genre in which an ordinary person is transported, reincarnated or summoned out of our world and into a fantasy one, then has to live there. The name means "another world", and the transfer itself is where the story starts.
Josei: Josei is a Japanese publishing demographic: manga serialised in magazines aimed at adult women, roughly 18 and older. Its stories deal with work, money, marriage and desire from an adult vantage, and it is routinely mislabelled shojo in English.
Murim: Murim is the martial-arts world of Korean fiction: the society of sects, clans and wandering fighters that runs parallel to ordinary life, with its own laws and hierarchy. The word (무림) means "martial forest" and names both the world and the genre set in it.
Regression: Regression is a story premise, dominant in Korean manhwa, in which a character dies or fails catastrophically and wakes up at an earlier point in their own life, in their own body, keeping every memory of the future they already lived through.
Seinen: Seinen is a Japanese publishing demographic: manga serialised in magazines aimed at adult men, roughly 18 and older. It differs from shonen less in content rating than in pacing and moral certainty — seinen lets a protagonist fail and stay wrong.
Shojo: Shojo is a Japanese publishing demographic: manga serialised in magazines aimed at girls roughly 12 to 18. It is defined by that readership rather than by subject matter, and its magazines produced the most distinctive page-layout language in comics.
Shonen: Shonen is a Japanese publishing demographic, not a genre: manga aimed at boys roughly 12 to 18, defined by the magazine that serialises it rather than by its content. Shonen magazines carry action, sport, comedy, horror and romance alike.
Slice of life: Slice of life is a genre that takes its story from ordinary daily existence — school, work, meals, friendship — instead of from an external threat. The conflicts are small and personal, and the ending usually changes a relationship rather than a world.

Production

The documents and stages between an idea and a finished page.

Beat sheet: A beat sheet is an ordered list of the events in a story, one line each, written before any page or panel breakdown. It fixes what happens and in what order, so structural problems are found in a list instead of in finished pages.
Character sheet: A character sheet is a reference drawing showing one character from several angles alongside a range of expressions, so they are drawn the same way in every panel. It is also called a model sheet or a reference sheet.
Script: A comic script is the written document a comic is drawn from. It breaks the story into numbered pages and panels, describing what each panel shows and listing the dialogue, captions and sound effects that go in it.
Storyboard: A storyboard is a sequence of rough drawings that plans shots, staging and timing before any finished art is made. It comes from film, where each frame is one camera shot on a timeline; comics borrow the word for the same planning done page by page.
Thumbnail: A thumbnail is a small, rough sketch of a comic page used to test panel layout and reading flow before any finished art is drawn. The same word also means the small cover image representing a series in a platform's list — two unrelated things.