Those of you who follow the What are you reading today? topic know that I love 4-koma manga. I primarily read ones from Manga Time Kirara and I have a Natively list for my favorites. For those of you who don’t know, 4-koma is a format of manga where each page has one or two vertical strips of 4 square/rectangular panels.
In general I don’t see 4-koma manga mentioned that often on the forums, so I wanted to see what people think about them with some polls. Besides voting, feel free to discuss the poll results, discuss 4-koma manga in general, or ask me any questions you might have about them.
Do you read 4-koma manga?
That’s all I read!
Often
Occasionally
Rarely
Never
0voters
If you have read some 4-koma manga, how do you feel about them?
I love them
I like them
I dislike them
I hate them
Something else (leave a comment)
0voters
How many 4-koma series have you tried? (not necessarily finished the entire series)
0
1-2
3-5
6-10
11-15
16-20
21-25
26-50
51+
0voters
How many 4-koma volumes have you completed?
0
1-5
6-10
11-15
16-25
26-50
51-75
76-100
101-150
151+
0voters
Would you be interested in joining a 4-koma manga book club?
I’d love to join no matter the manga!
Probably, depending on the series/content
Maybe, if the manga isn’t too hard
If I can find time between my other 30 book clubs, sure
I’m not the biggest fan, but at the same time, I’m not strictly against them. There are only 2 I’ve stuck with for serious amounts of time, so I’ve read half a volume or so of a handful of others.
Both started out because I loved the anime and wanted more. I have 8 volumes of あっちこっち - Lv 24?? sitting about 2 feet to my left. Plus the Anthology Collection. Beside them, I have another 8 volumes of らき☆すた - Lv 31 though I bought that before I was good at Japanese, so I’ve only actually read the first 2 volumes.
(Side note–I need to grade あっちこっち because the two of those are not massively different in difficulty, but are tentatively 7 levels apart.)
I am not opposed to reading more, but with the massive backlog of Light Novels I have, I don’t see it happening anytime soon. I will finish Lucky Star, and grab the last 2 volumes of Acchi Kocchi when I’m back in Japan, but that’s all I have in the immediate plans.
I don’t particularly have an opinion on 4-koma, except that it usually equates to higher text density (particularly when it’s 8-koma per page) - so I tend to procrastinate them. Otherwise it really just depends on concept and execution for me.
Also almost all the ones I’ve tried are Mangatime KR - which I find vary between amazing and meh. The exceptions being 堀さんと宮村くん | L26 and トモちゃんは女の子! 1 | L20 - both of which I very much enjoyed (tho the former is all sloppy handwriting)
I’d be willing to try a club for probably any of the 16 on my wishlist or the 4 on my Owned list - or New Game, or anything else that seems interesting
Not sure, what I dislike about them as manga, as in anime form some of them I like very much. So it cannot be the contents. It may be the boring always-the-same page layout. I guess I like manga more if the authors put more effort into their images.
If I see a manga with a 4-koma tag, I usually go on. The one I bought was because I didn’t know it was a 4-koma manga. It took quite some time to get to the end and it even wasn’t that text heavy, even a wide-screen one.
I’ve enjoyed all the 4koma that I’ve read, though I don’t specifically seek out the format. If it’s 4koma, great, if not, that’s also fine. I’ve only read one in Japanese that I can recall (a 真・女神転生 Nocturne 4koma anthology which I don’t believe is on Natively yet), with the rest in English (月刊少女野崎くん | L26, あずまんが大王 | L25, and the first volume of 徒然チルドレン 1 | L19). I’ve got a few volumes of 佐々木と宮野 | L22 (in JP) sitting around I haven’t read yet; I didn’t realize that was also 4koma.
Oh, that’s been on my list for a while. So many Kirara series are nearly exclusively female cast, so whenever there’s a major male character it’s a nice change of pace. The two I read were ブレンド・S | L27 and 箱入りドロップス | L20.
Now that I think about it, Acchi Kocchi might be a good choice for a book club since it might have broader appeal.
I imagine that’s the case for most magazines, but yeah I’ve seen the same. I’ve read so many Kirara series that plenty were just okay or I dropped despite being popular (looking at you きんいろモザイク | L27). Thankfully that means there are plenty of good ones as well!
Ugh, that sounds exhausting! I tried the latter and it didn’t click for me.
I’ll take a look later and see if there are any on your list that I’d want to read.
I wouldn’t say it’s a lack of effort since it’s an intentional design choice, but I get your point. The difference in the anime adaptions is that they have to fill in the gaps. So the 4-koma manga sometimes feel too static or like they are jumping around and not providing all the information.
What manga was that? I usually prefer the 8 panels per page rather than the wide panels, but I’m still curious.
I enjoyed the anime of Nozaki-kun and even just looked at the manga preview a few days ago, but for some reason I’ve never really wanted to read the manga. Azumanga I really should try just because it’s a classic at this point. I enjoyed the anime well enough. That last one is on my list as well, but haven’t gotten to it yet.
It was, but eventually you get better at reading it… Still I did it in lessons for a reason (still need to finish it actually). Story and character-wise I like it better than its adaptation ホリミヤ | L23.
I read some 4-koma but it’s not my preferred format because it feels cramped to me, I do enjoy wide 4-koma and it made me appreciate the format more. There is something impressive about being able to make a complete story beat/joke/w/e within such a limited space. I would be willing to explore more of the genre.
Maybe I need to read this to finally get better at reading handwriting. I just skip it when I encounter any
edited to add: 堀さんと宮村くん is listed as a book series on here, I assume that should be manga?
I don’t think it would be very good for that, actually. I just use Google Lens if I can’t get manga handwriting, and it usually does decently well. With 堀さんと宮村くん it’s extremely hit or miss
Depending on the series, you may be missing some pretty important stuff btw. Some series it doesn’t matter so much, but for example https://learnnatively.com/series/38246b7b58/ it’s often equally important as bubble text
Personally the thing that most improved my handwriting comprehension was Ringotan and/or just writing. Otherwise it’s just one of those “the more you do it…” things. There are also series that have furigana for it (ex Sailor Moon)
I really wish there were proper study materials for reading handwriting tho
I bet you could make a nice handwriting Anki deck out of it; maybe a deck for individual kana identification, and one for whole sentences. Picture on the front, typed equivalent on the back. I’m kind of surprised no one’s done that yet, come to think.
Coincidentally, I just started a new 4-koma this morning: シスコンお姉ちゃんと気にしない妹 1 (MFC キューン) | L22 (it’s pretty tame gags) which is turning out to be a pretty fast read… So I guess it’s really the 8-koma ones that are the word dense ones?
Particularly learning the shapes, and writing sloppily - bc then I got to see how you get to some of the simplified forms (like why does a box become almost a circle). That said, I know there’s ppl here who’ve never written at all, and can read handwriting fine.
I’ve read very few 4-koma – on my shelves the only ones I can find are the four volumes of Azumanga Daioh, and Nishi UKO’s Collectors (Amazon link as it’s not on Natively; two women in a relationship, who clash over the fact that one of them spends all their money on books and the other spends all their money on clothes. Includes the occasional slightly more plot driven multipage section, but mostly it’s 4-koma. Also I think the only manga I own which puts bonus art/jokes underneath the outer cover. Complete in two volumes.)
Wow, I read a bit of this in english years ago - when it wasn’t even completed (or not translated), and I loved it so much I stopped reading so I don’t run out. I never got back around to it and completely forgot it was even a 4-koma.
Another 4-koma yuri I only now am remembering is プアプアLIPS. I really enjoyed this one too. (looking back at this manga - wow the covers look weird. The character who looks younger is an adult , and in the chibi-esque 4-koma style it never bothered me, but looking at the covers again she looks far younger than I even remember)
Yeah she looks like a kid inside the manga too, and it starts with her going for a job interview, and the manager going “I thought I wrote must be over 18 on the job ad”, “I’m 21!” joke a few pgs in…
That just makes me more curious to read it! (And I really wish ppl would write reviews with stuff like that). In any case it seems like at least vol 1 will be enjoyable
Tho things just went from “mother suspects something may be up with daughters” to mother being inspired to start drawing yuri again, using her daughters as a reference… which I’m not so thrilled about
I’m kind of surprised no one’s done that yet, come to think.