They more closely resemble the constantly updating startups of Silicon Valley. Their ethos is to get the product out to the right people--whether it's on a DVD or over a mobile phone or downloadable--and see what happens. If it succeeds, milk it; if not, try something different. And if the fans are into file sharing (which they are), keep the lawyers leashed and find a way to make piracy work for you. "Companies in this space live and die by their ability not only to produce quality product but to retain street cred with the audience," says Mike Kiley, editor-in-chief and co-founder of Tokyopop, which dominates manga in the U.S. "We're always adopting new technology, and we get in front of 250,000 to a half-million fans at trade shows every year all over the country. It's retail politics. It's working the crowd." In Baltimore last summer, some 22,000 anime fans--many dressed up as their favorite characters--paid up to $55 each to attend the Otakon anime convention. By the second day of the three-day event, Baltimore's convention center had sold out and the scalpers started offering up tickets. Another 33,000 showed up at the Anime Expo in Anaheim...

Responding to the interest, CosmoGirl last summer began running its own manga strip on the back page of every issue. "We started hearing girls say their favorite books and favorite things to read were manga," says Ann Shoket, the magazine's executive editor. "The girls have drawn their own manga for us. Not just one weird girl--a lot of girls.".."

This is open-source TV programming. "Fansubbers," as they're called, can spend more than a dozen hours collectively just to get a half-hour show ready for English speakers. The process is as orderly as an ant farm, with each fansubber having a specialized task. TV watchers in Japan start the process by recording an anime show and uploading it to the Net, typically a few hours after it airs. Bilingual fans around the world download the show and start writing out translations in text documents, which they post online or e-mail around. The first drafts have all kinds of mistakes--words are translated too literally or just wrong--and other translators make refinements. At this stage, self-appointed editors ask questions and make changes, then fan typesetters plug in the subtitles as well as the translations for words that pop up on signs or characters' T-shirts. Finally someone somewhere encodes the completed version--and here there's competition to see who can encode it with the fewest glitches and the best filters--and runs it through BitTorrent, a piece of software that allows large files to be downloaded quickly. Typically the fansubbers organize themselves in teams to make the process move more smoothly. All this is done for free.