However you cut the figures, it's pretty obvious that manga publishers are beating the living crap out of Marvel in the booksellers' arena. The last BookScan figures I was able to get my hands on only covered sales for 2001/2002 and were limited to just a few representative titles, but they seemed to indicate that Tokyopop has been outselling Marvel by an average of three-or-four to one on a book-by-book basis. The fact that manga publishers are capable of such sales — especially to the lucrative young-adult market, which Marvel had seemingly written off long ago — has to have whet Bill Jemas' appetite for similar success. Clearly, however, Marvel's current output isn't capable of creating a similar draw amongst the non-DM reading public.

Faced with a market where they were stuck playing second fiddle, Marvel has no choice but to give innovation a shot, however hesitantly. To this end, the company recently announced two competing initiatives, each clearly intended to make the company more competitive on bookstore shelves.

The first was Tsunami, a line of comics meant to appeal directly to manga fans. Eleven titles have been announced to date, each taking a different tack in attempting to attract a non-Marvel readership. The "first wave" involves an exotic romance comic (Namor), a horror comic (Venom), a giant robot comic (Sentinel), a spy thriller (Mystique) and two teen-adventure comics (Human Torch, Runaways). This was followed by a "second wave" featuring a post-apocalyptic thriller (Wolverine: Snikt!), a Kirby-esque sci-fi comic (Inhumans), an "urban" superhero comic (The Crew) and another attempt to re-boot the X-Men continuity without all the extraneous back-story (New Mutants). Most recently announced is the "third wave", of which only the teenage Indiana Jones-style comic Quest has been revealed to date.

The manga influence varies wildly from title to title, but with a few exceptions each attempts to downplay the traditional-superhero aspects of existing characters, while still remaining within Marvel's stable of pre-existing trademarks. Some of the titles are drawn by authentic manga illustrators, some by American artists in the manga style, while still others bear no trace of Eastern comics influence whatsoever. The underlying idea here is to see just how much of the manga influence is required to sell softcovers to the Tokyopop crowd.

The other initiative is a relaunch of Epic Comics, the line first pioneered for Marvel by the late Archie Goodwin in the 1980s. A mix of creator-owned and company-owned comics, the original Epic offered considerably greater autonomy to its artists and resulted in such fondly-remembered titles as Moonshadow and Elektra: Assassin. This second incarnation seems to be a bit less friendly to the concept of creator ownership, but hasn't quite dismissed it altogether; while the first two attempts at articulating Epic's publishing principles met with what could most charitably be described as a mixed reaction, Marvel CEO Bill Jemas has been fairly consistent in his message, if somewhat vague in exactly what that message ultimately means. So near as anyone can tell, Epic will be where creators are given free reign in producing the sort of material the company doesn't usually touch — though the use of existing Marvel superheroes is encouraged. As for creator ownership, this is as close to a clear statement as the company's issued to date, from Jemas' Marville #7: