It probably doesn’t sound like a winning combo to fuse the Bible with manga, that genre of typically violent and eroticized Japanese anime now overtaking Barnes and Noble bookshelves like kudzu. But as publisher Doubleday is finding out with The Manga Bible: From Genesis to Revelation — currently Amazon’s best-selling religious text (over The Message translation and Deepak Chopra) and manga book — there’s a reason manga’s annual sales now top $300 million in the United States.

Forays into manga last year by Tyndale House and Zondervan were successful, though they didn’t ripple much beyond the Christian book-buying sphere. Next, a nonprofit organized for the “distribution of biblically based manga materials,” recently released the first in a series of five Bible-based graphic novels, The Manga Messiah.

But The Manga Bible, whose noir-ish, edgy black-and-white Jesus is as much samurai as savior, may enter the market at the right moment (after a trebling of sales in four years) with the right publisher (Doubleday) to hit wide acclaim. Praise of the 224-pager — chockablock with only the most action-packed parts of the Old Testament, the Gospels and several of Paul’s epistles — has sprouted up in places like this New York Daily News column.

The book’s illustrator Ajinbayo Akinsiku, a Nigerian Londoner who goes by the nom de plume Siku and hopes to become an Anglican priest, told The New York Times on Sunday he wants to give manga obsessives worldwide a more accessible Jesus, namely “a samurai stranger who’s come to town, in silhouette.” “The heroes,” the Times story says, “look and sound like skateboarders in Bedouin gear.” Noah gets “tripped up counting the animals in the Ark: ‘That’s 11,344 animals? Arggh! I’ve lost count again. I’m going to have to start from scratch!’” Figures like Goliath resemble Ringwraiths from “The Lord of the Rings.” The lead-up to Abel’s doom at the hands of Cain proceeds thus: “Whassup, bro? I’ve got something I wanna show you in my farm.” “Sounds interesting . . . what is it?” “Your death, you smug %@#$!”

Manga sales are up partly thanks to popular genre tributes from places as varied as Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” films and the edgy avatars used by the “virtual” hip hop/rock band Gorillaz. Christian authors, including WORLD’s Marvin Olasky, have predicted a bright future for graphic novels among young readers, and The Manga Bible appears to bear this out. Critics worry about putting the Bible into a genre known for hyper-sexualization and overt violence, but manga’s proponents, like Next, argue it isn’t just a fad and that it has worldwide youth appeal. The comics in Japan currently outsell newspapers and magazines, gobbling up 40 percent of the print market. In the United States, manga has become the fastest-growing category of books.