Like other forms of popular fiction, Japanese manga regularly deploy themes that might be reasonably described as “religious.” Manga include deities and priests, heavens and hells, and dramatic resolutions such as apocalypse or apotheosis. Manga targeted to all sorts of demographics also provide readers with normative understandings of “good” and “bad” religion through stereotyped tropes like the greedy priest, the evil “cult,” the vengeful ghost, the powerful wizard, or the beneficent deity. Religion is therefore a key feature of manga imagery; “religious” magic and miracles are convenient narrative devices that help manga artists tell exciting stories. But it is difficult to say how such content influences how readers understand, and act in, the world. Holding this ambiguity in mind, this talk first situates manga within a longer history of visual-verbal entertainment in Japan, highlighting how manga artists today inherit a long Buddhist tradition of using entertaining illustrated stories to induce changes in audience perspective and behavior. Second, by paying careful attention to the compositional techniques used in the manga medium itself, I show how the “gutter” between panels is not only the place where the imaginative magic of manga happens, but is also a convenient metaphor for thinking about how fictional illustrated worlds can and do influence readers’ experiences of empirical reality. Ultimately, manga do not simply introduce readers to “religious” imagery and ideas. Manga artists and their audiences collaboratively make religion.