Indeed, combine the developing popularity of graphic novels with the growing market for Christian literature in general — and throw in the fact that the Bible is the best-selling book of all time — and you have a winning business model.

“If you went to Barnes and Noble, it used to be that there was one bay of graphic novels,” says Avery. “Now it’s huge. That’s what kids are buying, that’s what people are interested in. Zondervan specifically wanted to tap that market.”

It makes sense: Christians don’t want to do away with comics or books or music — they just want to make sure they’re created, and consumed, their way. (There are some real crazies who disagree with the concept of Christian rock entirely because pop music is evil, but they’re in the minority.)

These publishing houses are simply doing what megachurches, musicians, and Christian role models have done before: recreating popular culture in piety’s image. Rather than waste their time criticizing Harry Potter or railing against rock music, many believers are immersing themselves, and their children, in Christian alternatives.

Earlier this year, 71,414 people attended BattleCry events in San Francisco, Detroit, and Bristow, Virginia. The brainchild of Teen Mania Ministries, BattleCry is a Texas-based national organization that urges teenagers to reject popular culture in favor of a teen culture that embraces Jesus Christ. At those events, thousands of teens listened to Christian-rock music (from bands such as P.O.D. and Casting Crowns), participated in a stadium-scale worship service, and, at least in San Francisco, watched a performance by “hip-hop evangelists who use their fast feet to communicate God’s love,” according to the BattleCry Web site.

“Sometimes I think we, as adults, make teaching the Bible boring,” Russo says on the phone from his house in California. “It can be fun. I believe the spiritual truth is everywhere. It’s just a matter of being able to see it through a different lens and apply a biblical filter.” Russo knows that some in the Christian community will chastise him — “How dare you find spiritual truth in a Disney movie” — but he maintains that “I don’t think something is bad because it’s secular. There are a lot of things that we can appreciate in life that are not necessarily sacred.”

Even better, there are lots of secular, popular (and titillating) trends, such as manga or hot-young-celebrity musicals, that can be adapted to meet the tastes of a sacred audience. Z Graphic Novels, along with the Serenity series and other independent Christian comics, are the latest incarnation of this ability to adapt.

In fact, Christian publishers may be so eager to co-opt the manga genre that they are prematurely labeling themselves as such.

“The Zondervan [FAQ] misrepresents both the form and the content of manga,” Douglas Wolk, a well-known pop-culture critic and the author of Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean (and occasional Phoenix contributor), writes in an e-mail. “ ‘Manga’ is usually used to refer to comics in a specific range of visual styles developed in Japan, which isn’t true of a lot of Z’s stuff, and to say that ‘many manga series also tend to celebrate violence and sexual misbehavior’ is pretty misleading. (Some represent them, but representation and endorsement are not the same thing.)”

Even Butler, of COMIX35, questions Zondervan’s decision to market Z Graphic Novels as manga: “I’m a little surprised that they’re calling it that,” lest manga-loving young readers start to believe that “Christians are a little tone deaf about what [kids] are really looking for.”