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My question is about how are volumes determined in a manga. Does it go by major villain in a form of one per volume? Or... Does it go by story arc, in a way that a new story forms a new arc? Lastly, are anime story series—arcs, seasons, sagas, etc—determined by the manga volumes?

Please help me understand how this categorization works.

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    I mean, the answer is basically "volume boundaries go wherever the author and publisher agree they should go". There's not really anything deeper to it than that. Obviously, they're likely to pick narratively-interesting stopping points for the boundaries, just as multi-volume works in any other medium would (Western comic books, serialized fiction, multi-part movies, radio dramas, etc.).
    – senshin
    Oct 9, 2015 at 17:31
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    I don't remember if they go through that issue specifically, but reading Bakuman made me understand much about the making of mangas. I'll recommend it to any enthusiast.
    – solalito
    Dec 15, 2016 at 12:25

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There is no fixed rule to decide the boundary of a volume of a Manga. It's upto the mangaka and the publisher to decide where a given volume starts or ends. They're generally published arc-wise to maintain a uniformity throughout the volume.

As per Wikipedia

In Japan, manga are usually serialized in large manga magazines, often containing many stories, each presented in a single episode to be continued in the next issue. If the series is successful, collected chapters may be republished in tankōbon volumes, frequently but not exclusively, paperback books.

After a series has run for a while, publishers often collect the episodes together and print them in dedicated book-sized volumes, called tankōbon.

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It is usually each episode, most animes are based off of manga, so you have to do the math if you wanted a 23 episode from season 6 of an anime you would have to count each episode to get to that episode as in the manga.

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  • I'm not really sure I understand the explanation. Did you mean each anime episode is based on each manga chapter? Could you expand/reword on "count each episode to get to that episode ("chapter"?) as in the manga", or is it like season 6 episode 23 is the 153th (5x26+23) chapter from the manga? Even if this might be true, there are many exceptions to this, like manga with a long chapter is broken into multiple episodes, or manga with short chapters are combined into a single episode...
    – Aki Tanaka ♦
    Oct 26, 2019 at 5:40

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