This week, I’m exhausted but happy after a weeklong visit from my sweet ten-year-old granddaughter! We’ve packed in all sorts of fun activities, including a couple of trips to the bookstore, where Chloe picked up some new reading material in her favorite genre: manga! I’ve turned over this space to her today. Read on as she shares her passion with you in a guest essay (lightly edited) – and please note that not all manga is suitable for children:

Hi, I’m the guest blogger today! Yes, yes, I’m not Barb; I’m her grandkid, but OK- stay with me.

I got into manga through my dad, who first showed me anime, and I fell in love with an anime called Sailor Moon. Then I just basically kept asking him for the manga until he finally got it for me, and yeah! That’s how I know about all these wonderful stories and such.

Manga is a Japanese comic known for catchy storylines and beautiful art. It’s kind of like a comic book, if you’ve ever read one, or like a graphic novel. Actually, it’s more like a Japanese graphic-novel series.

They’re mostly black and white, but you can get them in different colors. And they’re quite easy to read! If you get one with very small print, then that can be a little bit harder to read, but I tend to have mine not in very small print, so they’re easier to read.

Examples of manga are Chainsaw Man, Jujutsu Kaisen, and so on, but let’s break it down: Manga is a Japanese comic book. If we put it into simpler text, it’s a kind of comic book made by Japanese artists. They still look like regular comic books, but sometimes the lines and art styles can be different.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: What are some main mangas not including Jujitsu Kaisen and Chainsaw Man? The ones I’ve mentioned already include some mangas that have been turned into animes, so you get Suicide and Chainsaw Man, which are both like a hand-drawn show. They’re pretty cool.

But what I really like about manga is its creativity! You can go from fighting mangas to romance mangas to everything in between, mixed into one.

Some mangas are hard to pronounce, like Kaisen which, if you use voice commands and you said, “Go to Kaisen,” it might not work. It might not know what you’re saying because it’s in a different language! Because they’re Japanese, manga can come in different languages, and it’s actually really fun to read them and see what Japanese people read on a daily basis: what they have in their libraries and some bookstores. Japanese libraries are a bombarded area full of manga and other Japanese books.

Here, some stores like Books-A-Million carry manga, but it might be hard to find at your local bookstore because it is a Japanese type of book.

Things like Sailor Moon you can find in Mario or any anime you like, even Cowboy Bebops or Demon Slayer, Hunter x Hunter, Spy x Family- all of those animes, you can find! My favorite is actually Witch Watch.

Anyway, they’re all very nice. Some of them don’t have huge storylines, but some of them have humongous storylines! For example, One Piece is actually one of the most “favorited” shows, and it has so many seasons! I think it has at least 23 seasons and more than 1,000 episodes, which is pretty cool.

If you look in the manga section, it’s just quite cool, actually. You can find small mangas that usually aren’t put into anime yet, and that’s okay! Some of them aren’t even in English, so if you can’t read in Japanese and you have an anime [in that language], then you can’t use that.

But everyone should at least be able to look over the text [even if they can’t read Japanese] and see how Japanese people have their comic books oriented. Some of them are different than ours and some of them aren’t! But they’re one of my favorite kinds of books, and everyone should know that they’re a real thing.

I just bought a manga-like book. It was about Demon Slayer, but it was their official art book! So it wasn’t truly a manga, but it did have some cool manga images- and it was pretty cheap for what it was, considering it was only $23.35. I recommend it for any lover of a fighting anime and some other ones for some other genres, too! For romance, I recommend My Dress-Up Darling or Witch Watch. For silent romance, I would definitely recommend Witch Watch.

Basically my whole thing that I was going to explain today was what manga is. If you didn’t know what manga is- because I feel like whoever doesn’t know needs an explanation- it’s like your good old comic book, but from a different country. And yes, you can find them in America quite easily, though they are from Japan.

It is not very popular among kids, but a lot of older people like them. I feel like kids would really enjoy it! But you know, some young people don’t even know yet what manga is. So this is my encouragement for you: If you have a young person, tell them what manga is!