When East meets West: Newsarama's "Your Manga Minute" looks at some recent results -- both good and bad -- of manga's influence on Western comics:

"Last year’s turmoil surrounding Marvel’s Tsunami titles would seem to indicate this. Marvel launched a bevy of new books, supposedly influenced by manga and employing many of the familiar visual cues. The characters were largely teens and/or outsider characters from other popular series. The intent was to draw teens into buying these titles in much the same way that they’re making Chobits disappear from the mall. With a tide of cancellations, changes in format, and general fan confusion even before the first 'manga-sized' trades come out, Tsunami sort of washed up.

"Still, with all the perceived elements in place, why didn’t it take off? In a somewhat familiar analogy, Shiver in the Dark creator Stuart Sayger, who has also worked as a retailer, notes, 'To me, Marvel’s product smacked of major record labels trying to capitalize on the punk rock craze of 20 years ago. It was right in front of them, they looked at it and studied it and tried to replicate it, but they never understood it.'"