Does manga count as reading?

A friend of mine logged forty manga volumes last year and still introduces herself as someone who “doesn’t really read.” She means novels. Whatever shelf she is measuring herself against, the forty volumes did not count toward it. I have heard versions of this from a lot of manga readers: thousands of pages a year, and a quiet sense that none of it is the real thing.

The skepticism usually comes down to one claim: manga is mostly pictures, and pictures are easier than words, so reading manga is not really reading. It sounds reasonable. It also turns out to be the wrong question, for reasons the actual research makes fairly clear.

What “it’s just pictures” gets wrong

A 2025 study in Cognitive Science put this claim to a direct test. Researchers had forty skilled adult readers read comic and prose versions of the same two stories while tracking their eye movements, then tested comprehension on both. The result: no significant difference in comprehension between the comic format and the traditional text format.¹ Pictures did not make the material easier in a way that hollowed out the reading. They changed how the information arrived. The amount that landed stayed the same.

This matters for manga specifically because manga is not pictures with some dialogue bolted on. In 2003, researchers Kate Allen and John Ingulsrud surveyed 297 Japanese college students about how they actually read manga. They found a page of manga routinely mixes kanji, two separate phonetic syllabaries, the occasional romanized English word, and sound effects rendered as their own typographic objects, all laid out in panel sequences that are not strictly left to right. Many of the students they surveyed counted as genuinely engaged readers: motivated, and equipped with real strategies for tracking all of that at once.² That is not the profile of someone who found a shortcut around reading. It is the profile of someone managing a busy page.

There is also a cognitive case for why combining images and text might help rather than hurt retention, separate from format-versus-format comparisons. Dual coding theory, the framework Allan Paivio developed in the early 1970s, holds that information encoded both visually and verbally gets two separate retrieval paths instead of one.³ None of this proves manga is superior reading. It does mean the simplest version of the dismissal, pictures bad, words good, was never well supported to begin with.

Manga is not one thing

Part of the dismissal rests on a narrow idea of what manga is: bright, simple, kid-friendly stories about teenagers with swords. Plenty of manga fits that description, and there is nothing wrong with reading it. But the category also includes work like Vagabond, a meditation on violence and discipline dense enough with internal monologue that whole chapters go by without a fight scene, or Vinland Saga, which spends entire volumes on the economics and politics of Viking-age Europe before anyone draws a weapon. Seinen and josei manga, aimed at adult readers, frequently carry text density closer to a literary novel than to a children’s comic. Treating “manga” as a single, simple genre is a bit like treating “novel” as a single genre and judging the whole category by the easiest beach read on the shelf.

This matters for the reading question because the comprehension demands of a manga volume vary as widely as the demands of prose fiction do. A reader working through a text-heavy seinen series is not doing something categorically easier than a reader working through a literary novel. They are doing a different version of the same thing: tracking plot, character, and theme across hundreds of pages, just with art carrying some of the narrative load that prose would otherwise carry alone.

The volume objection, and why it misses the point

The second-line argument is usually about speed: manga reads fast, therefore it does not “really” build a reading habit the way a slower novel does. There is something to the speed claim. Most readers clear a typical volume in well under an hour, partly because panel layout and art carry information that prose would need a full sentence to convey.

But speed and habit are not the same axis. A reading habit is built by sitting down with a book regularly. How long any single session lasts is beside the point. Someone who reads two manga volumes a week has done the behavior that builds a habit twice that week. Someone who reads three pages of a novel every few days, then puts it down for two weeks, has not, regardless of which one feels more serious on a shelf.

Where the speed objection has a real point buried in it: if you are flipping through panels without absorbing the story, you have built a scrolling habit wearing a book’s clothes. That is true of any format. A novel skimmed for plot beats while half-watching television is not doing more for you than an attentively read manga volume. The honest measure is attention. Pace alone tells you nothing about whether you are giving it.

Where this leaves the actual question

“Does manga count as reading” is really two different questions wearing one outfit. The comprehension question has an answer: format does not appear to determine how much of a story you absorb, at least not in the direction the skeptics assume. The habit question has a different answer: a habit is made of repetition in a consistent context, and manga supplies exactly the kind of consistent, returnable-to material that makes repetition easy. If you pick up a volume most nights, you have a reading habit. The fact that it moves fast and uses panels instead of paragraphs is a description of the format, not a disqualification.

Where this still gets contested is taste. Someone is welcome to think prose fiction does something manga does not for them personally. That is a preference, and a reasonable one to have. It is a different claim from “manga readers are not actually reading,” which the research does not support.

Tracking it honestly

In Moth, a manga volume goes into your library the same way a novel does: title, cover, pages. You start the timer, log pages when you stop, and the session counts toward your daily goal and your streak exactly the way any other book does. There is no separate manga category and no asterisk. A 200-page volume read in thirty minutes shows up as thirty minutes of reading and 200 pages logged, because that is what happened.

This is the same stance we take on audiobooks: the format is a secondary detail next to whether you are building a real, repeatable reading habit. If your shelf this year is forty manga volumes, that is forty volumes of reading. Log them as that.

Pick up the next volume tonight. Start the timer when you do.

Footnotes

1. Rasamimanana, M., Mizzi, R., Melmi, J.-B., Saffi, S., & Colé, P. (2025). Is comprehension in comics more effective than in traditional texts in skilled adult readers? An eye movement-based study. Cognitive Science, 49(7), e70081. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70081 ↩

2. Allen, K., & Ingulsrud, J. E. (2003). “Manga” literacy: Popular culture and the reading habits of Japanese college students. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 46(8), 674-683. ↩

3. Paivio, A. (1971). Imagery and verbal processes. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. ↩