Mangaglyphics

Apparently the Japanese word manga (katakana マンガ, kanji 漫画, hiragana まんが) can be loosely translated to English as “whimsical pictures”. Distinctive manga styles have seen growing popularity outside Japan during the last few decades predominantly through comic book, cartoon, and video game formats.

Some time ago I had the crazy notion that there are some interesting ways to combine the tradition of ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs with manga styles in an entertaining way, mangaglypic seemed like the word rather than the equally obvious hieromanga. Fun, possibly with some educational value.
However with the work that needs to be done on improving accessibility to non-whimsical applications of ancient Egyptian on personal computers and other devices mangaglyphic is pretty low on my software to do list.

So why mention the term right now? Partly because it looks like a mangaglyph or two are creeping unasked into the InScribeX Web user interface. Partly because I’d be delighted to hear from artists or others experimenting with this style of image. However what actually stimulated my writing today was discovering the search engine bing.com still returns zero results for mangaglyphic or related words and google.com returns only one result. So in the unlikely event the term catches on at all I wanted to state mangaglyphic is meant to be a generic word. No attempts to register trademarks etc. please.