The comic book store has never been a female-friendly place.
In the popular imagination, it's a dank cinderblock of a building, decorated with statues of absurdly proportioned superheroes and heroines, frequented by pimply teenage boys and presided over by a condescending slob who manages be at once sexless and vaguely lecherous. (The latter type has been immortalized by the insufferable Comic Book Guy on "The Simpsons.")

What is news is that many of the young women who are now walking into American comic book stores on a weekly basis have started writing manga books of their own, shaking up an industry long dominated by translations of Japanese works. These women are, perhaps, the most striking part of a phenomenon known as original English-language manga. Though manga written outside of Japan accounts for only a small part of the market, it's on the rise.
"I think it's the future of manga," says Rivkah, the single-named local writer and artist who has published two volumes of her manga series, "Steady Beat," about two teenage sisters living in Austin. "I get a lot of e-mails from fans who say, 'I never read manga until I started reading your comics, because I can relate to the characters.' Which is fine with me."
Even the music industry is jumping on the bandwagon. A few years ago, Courtney Love published an original English-language manga, called "Princess Ai." This month, Ballantine Books' Del Rey Manga division put out the first volume of "Avril Lavigne's Make 5 Wishes," an original English-language manga tied to the release of the pop idol's new album. According to Del Rey, it sold out its first printing in four days.
American influences
In the West, manga is usually thought of as a cartooning style distinguished by characters with large, childlike eyes and artistic techniques such as exaggerated motion lines and "super-deformed" heads (which are drawn absurdly big in order to express a powerful emotion, such as anger). In fact, manga is simply the Japanese word for "comic book." If you saw a copy of Superman or Archie for sale in Tokyo, it would be referred to as manga. But in America, "manga" has come to mean Japanese comics: usually, serialized, digest-sized books printed in black and white that retail for about $10.
There are many different styles of manga; not only the cartoony "big eye" style, but sober, realistically drawn comics aimed at adults. In Japan, manga doesn't come with the adolescent stigma attached to comic books in America.
Though some purists balk at manga that isn't from Japan, the advent of such books seems not only inevitable in a globalized age, but built into the medium's DNA.
"Manga has traditions that go back to medieval Japanese art and culture, but the original stimulus was probably Punch, the British humor magazine," says Susan Napier, a scholar of Japanese pop culture who recently left the University of Texas for Tufts University. "The British came over to Tokyo in the 19th century and developed their own humor magazine called Tokyo Punch that had small one-panel comics, like you see in The New Yorker. American newspaper comic strips were inspirations, too. Manga expert Frederik Schodt tells the story of a Japanese who visited America in the early 20th century and came back saying one of the keys to American greatness was the funnies."
Walt Disney movies and the comic books that American soldiers brought to occupied Japan also influenced early manga. So it's fitting that the cultural exchange is now running in the opposite direction.
"I always gravitated to Japanese stuff," says Austinite Tony Salvaggio, who has co-written the English-language manga "Psy-Comm" with Jason Henderson of Dallas. While the other kids in College Station were watching "The Flintstones," Salvaggio was tuning in to the animated Japanese show "Speed Racer." His fascination with anime soon led to an interest in manga, and today he not only writes manga, he pens a column about it for the comicbookresources.com Web site.
Salvaggio, 34, knows that some people are skeptical about the notion of non-Japanese manga, but the medium's variety of styles is as much a part of his cultural heritage as Superman. "Manga definitely colors my writing," he says. "We trade music with Japan, we trade films. For people to say, 'Oh, you're just a copy cat,' I think is pretty poor and shortsighted. You know, spaghetti Westerns are no less valid as Westerns because they're created in Italy. You can't tell me those guys can't make a good Western."
Paul Benjamin, the 36-year-old Austin-based author of the "Pantheon High" manga, remembers a somewhat different experience. "Growing up in Oklahoma City in the early to mid-'80s, I always enjoyed anime and things that were based on manga, but I wasn't huge into them," he says. "But I had friends who were learning to read and speak Japanese just so they could read manga."
Benjamin didn't start paying serious attention to manga until he was an adult working in the comic book industry. Unlike Salvaggio, who was raised on the genre, Benjamin was at first thrown by and then dazzled by manga's strangeness, and the freedom it offers. "I loved the otherness of manga, I loved that it wasn't like anything I'd ever read before," he says. "I know I'm going to be dead and bones and Batman is still going to be dealing with his issues over his parents dying by beating up bad guys. That's never going to change. That's just the nature of a property owned by a big company. But with manga, anything goes, anything can happen, and that's very exciting."
Benjamin, in short, may be a newcomer to manga, but he doesn't feel like an interloper.
'This spoke to me'
Not coincidentally, Rivkah, Salvaggio and Benjamin all work for the same company: Tokyopop, America's leading publisher of non-Japanese manga.
"It really started becoming a company initiative in 2002-2003," says Lillian Diaz-Przybyl, Rivkah's editor at Tokyopop. "We saw an opportunity in the market to really expand. As much as I adore Japanese manga, there is something about it which many American readers find limiting."
Even so, original English-language manga still takes a back seat to the more traditional fare. Diaz-Przybyl estimates that of the 400 or so titles Tokyopop puts out a year, about 70 are non-Japanese. And where a top Japanese manga will sell as many as 100,000 copies in the U.S., the bestselling non-Japanese manga will move only about 50,000.
"We don't have as many breakout hits as we were hoping for, but the fan base for these books is exactly what we wanted," Diaz-Przybyl says. "The people who say, 'I never would have read manga, I never would have read comics, but this spoke to me.' "
Asked for an example, Diaz-Przybyl cites Rivkah's books. "Steady Beat" tells the story of two sisters at "Eastlake High" (Rivkah attended Westlake High) who grow up in a conservative Christian household and what happens when the older sister comes out of the closet as a lesbian.
"Rivkah has very shojo style, but she's telling a story set in Austin, a pretty realistic depiction of what it's like to come out in the U.S.," Diaz-Przybyl says. "You're not going to get that story from Japan."
"Steady Beat" isn't exactly autobiographical, but it draws widely on Rivkah's life. There's the barely disguised Westlake setting and plenty of shots of Austin landmarks: Barton Springs, the Frost Bank building, the Paramount Theatre. And the book's main story line — how 16-year-old Leah Winters and her mother, a staffer for a Republican state senator, deal with her older sister's homosexuality — is directly connected to Rivkah's experience coming out as bisexual.
"When you start reading 'Steady Beat' you think I'm going to take a negative view of Christianity — Leah's mother is very conservative and Christian; my parents are very conservative and Christian," says Rivkah, 25. "I had to come out to my parents at some point in time, and I was afraid that they would shun me. But they were actually very open and accepting, and they still love me and accept me for who I am. A lot of the book is about that, about expecting to be turned away and shunned and finding out that people are a lot more open minded and accepting than you think they are."
Personal experiences
Talking to Rivkah, it's clear that she has a lot more autobiography to draw on, if she so chooses. There's her brief, unhappy marriage to another woman, during which she lived in rural Pennsylvania. There's her early Japanophilia, which drove her to teach herself Japanese so she could read untranslated manga. And there's the matter of her religion: Though raised a Christian, she never believed in Jesus, and in her teens decided to be Jewish instead. She hasn't formally converted, but she studies the Torah and goes to synagogue regularly.
It's not tough to imagine each of those experiences making for a compelling story, and that in itself seems like a justification for original English-language manga, no matter what the purists say: Until it came along, there was little room for the stories of American girls and women in the world of mainstream comics.