Stephenie Launches Twilight: The Graphic Novel

We've had Twilight: the bestselling books, Twilight: the box office smash, and now author Stephenie Meyer has revealed that the next step in the vampire love story's world domination will be Twilight: the graphic novel.

Illustrated by Korean artist Young Kim with input from Meyer on every panel, the first volume of Twilight: the Graphic Novel will be published on 16 March. Its publisher said the black and white title, with colour interspersed throughout, would combine "a rare fusion of Asian and western comic techniques".

The cover shows human teenager Bella Swan sprawled on the grass – an image from the dream that first inspired Meyer to write the novel. "In my dream, two people were having an intense conversation in a meadow in the woods. One of these people was just your average girl. The other person was fantastically beautiful, sparkly, and a vampire," she has said. "I stayed in bed, thinking about the dream. I was so intrigued by the nameless couple's story that I hated the idea of forgetting it; it was the kind of dream that makes you want to call your friend and bore her with a detailed description."

The American author said yesterday that Kim's graphic interpretation of her characters and settings was "very close" to what she was imagining while writing the series. "It takes me back to the days when I was writing Twilight," she told Entertainment Weekly. "It's been a while since I was really able to read Twilight; there is so much baggage attached to that book for me now. It seems like all I can see are the mistakes in the writing. Reading Young's version brought me back to the feeling I had when I was writing and it was just me and the characters again. I love that. I thank her for it."

Meyer's Twilight saga – Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn – has sold 85m copies worldwide. Its UK publisher Little, Brown said it had sold more than a million copies of each novel in the series in Britain alone. "I can't say that I am done with Twilight forever," Meyer told EW. "I'm not working on anything new Twilight-related now, and probably not for a while. But there's still a possibility that I'll go back and close some of the open doors."

Source: Guardian.co.uk

Release date: March 16, 2010!