The timeless debacles.

Are you a true fan of the anime?
You're not a true fan if you haven't read the manga first.

Cheap, generic manga produced solely for an inevitable anime adaptation.

The manga will never be translated. The anime will never be translated. The manga is horrible. The anime is horrible.

I have heard all of these and more, but the idea that if you haven't read the source, you're not good enough is a bit unfounded for some.

Some anime did not even start as manga like Steins;Gate or Pokemon which started as a video game,
or anime which are the original source material like Serial Experiments Lain and have no manga to precede them.


But let's just ignore all that and talk about our preferences.


Personally, I enjoy reading above watching it.
I'm a lot more focused on it than when I watch anime.

When I watch a show now, I swear I cannot sit still. You'd have to tie me down and gag me to force me to watch anime.

And I will drudge through anime very slowly. What will happen is I'll watch,
and I'll probably pause more than a few times to think about what has happened so far.
Then when the episode ends, I'll think to myself "Wow, that was great. I'm going to take a break."
... and I'll never watch it ever again. Or I will go painfully slow. Months slow.
It took me a long time to finish the anime adaptation of Kino no Tabi (2003)
and I really really really loved Kino. But I just had to will myself to finish it and even then it was hard.

Each copy of the manga is usually super expensive but in most cases I prefer the anime unless it's something big like Pokemon and Persona. Other than the big ones, I loved the manga but couldn't really get into the anime.

I remember when I was really into Eyeshield 21, I used to always be getting a copy of the manga from the library and I loved it. I tried watching the anime but I couldn't really get passed the 1st episode.

I never read manga unless it's the Pokemon Adventures manga or JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, and I only read JoJo after I have already seen it in it's animated form. I'm under the opinion of, if it's animated, why feel the need to read still images of it? Animated movement will get you more invested.

I like both? Is that bad I do? Its because I grew up with anime first then manga. I enjoy it so it depends if I am doing one of them or both at the same time. From time to time I tend to look into reading mangas that I haven't read before. There are other times I haven't been watching much new anime, but been sorting it out. The last new one I watched was on Netflix called hi score girl.

Almost always the Manga is better than it's anime adaptation me personally I like both simply because if I want the full story as the creator intended then I'll read the manga but occasionally I'll read the manga only after I watch the anime adaptation just because I want to see if I'll be interested in it first. Take Fullmetal Alchemist and Fullmetal Alchemist brotherhood for example, Brotherhood is based completely off the amine (which is the better of the two in my opinion) while Fullmetal Alchemist is a adaption that is loosely based on the anime only taking major plot points another example would be Tokyo ghoul  Root A and Tokyo Ghoul while Root A was a loose adaptation it gradually turned me as well as many fans of the series off to it because it had strayed so far from the source material and added nothing to the creators master piece. Over all manga is better because its unfiltered and its the creators vision exactly how the creator intended it to be   

Divine Aurora : I 100% agree with this. I always hate it how some anime just leave out smaller plots and underlying storylines as they have to condense everything to 20 minutes or so. Manga to me is more relaxing as I can read it and put it down whenever I want without much inconvenience. Anime is a lot more difficult to put down mid episode in my opinion as most anime sites can be a pain with adds or pop-ups.

I prefer Anime, it's less time consuming for me honestly. Plus I lot a watch of it whilst I'm doing other things. I can't really do that with manga. 

As many people have stated manga's are better in the story telling sense solely due to the fact that they can add a lot more information and world building into it. They don't take as long to produce as animes, you don't need a good production budget to make a decent manga., and you can always describe things better with words than pictures. 

Manga is usually the better option if you want to enjoy a series more I will admit that. I'm just usually doing three things at once... and it's pretty hard to focus on good written material and actually do anything else worthwhile at the same time

I prefer whichever is the source material. You can argue as much as you want that Anime is faster. But in most cases, there's so much filler injected into the Anime, that it ends up being slower. Even when an episode is supposed to be "canon." There's often plenty of irrelevant made up scenes. And when the Anime is faster, it's usually the case that it cut out vital parts of the original story. (Like the mask set up in JoJo's.)

So generally, I prefer manga, unless it originated as an Anime. That's not to say that I don't watch Anime, I've watched a ton. Manga is a new hobby for me, but I find it makes Anime harder to watch, because the experience is so much more focused.

Anime mostly for the reasons that muffin mentioned. I like to do other things in the background which you can't really do with mango. I recognize in a lot of series that it's better to read, but I'm not a big reader in the first place and I love to multi-task so it just wouldn't sit well for me.

Manga doesn't have music and voice acting, anime has more variables and doesn't allow for as much imagination and interpretation.

In the end, I enjoy anime more (music and sound admittedly plays a massive role in this decision), but there are also a number of manga that have been downright insulted on the anime side of things (Horimiya) and some that have just been ignored entirely (Komi-san).

The thing that really grinds my gears are the people who (in either case, anime or manga) claim that you aren't a true fan if you pirate anything or use a streaming/fan translation service. I don't know Japanese and I have very little to my name in terms of spending money. Let me read a fan translation in peace.

And in that regard, manga can be incredibly superior to anime in that a studio needs to pick up an anime for us to see it at all, subbed or not, but any shmuck can release a manga on twitter and as long as one person is willing to translate it, we can all read it. Ease of access really is great.

I prefer the anime, mostly because I learned that an entire series of just one manga takes up way too much space. There's only one manga (Eyeshield 21) that I like more than the anime.