Now the Japanese comic book genre 'manga' is being given another air of literary respectability with the respected publishing giant Random House . . . whose roster includes writers such as Ian McEwan, Ruth Rendell and David Starkey . . . to launch its own range of dozens of titles.

Under the new imprint Tanoshimi, the company will publish a series of titles from summer onwards, with 45 books due on Irish shelves by the end of the year, including bestselling series such as xxxHOLiC and Tsubasa.

Although dismissed as comics by some critics, the genre already has something of a following among the literati. The Booker Prizenominated author of Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell, has expressed his admiration for manga, and double Booker winner Peter Carey is another fan.

Mitchell told the Sunday Tribune: "The best manga . . . and its western counterparts, the graphic novel or comic book . . .

is high art. Yes, there is a lot of schlock in the genre, but there is in all art forms. The finest manga constitutes a film, drawn in a sequence of crucially-placed stills, that would be impossible ever to shoot.

It can nourish the intellect, stun the eye, play the subtlest games with perception and emotion, and seduce the reader without mercy."

Meaning 'random (or whimsical) pictures', the manga works are a way of life in Japan, taking in anything from puppy love to violence and pornography. Even in translation, the manga titles read from right to left and from back to front as they would in Japanese.

At specialist booksellers like Forbidden Planet there are huge banks of manga titles, and even mainstream shops such as Waterstones carry around 200 titles, with the firm reporting a 58% sales increase, which is projected to grow even higher this year.

Waterstones manga buyer Joe Browes said: "We are only on the foothills of the manga Everest and we can expect this craze to continue to grow, for the next few years at least."

Richard Cable, managing director of the Random House division which will publish the manga titles, said: "It's not a passive experience . . . it takes as much concentration to read graphic novels as it does where you just have words on the page. It's a different experience and one that appeals to a younger generation who are used to having images in front of them all the time."

In his travel memoir Wrong About Japan, Peter Carey spoke glowingly of the books and said he became "delighted by artists I never would have discovered if not for my preternaturally tall, crew-cut son".