"We were looking at the success of manga as a great sign that teenage girls were actually reading comics again," said Karen Berger, a senior vice president at DC Comics who oversees the Minx line. "Girls tend to read more than boys historically, and the fact that there hasn't been that much material in the comic and graphic novel form aimed for young girls before this just leaves the area wide open."

Reading manga can be an unusual experience for the uninitiated. The paperback books, usually translated from Japanese, are read top right to bottom left and are priced around $10. (In some books the first pages remind readers to start at the back.) Manga also has a different pace and story-telling style than traditional comics. For instance, instead of action-driven storylines punctuated with frequent fight scenes, manga titles — especially those aimed at girls — often dedicate significant space to awkward silences, embarrassing moments and close ups of tear-filled eyes. Friendships and romance tend to figure prominently, even against fantastical backdrops that include robots, ninjas and vampires.

Viz Media's "Vampire Knight" tracks the adventures of Yuki Cross, who attends a boarding school loaded with vampires. Its pages feature their fair share of gun play and neck bites. But even in this setting, a complicated relationship quickly emerges between Yuki and Zero Kiryu — who both are responsible for protecting regular students from the vampire contingent — and a tall, dark, dashing vampire named Kaname Kuran.

The artistic conventions and techniques of manga can differ markedly from U.S. comics. For example, female characters in manga tend to be less voluptuous than the superwomen in U.S. comics. Such curvaceous characters can be tough for young women to relate to, says Nicole Lewis, a 19-year-old manga reader who is going into her sophomore year at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "It's a little off-putting," Ms. Lewis says of some female superheroes in American comics. "Especially to young women who don't look like that at all."

Ms. Lewis says she likes the fact that the female stars of manga are often girls without any special powers, who wear normal clothes, attend high school and are trying to resolve some life problems. "They don't need to be bit by a spider or be from another planet," Ms. Lewis said.

DC Comics has an existing manga imprint, called CMX, which is translated from Japanese. The new Minx series will mimic the general look and price-point of manga. But Ms. Berger stresses that the books are designed with American readers in mind. They read in the standard, left-to-right, manner. And they're written in English, not translated.