Has anyone tried to use manga/comics as a memory palace? I’ve got a lot of physical manga, so I was thinking about using them, but I’m not sure if I should be using panels or just the books themselves
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I would use panels. Cover art, too. Don’t know that a book is enough of a place to store that way, but let us know. 
I use comics to vary my mental characters in other systems, since the variation in clothing or ornamentation creates a different character.
You can use the story of a comic book as a mental palace obviously, when I read manga I usually confuse the animated chapter as if I had already seen it and it’s because of the manga I had previously read, so yes you can and even with literature as the old mnemonists did.
I’m not a manga fan/consumer, so I may be a bit confused, but…are you simply talking about using a drawn image as a memory palace? If so, in that sense, I don’t think an art-filled frame from a manga (or any comic/illustration/art) would be any different than using a single painting from a museum, which has been discussed at length here. My extremely limited experience with manga makes me think it might be difficult to find images complex enough to yield a good number of potential locations—the art I’ve seen appeared to be very simplistic—but I could be wildly mistaken.
Unless I’m mistaken regarding what you’re considering, you may find some helpful information in these discussions:
“Paintings as Memory Palaces”
“Using Paintings as Palaces”
“What are some methods to build memory palaces”
Bob
Unlike a painting that a person can’t easily interpret, manga or comics have a story that you can read as you advance in the plot, that creates the ground, they are not only drawings, but also a story, their drawings reinforce the story and with that you have a literary palace reinforced with images.
Most manga don’t have a clear background other than their characters and their story.
I have a mental palace created in minecraft that I am making grow, since I have the goal of creating the ideal city of platon in minecraft or something similar to that colossal city, when I build the parts of the city I don’t even have to go through those parts, since when I build the parts, it is as if it was automatically reinforced in my memory. I also use other video games, as well as movies, series, etc. Movies or audiovisual content helps me to train my episodic memory, since I focus on memorizing the plot, actions, places, dialogues, etc.
Manga or comics have something that makes the images move in the memory, because as I said when I see the animation I feel like I have already seen it.
@KingF00, the two are incompatible directly. Manga are subjects. Palaces are locations.
If Manga have unique locations that they exist in, you could use those but you would still have a problem. You need an order to traverse the pegs. That’s when you create an alphabetic list of Manga so you know which one comes next.
Doug
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So, I make a very amateur comic on a semi-regular (ha!) basis at Joe’s Comics | HTML and css for making comics., mostly as an exercise in learning the form and storytelling.
Several Things:
- If it works for you: great. You absolutely don’t need our permission and I’d love to hear more.
- Panels in Manga have a very very (by Western standards) loose relationship in a story (but not mood) sense. There are also an enormous amounts of very similar consecutive panels. Either of these would absolutely mess me up if I used using panels as pegs.
- Modelling a memory palace on the beats of a story is fascinating - but I’ve never seen it done well and I’m unsure if it can be. When I teach storytelling it’s amazing how few people can think of the story beats of their favourite film.
- A decent section of Manga has a fairly episodic cycle. So could absolutely do something like “I’m using the villains of Dragon Ball in appearance order” and that would be quite cool.
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Maybe the original poster was thinking of using the manga/books as a lukasa? (Because they said “physical manga”)
In this case you’d flip the pages and the “burden” of remembering the story/order isn’t on you, since you just physically go through the pages.
Edit: so I tried it out, because I was curious. Memorized a deck of cards in random order with one of my old books a “bande dessinée” (french comic, which (at least the classic ones) are pretty codified: each one has 48 pages, 1 “planche” with several “cases” on each page, with sort of a theme/mini-arc on each – adding to that a few “making-of” pages at the end, which makes 52 loci).
It works really well. But it’s slow because I’m not really “fluent” with my “Card-People” (I defined them for fun but I’m not really using them for any prioritized project). And since the suit of diamond is full of characters coming from that serie of comics (should’ve taken another one perhaps) it got confusing at times. And also it means I more or less re-read the comic which was enjoyable, but not particularly quick.