Publisher’s Weekly Comics Week lists their top ten comics for January, which seems to encompass the holiday shopping season as well. Here they are:
1. Naruto, vol. 12
2. Fruits Basket, vol. 15
3. Negima, vol. 12
4. Bleach, vol. 16
5. Full Metal Alchemist, vol. 10
6. Naruto, vol. 11
7. The Best American Comics 2006
8. Halo Graphic Novel
9. Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, vol. 1
10. Death Note, vol. 8
And then, in sort of a desperate attempt to show that it’s not all about the manga, they highlight three books that didn’t make it into the top ten, Marvel Zombies, An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons and True stories, and Absolute Sandman, while ignoring whatever (probably manga) ranked number 12 and 14.
That was so odd! It’s like manga just gets a shrug of resignation while everything else but the Halo book (which is apparently sufficiently and self-evidently populist) needed to be explained.