That's fair enough, and I should have thought of it as an analogy. (It's also really interesting and useful to me to keep being reminded that I am talking to people who live in many parts of the world, and in different literary and publishing-environment contexts from my own!)

I have really not read very much manga, at least not in the sense of long ongoing series. (I have seen some anime adapted from such series, but of course these are different media.)

I guess a couple of questions I would ask are: Are there [many] manga series that focus on realistic human interactions (as opposed to melodrama, which many -- if not most -- soap operas and genre comics rely on to keep them going)?

Second: are there many long-running series in which the human characters age over time? I don't think I would be particularly interested, at least in the same way, in series in which the protagonists remain eternally young.