Jan. 23 (Bloomberg) -- Doe-eyed girls with melon-sized breasts, slasher samurai, resilient teenage heroines wielding magical powers and adventurous ninja boys: Japan's manga artists know how to hook an audience.

More than 35,000 groups of amateurs sold their versions on Dec. 28-31 at the world's biggest comic market, in Tokyo International Exhibition Center, or Tokyo Big Sight. The biannual event, known in Japan as a comiket, drew a crowd of more than 500,000. Producers of doujinshi, or lookalike copies of established manga characters, rubbed shoulders with Japan's top three manga publishers, Shueisha, Shogakuan and Kodansha, as potential copyright violations are rarely contested.

While manga magazines and books sold 1.26 billion copies of 70,000 titles in 2006, domestic sales have been falling for 12 years. The comikets are the perfect place to discover a new artist with the potential for a global mega-hit like the shonen manga for boys named ``Naruto'' or the shojo manga for girls called ``Fruits Basket.''

If popular in Japan, a manga character can jump quickly from magazine to book, and then into a TV anime series, spawning toys, games, stationery and other branded goods. Some even get their own movies or TV dramas.

``Fruits Basket,'' a series about orphaned schoolgirl Tohuro Honda, who is saved from living in a tent by a family of therianthropic zodiac animals, has sold more than 18 million copies in Japan and 2 million in the U.S., according to publishers. It was made into a smash-hit anime TV series.

Manga readers in Japan range from children to seniors. In major bookstores, teenagers and adults cruise shelves lined with thousands of choices. In Tokyo's Akihabara district, geeky young men known as ``otaku'' flock to manga outlets, some specializing in provocative genre.

Mobile Manga

Commuter trains were once packed with boys, young men and even businessmen reading cheap manga magazines, some as thick as a phone book. Now, the titles have been replaced by more compact comic books and the new trend is to view the comic strips via mobile phone. Manga mobile sales reached about 8.2 billion yen in the year ended March 2007, according to a survey by Impress Group. Traditionally, women read manga in the privacy of their home.

Japanese manga artists commonly work without the protection of a copyright, but face few restrictions on their imagery. Local publishers have their own rating system, proving that censorship is a culturally relative term. What would be considered nearly pornographic in the U.S. is available to children in Japan.

``We'll probably continue as we've done so far,'' said Masakazu Kubo, executive producer at Shogakukan and the Tokyo Anime Center and the Japanese marketing guru behind Pokemon. ``We don't want to put restrictions on creativity. It's not in the Japanese culture to create rules for manga artists.''

Sex Guide

Some established artists want tougher regulations, particularly on pornography.

``We should make the law on copyrights more strict, especially with internet and mobile phones, and sexual manga with more controls,'' said Mimei Sakamoto, a ladies' comic manga artist, who broke into the business 20 years ago at the age of 22 with pornographic manga. She has since turned her series into how-to guides on sex and hygiene for young women. Her ``Textbook for Sex'' sold 80,000 copies and her ``Beauty Book'' sold more than 100,000.

``I had a difficult childhood,'' Sakamoto said. ``No money, parents quarrelling all the time, fat, not pretty, and often depressed. But I was able to change myself and so I draw manga stories to inspire young women who don't have confidence.''

Authors like Sakamoto are helping bring the cartoons to a bigger audience abroad. A three-book set on Roman history that took her seven years to draw will be translated into Italian. She also collaborated with New York-based lawyer and cartoonist Charles Danziger on a book in English called ``Harvey & Etsuko's Manga Guide to Japan'' which was released in November.

Manga Mix

``It's about an American cartoon character and a Japanese manga cat who share adventures in Japan,'' said Danziger. Glenn Kardy, head of Tokyo-based Japanime Co., the book's publisher, said, ``It's probably the first of its kind where a cartoon and manga character mix on the same pages.''

North American manga sales doubled to $200 million between 2003 and 2006 and probably rose 10 percent in 2007, according to Milton Griepp, chief executive officer of ICv2.com, which provides information on the industry. That's about half the value of the non-manga comic market, according to data from Diamond Comics, the world's biggest comic distributor.

Even so, manga has yet to reach its popularity in countries such as Italy and France, the top markets outside Japan, where sales are seven times larger than in the U.S.

To gain a bigger slice of the U.S. market, where most buyers are teenagers, manga publishers need to target adults. ``If Americans can understand the Matrix movies, then maybe they can enjoy science fiction, suspense or horror manga,'' said Shogakukan's Kubo.

``Fruits Basket'' heroine Tohuro gained popularity as an outsider, trying to fit in -- a rice ball in a basket of fruit. Japan's manga publishers are scouring the aisles of comikets to find authors who can help do the same for the genre overseas.

``It's better if manga is a common international culture,'' said Kubo, who is also a professor at the Beijing Film Academy. ``One manga artist can change the world.''

(Lucy Birmingham is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer on this story: Lucy Birmingham in Tokyo at lucybirmingham@gol.com.

Last Updated: January 22, 2008 10:06 EST