Anime, manga gaining popularity in U.S.

No longer gender specific
While much anime and manga content tends to be split by gender (into "shonen," Japanese for "boy," or "shojo," Japanese for "girl"), crossover is common, said Leanza, who would love to work in the industry as a designer or animator.

"There's a lot of stuff I read that's done by boys that's really cute, and really violent stuff done by women," she said, citing the expo's debut U.S. appearance of the Japanese collective CLAMP, a feisty all-female group of manga artists.

One wildly popular sect of manga starting to seep into the mainstream is "yuri" (girl-on-girl) and "yaoi" (boy-on-boy), soft-core and hard-core erotica geared toward mostly heterosexual males and females.

Bryan Musicar, whose company sells wooden paddles with either "yaoi" or "yuri" stenciled on them, said that 95 percent of people who buy "yaoi" books are women.

Though "yuri" books tend to depict buxom, thin-waisted amazons, similar to commercial comics and porn, "yaoi" goes against the grain of traditional rendering of men as buffly masculine.

"Men are emasculated in them, made to look less threatening," said Musicar, standing next to boxes of the comics, surrounded by clusters of young women. "It's huge here. We never thought American audiences would like it. It's in Japanese."

Male characters in "yaoi" look like girls, with large eyes and lithe, soft bodies. It's more about kissing and romance, said 18-year-old Lynn Teng.

"`Yaoi,' because it's for women, is not just about sex. There's more of a sappy plot," she said. "Because two guys in it are gay, it's kind of like a forbidden fruit sort of situation."

The changing demographics behind anime and manga also reflect a change in stylistic approach — mostly in the form of computer-generated graphics influenced by video games.

Unlike hand-drawn anime, CG features ultra realistic, fluid movements and seamless shadows and light, as in Romanov Higa's futuristic police thriller "Tank SWAT 01." Details, however, may become fuzzed out, and angles distorted.

"CG is becoming increasingly less expensive to do," and mass produce, said "Robotech'"s Oliver, who also directs anime in Los Angeles.

High-school graduate Christine Vu, 18, sat at a booth that sold manga markers and skillfully sketched a lean-lined portrait, reflecting as she did on how computers are replacing traditional tools in manga.

"I think it looks exactly the same," she said, shrugging her shoulders.

But what about anime and manga breaking cultural barriers? And moving past the fringes of nerd-dom?

"Personally, this is not the sort of thing you talked about in school, but now it's spreading, spreading, spreading," she said.

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