Last week, EW.com reported that the Twilight series’ will get a comic book adaptation, to be published by Yen Press (sample illustration above). Korean artist Young Kim will provide the art, and Twilight’s author, Stephenie Meyer, is supposedly reviewing the comic panel by panel.

You can gauge general reactions by reading the comments on Entertainment Weekly’s post; for manga/comics fan reactions, see the comments at MangaBlog &  ANN. To boil it down: you’ve got excited Twilight fans, some comics fans who realize how great this is for Yen Press & manga/comics as a whole, some people moaning about Twilight’s quality, its fans, & its role in the destruction of culture, and plenty of people bitching about the art based on 1 or 2 panels.

From a bookseller’s perspective, though, this is pure BRILLIANT.

No matter how you feel about the series’ artistic merits, Twilight sells. Women of all ages (not just teenagers) are addicted to it (Lucy Knisley’s comic take is dead on). They buy Twilight from bookstores rather than online or the library, because they need those books right now. They pay for hardcovers because they can’t wait for the paperbacks. They come to the register with a 40% off coupon, and upon discovering that said coupon has expired, will still buy the books at full price, because again, they need them. And they will smile at you while they do it. They scare me (kidding! I love you all).

More to the point, Twilight fans buy the books AND related merchandise. At my store & most others, Twilight books are not just shelved in the YA fiction. Instead, the series has its own table, stocked with all the books, plus the branded t-shirts, key chains, Edward lunch boxes & action figures, jewelry, and any other vampire series staff can stick there. We even sold Twilight perfume at one point (it was blood-red and overpriced).

That’s why Twilight manga is such wonderful news for Yen Press, and consequently for comics. Unlike other manga publishers, Yen Press still offers high quality products for relatively low prices. It’s also one of the few publishers still taking risks, like licensing manhwa & manhua, adopting orphaned licenses like Yotsuba&!, and putting out OEL titles (Nightschool, Maximum Ride, etc). Its presence is vital to the manga industry.

So if, as ICV2 noted, printing Twilight manga is the closest publishers can come to printing money, then even Twilight haters benefit. Money from Twilight manga will subsidize the Cat Paradises of the Yen Press catalog, and everybody wins.

Twilight manga is also good news for manga, specifically shojo manga, and more specifically Viz’s Vampire Knight. Vampire Knight is already described as the manga version of Twilight; the series is a bestseller, too, so most bookstores have it in stock, making it easy to up-sell.

Whether or not other series or non-manga comics will benefit is less certain, but I think we’ll see a nice ripple effect as women (and maybe a few guys) learn how effective the comics medium can be. It’s ironic that a series cited for manga’s declining sales in 2008 should become manga’s white knight apparent, but there it is.

Even for those who hate Twilight (I confess, I read some book excerpts, saw the movie, then promptly gave up), the manga might be decent. Or at least, not terrible. Twilight’s plot & audience always seemed very shojo (during the last Boys Over Flowers craze, it was described as the Twilight of Asia), and a comic adaptation lacks both descriptions of Edward (“porcelain god”) and bad acting. We shall see.

Read more: Melinda Beasi’s take at There It Is, Plain As Daylight; Johanna Carlson’s take at Comics Worth Reading; Deb Aoki’s take at manga.about.com; and an excellent roundtable on Twilight, SDCC, and gendered fandom snobbery at Robot 6.

Saint Young*Men (aka Seinto Oniisan) starts with a unique & sacrilegious premise: Jesus & Buddha, needing a break from heaven, end up sharing an apartment in present day Tokyo. Each chapter features the pair discovering some new modernity (manga, public baths & swimming pools, roller coasters, bargain shopping) with silly results.

For example: Jesus parts the waters of the swimming pool. Buddha weeps while reading Tezuka’s Buddha, which inspires him to write his own manga (no one gets it). Jesus tries to put aside his selfish desire to see a parade (Buddha wants to go souvenir shopping), but fails (and terrifies bystanders) when his stigmata spurt blood. At the public bath, a Yakuza gets the wrong impression when he asks Jesus who wounded him, and Jesus cheerfully answers “The government.” You know, typical stuff.

Jesus has admirers at the konbini (source).

Saint Young*Men succeeds largely because manga-ka Hikaru Nakamura pushed aside any urges she had for religious commentary or criticism, and went straight for comedy. That decision created a minor miracle: a religious comedy that manages to be funny without ridiculing either faiths or their followers. Instead of irony, Saint Young*Men offers a “grandpa joke” vibe, emphasizing puns and nudge-nudge in-jokes (like Jesus’ horror at being offered a dead fish). It’s such a light touch, in fact, that some Catholic & Protestant churches in Japan have distributed the comic.

Buddha & Jesus debate if they can get the senior discount at an amusement park.

So when English language write-ups of Saint Young*Men note the unlikelihood of a licensed American version, I don’t see why. We have sensitive believers here, but manga readers rarely fall into that group. Also, compared to pop phenom South Park, whose pilot featured Jesus & Santa in a death brawl over Christmas, Saint Young*Men seems positively wholesome. Considering the series’ popularity and critical acclaim in Japan, and the amount of blogger buzz it has already generated (sans an anime series or long print run), I’d be more surprised if someone doesn’t snatch up the license.

You can read more about Saint Young*Men at MangaCast, watashi to tokyo, kyuuketsukirui, & Otaku Champloo. The first five chapters are available in English at Megchan’s Scanlations (the source for the excerpts).

Jesus & Buddha try a roller coaster.

Like, oh, everyone, I’m thrilled that Del Rey licensed Moyasimon: Tales of Agriculture. Winner of the Kodansha Best General Manga award for 2008, the manga also spawned a brilliant anime series, available piecemeal on YouTube. Most American fans familiar with the series discovered it through the 12 episode anime (which covers the first four tankoubon).

Image/manga by Masayuki Ishikawa.

Moyasimon centers on Tadayasu Sawaki, an agricultural university freshman who can see and talk with bacteria. To him, however, the bacteria resemble a cross between microbe plushies and Princess Mononoke‘s tree sprites. They’re adorable, and like the manga itself, marry the technical with the irreverent.

It’s that marriage, between scientific curiosity and mischief, that distinguishes Moyasimon from other seinen or edu-manga series. It’s a peculiarly childlike approach, and therefore designed to appeal to anyone with an inner child, preferably one seeking the gross, bizarre, and extraordinary.

In the first chapter, for example, we see human-size radishes and unearth a dead seal. We watch Sawaki’s professor suck a sea bird’s fermented guts out of its rear (a delicacy known as kiviak). Later story lines include various cutely rendered infections, all conveyed through Masayuki Ishikawa’s distinctive art. The characters are first-rate, too: unusual, flawed, and funny. UPDATE: Kate Dacey has an excellent full review here.

Del Rey will the release the first English volume November 24th. For more info, check out these related posts at Riuva, Japanese Book Reviews & Kids Web Japan.