The three college students have been reading manga -- Japanese comic books -- since they were children in Taiwan, but no asian thu.

Hanging out at the extensive manga section in the Ann Arbor Borders, where they're scoping out the latest titles, Jack Liao, 22, says he prefers manga to American comics "because there's simply more variety in the stories."

Long-running comics like "Superman," says Liao's friend, Tessie Chin, also 22, "are all kind of the same" -- a common critique among manga enthusiasts, who paint the American comics industry as overly fixated on superheroes.

For her part, Liao's sister, Alice, 19, just admires the "stylized" esthetic that gives much of manga its distinctive look -- often characterized by girls with oversized baby-doll eyes, and skinny, oddly pretty young men whose appearance would make Bart Simpson bust a gut.

You may not have noticed, but we're in the midst of a significant new cultural invasion. Comic books -- that great mainstay of American childhood -- have been in steep and steady decline for years, despite some recent gains. By contrast, manga in the United States has shot up like a hot biotech stock, jumping from $10 million in sales six years ago to $300 million today.

Catching this cultural wave, The Detroit News on Sunday will introduce the first manga comic to run in American newspapers, a kid-and-pet tale called "Peach Fuzz." (See story below.)

"Peach Fuzz" will launch Sunday in 28 other U.S. newspapers, as well, ranging from the Boston Globe to the Denver Post.

Like most manga, "Peach Fuzz" will have an ending, rather than running indefinitely. The trials and tribulations of the heroine and her pet ferret will appear every Sunday in The News for 21 weeks, at which point the strip will be replaced by another American-created manga, "Van Von Hunter," a send-up of the vampire-chaser genre.

That storyline will run for 17 weeks.

Both comics are products of TOKYOPOP, a Los Angeles entertainment firm with offices in Tokyo and Hamburg, Germany, dedicated to introducing Asian pop culture to the rest of the world. For years, the company largely devoted itself to translating Japanese comics into English, but is now launching made-in-America manga.

"Manga is typically written in a much more cinematic way" than traditional American comics, says TOKYOPOP editorial director Jeremy Ross, trying to define the difference between the two formats. "It's slower in its pacing. The story breathes more."

Those stories range all over the map, usually crafted for highly specific demographic groups, such as young teenage girls. (In bookstores, manga comic books often include age-appropriate recommendations.)

But it would be wrong to imagine that these are just a childhood concern in Japan. Unlike this country, where comics and cartoons have a distinctly juvenile reputation, in Japan, the form is accorded considerable artistic respect, and enthusiasts often read manga or watch anime -- its animated cousin on TV or film -- well into adulthood.

Indeed, while "manga" is loosely translated as "entertaining pictures," one of Japan's most celebrated artists, Hozukai -- whose painting of a tsunami wave is perhaps that country's most-famous artistic image -- also produced black-and-white studies he called manga.

And while both manga and anime may be unfamiliar terms to many adults here, most parents are probably familiar with the latter from its most-successful forays onto American shores -- "Pokemon."

Ann Arborite Soren Berg, who's been a fan since his freshman year at Community High School, notes that the stories run the gamut from romantic tales for young girls to dark plotlines about monsters, demons and vampires.

"Manga is just a different approach" to cartooning, says the 20-year-old "with different cultural assumptions." For his part, he says, "I tend toward the more philosophical stories. And the Japanese," he adds, "don't have as many taboos as we do. They're far more likely to talk about violence or sex."

To be sure, there's no sex or violence in "Peach Fuzz."

Berg adds that lots of his high school friends were converts. "Anyone who's into geeky hobbies," he says, "watches anime and reads manga."

While manga is uniquely associated with Japan, Ross notes that it's "kind of a cultural form that's been circulating for years back and forth across the Pacific." Japanese artists, he says, were heavily influenced by U.S. comics that flooded the nation during the post-war occupation.

In fact, Ross says, when the father of modern manga, Osamu Tezuka, was asked where he got his distinctive wide-eyed drawing style that is now emblematically Japanese, the artist cited two influences -- Betty Boop and Bambi.

In any case, there's little doubt that the genre is exploding in this country, particularly among girls, who constitute about 60 percent of its American readership. Borders Books and Music stocks more than 2,500 manga titles, and has seen double-digit growth in their sales over the past few years.

Says John Glynn, "Invariably, when I go into a bookstore, the manga section just keeps getting bigger and bigger, which tells me somebody's buying them." Glynn is vice-president for rights and acquisitions at Universal Press Syndicate, which is distributing "Peach Fuzz" and "Van Von Hunter."

Indeed, manga's grip on American teenagers is such that the illustration-program chairman at Detroit's College for Creative Studies says he has to break incoming students of the genre's stylized drawing style before he can train them in accurately representing the human form.

"Half the students who come in to the program have some kind of connection to that style," says Gil Ashby. "But once they understand that they have to be able to draw a figure correctly, then they can go back to doing manga."

As was probably the case with Ashby's students, it's manga's fresh approach to drawing and storytelling that first hooked Luke Hanna, 22, but he's noticed that the Japanese style has begun to bleed over into distinctly American products like Marvel Comics.

"American comics these days have gotten more interesting," says the Ann Arbor resident, but he still notes a certain redundancy in storylines. "I mean," he adds, "Superman has been killed, like, seven times."

You can reach Michael H. Hodges at (313) 222-6021 or mhodges@ detnews.com.