Good! ^_^
Two things I want to adress here. First off, I'm not one of those people who despises everything American (which I think is a pretty stupid attitude for an American citizen to take, anyway...), so I don't want to sound like I'm slamming American comics just because of that. I'm going to slam them because, frankly, they just don't compare to most manga in my book. In fact, like all too many of the cartoons I've been seeing in the U.S. lately, they suck. They've got decent art, the plots are okay, but the writing has really failed to carry its end of the load. There are certainly exceptions, but for someone who loves words like friends and hates to see them massacred, the crap we force-feed to our kids these days is pretty disturbing. For anyone who thinks that manga are like that, stop it right now, and be prepared to think differently after you've read a few.
Secondly, a few notes for newbies. Manga and anime both come in quite a few different genres. The simplest divisions, and the ones I talk about the most, are shonen and shoujo; very simply, shonen is directed primarily at males and shoujo is directed at females. This does not mean that they are exclusively for one gender or the other! As you read or watch more, you'll notice that there is often a very fluid interpretation of gender, anyway. The first examples that come to my mind are the series Ranma 1/2, where the main character actually shifts gender periodically, and characters like Yue from Card Captor Sakura who has no true gender at all, although he is referred to as masculine the majority of the time. His nature is evenly balanced between male and female, and this is a fairly common character trait in both anime and manga.
Just as a side note, if you find something called shonen ai or shoujo ai, that means that it deals with same-sex relationships, but in a less sexual and more emotional way. Yaoi and yuri, on the other hand, are same-sex relationships with sexual content (usually; some fans haven't picked up on the distinction, and just call every same-sex relationship yaoi or yuri). There are shoujo ai and shonen ai relationships mentioned in this section, but since there isn't any yaoi or yuri content in the manga, you won't see it here. If that bothers anyone, just be careful looking up anime websites, is all I can say! I will try to mention it if there's any of that type of content in a particular series so you can avoid it if you want, but it's there just the same.