While Hollywood has been going nuts making movies out of comics and graphic novels, manga has been quietly and politely been sitting over to the side all this time, waiting for someone to notice its charms. According to Variety, some have taken notice, and manga publisher Tokyopop looks to be sitting pretty right now.

This year the company founded Tokyopop Pictures and Tokyopop Digital in order to move into those respective fields. They have a decade's worth of manga under their arms, plenty of original properties, and countless readers. This should put them in a prime position to make manga films the next big thing. 

"My dream had always been to bridge Japan and Asia to Hollywood and the West -- and Tokyopop being a platform for that bridge," says Stu Levy, the company's founder, CEO and creative chief. "Now that we have this platform, we are able to move into development ... work with creators in Asia as well as locally and try to experiment with this sort of storytelling from the ground up."

Tokyopop signed on with the William Morris Agency recently to make connections, and the agency's comicbook and graphic novel rep Scott Agostoni says that there has been some interest in Tokyopop's properties. "I've been moderately surprised at the appeal," he says. "I thought it would be a more hardcore selling process."

So far it looks like the company has several projects in the works, including an animated feature called I Luv Halloween, a live-action Van Von Hunter, and an anime version of Princess Ai, which will be shown in promo form at the New York Anime Festival in December.