Yen Press to ‘re-imagine’ Gossip Girl as manga

Yen Press will publish a manga based on Cecily von Ziegesar’s bestselling Gossip Girl young-adult novels, to be serialized monthly in its Yen Plus anthology.

Gossip Girl: For Your Eyes Only, which debuts in the January issue, is described as “an original re-imagination” of the girls’ senior year at an elite private school on New York City’s Upper East Side. The manga is written and illustrated by HyeKyung Baek.

Yen Press and Gossip Girl publisher Little, Brown and Company are subsidiaries of Hachette Book Group USA. Yen Press recently published an adaptation of James Patterson’s Maximum Ride, and has announced manga versions of Darren Shan’s Cirque du Freak and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight.

Debuting in 2002, the 13 Gossip Girl novels have sold more than 5 million copies, and spawned a spin-off series as well as a cult-hit television show airing on The CW.