The next wave of heroes in the comic book business may look more like "Plain Janes" than X-Men.

Industry heavyweights including Time Warner Inc.'s DC Comics and Marvel Entertainment Inc. are betting that girls represent a big growth opportunity for the traditionally male-dominated medium. It's part of a renewed push in recent years by the two biggest comic-book companies to court a new audience with products aimed squarely at teenage girls.

The new titles are inspired in part by the fast growth of translated Japanese comics called manga. While gory and violent themes aimed at boys are staples of manga, fantasy and romantic storylines meant to appeal to girls have helped manga capture the attention of female readers, an audience comic publishers have long struggled to attract.

Last month, DC Comics launched a line of original books, dubbed Minx, which include "The Plain Janes," about a band of suburban outcasts who form a "secret art gang." Other Minx graphic novels include "Re-Gifters," — about a Korean-American girl and martial arts enthusiast who falls for a surfer boy who gives a present she buys him to someone else — and "Clubbing," which follows Charlotte "Lottie" Brook, a London girl sent to live at her grandparents' dowdy country club after being caught with a fake ID at a chic West End nightspot.

The publishers are following the lead of upstart manga publishers — such as Los Angeles' Tokyopop and San Francisco's Viz Media, both closely held — that have managed to draw female readers with a mix of girl-friendly content and distribution to both comic book shops and mainstream bookstores. Trade publication ICv2 puts the total comics and graphic novel market at about $640 million last year in the U.S. and Canada, with manga accounting for about $200 million of that figure.

The manga category is expanding quickly. Total sales of manga books jumped 22 percent to 9.5 million units in 2006 from 7.8 million a year earlier, according to Nielsen BookScan, which collects point-of-sale information from 6,500 retail locations across the country, including those operated by Borders Group Inc. and Barnes & Noble Inc. The manga category in 2006 accounted for about two-thirds (68.5 percent) of all graphic novels sold in U.S. bookstores, up from slightly more than half (53.8 percent) in 2004, according to Nielsen BookScan. (The figures don't include comic-book stores.)

That fast growth helped convince DC that the time is right to cultivate a significant customer base of teenage girls.