There's been quite a bit of buzz about the recent 72nd Comiket's record attendance, both in the blogosphere and in 'regular' media. Publishers Weekly has an excellent article introducing Comiket: the text does a very good (and objective) job of describing the creativity that drives the event, and also goes beyond doujinshi to talk about the video games and software sold there.

A short follow-up to Detective Conan introduces the Forein Ministry: the Japanese Ministry of Defense is using a moe character to explain the myriad complexities of Japan's defense situation. The first part of the series was a runaway success, apparently inspiring two more volumes. More on this if we can lay our hands on it.
(List of articles on this subject at del.icio.us)

We've considered the idea of having students create short reports in manga format; they could use online comic creation tools such as Read.Write.Think's Comic Creator or Comicjuice to explain (for example) historical events or social issues in manga form and in Japanese, enhancing their understanding of complicated issues and their command of related vocabulary (plus things like onomatopeia and spoken language that come with the manga format), and in the meantime creating a resource that could als