This summer, Yen Press is releasing not one but four new series featuring four-panel manga, which seems like a big leap into a Japanese comics format that is relatively rare in the U.S. Yen Press co-director Kurt Hassler had a simple explanation publishing the format: He likes them.

“Every time we are in Tokyo, we spend hours and hours in the bookstores,” Hassler said. “We came across this line from [Japanese publisher] Houbunsha and we fell in love with the stuff. It’s a very diverse range of materials being done in these formats. It’s something people are unfamiliar with, but it think it will be easily embraced.”

Four-panel manga, or yon-koma, look like an American newspaper cartoon strip that runs vertically instead of horizontally, but the humor and structure are quite different. The most familiar title in the U.S. is ADV’s Azumanga Daioh, but four-panel gag strips often pop up as the “omake,” or extras, that manga artists include in their books.

Yen’s new titles are Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro, S.S. Astro, Sunshine Sketch, and Suzunari! Besides their common format, all share a humorous outlook and a cute art style that focuses on big-eyed, round-faced young girls. All four are part of Houbunsha’s Manga Time Kirara line of four-panel manga anthologies.

Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro, the first volume of which was released in May, is the story of a young girl who carries a coffin on her back and travels with a smart-alec bat for a sidekick. “They are on a journey, but you are not given many details in the first book about what they are looking for,” Hassler said. “It gives it an enigmatic quality, and the four-panel pacing lends itself to that.” Each four-panel strip in this book is more like a beat in the story than a joke; most of them aren’t gags. A few pages use a slightly different format to break up the book a bit. With black borders, copious color pages, and a 6 x 8 trim size, the book has a deluxe feel and, Hassler said, has a similar look to the Japanese original.

Launched in June, Sunshine Sketch is a comedy about art-school students and has been made into an anime titled Hidamari Sketch.Suzunari! was released in July and it is the story of a teenager whose life is thrown into confusion by the sudden appearance of a cat-eared look-alike. S.S. Astro, out this month, is another high school comedy, this one focusing on teachers in their off-duty moments.

Hassler thinks the new line will appeal to a broad spectrum of manga fans. “Something like Kuro I think is very much accessible to younger readers,” he said. “Sunshine Sketch can be appealing to younger readers, but I think there is something there for older readers as well.” Both those titles are rated for teens, while Suzunari! and S.S. Astro, which feature more mature content, are rated for older teens.

While the four-panel format has a familiar feel, there are a few challenges for new readers. The humor is often more subtle than in American gag strips, the punch line sometimes occurs in the third panel rather than the fourth, and when the strips are gathered into books, the format may be confusing until the reader adjusts to reading vertically rather than horizontally.

Hassler said he didn’t think readers need to be guided through the pages, however. “I honestly don’t feel like the manga fans are going to have a lot of difficulty getting into the pacing,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to clutter up the page with something like ‘Read this way.’”

Yon-koma manga has its roots in American newspaper strips, such as Mutt and Jeff, which were popular in Japan in the early 20th century. Japanese artists soon began producing homegrown versions; one of the most popular in its day was Yutaka Aso’s Nonki Na Tosen (Easy-Going Daddy), first published in 1924, which borrowed the characters and style of Bringing Up Father but refashioned them with a Japanese sensibility.

Osamu Tezuka, the father of modern manga, began his career in 1946 by drawing Maachan no Nikkichou, (Ma-chan’s Diary), a four-panel newspaper strip about a cheeky boy living in American-occupied Japan. Ma-chan only lasted for 73 episodes, but another postwar yon-koma became one of the most popular comics ever: Machiko Hasegawa’s The Wonderful World of Sazae-San, which showed a cheery, somewhat ditzy, housewife named Sazae coping with rationing and other challenges of postwar life. Sazae-san debuted in 1946 and ran until 1974 in the Asahi newspaper. Collected volumes of the strips continue to sell in Japan, and Kodansha has published 12 volumes in English as well. Today, four-panel manga continue to be a staple of Japanese newspapers and magazines, and the format is also popular among creators of fan-made comics, or doujinshi.