Best selling shoujo of all time

Posted on May 25, 2006 by Brigid Alverson

ComiPress has a list of the best selling shoujo manga of all time. The top seller is Boys Over Flowers, and Nana is number 4. Pata has some good analysis. My own reaction was surprise at how many of the top-selling titles are licensed in English. Google any of the titles and you’ll find scanlations, though. Looking at this list makes me realize that, legal or not, scanlations really are filling a niche.

About Brigid Alverson

Brigid Alverson has been reading comics since she was 4. After earning an MFA in printmaking, she headed to New York to become a famous artist but ended up working with words instead of pictures, first as a book editor and later as a newspaper reporter. She started MangaBlog to keep track of her daughters’ reading habits and now covers manga, comics and graphic novels as a freelancer for School Library Journal, Publishers Weekly Comics Week, Comic Book Resources, the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, and Robot 6. She also edits the Good Comics for Kids blog at School Library Journal. Now settled in the outskirts of Boston, Brigid is married to a physicist and has two daughters.
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3 Responses to Best selling shoujo of all time

  1. David Welsh says:
    May 25, 2006 at 10:18 am

    Excellent point about scanlations. I think the best practitioners are the ones who use scanlation as a means of building demand for a title that has yet to be licensed. There’s an excellent article on scanlation over at TCJ from the Shoujo Manga issue: http://www.tcj.com/269/n_scan.html

  2. Lyle says:
    May 25, 2006 at 3:50 pm

    It’s interesting to see two titles high on per-volume sales are ones that I’ve long been curious about, but won’t likely see American shores. (Namely Candy Candy and Chibi Maruku-Chan.) I actually grew up watching the Candy Candy anime, though I didn’t understand any of it since it was subtitled and I couldn’t read. I loved the animation at that age, tho.

  3. A. says:
    May 25, 2006 at 11:09 pm

    The list is far from complete: Rayearth, Renai Catalogue, X, Tokyo Babylon, Sailor V, Koukou Debut and Sunadokei are some of the titles that were suppose to be there but aren’t.

    Some numbers are also incomplete. Like KARE, FIRST LOVE; Boku wa Imouto ni Koi wo Suru (7 volumes, 2.5 million but the real number is 10 volumes, 5 million) and the currently being published Life (Fruits Basket, too).

    The most popular shoujo titles currently being published in Japan are (the list is incomplete, of course, because the original source, the ComiPress article, is also incomplete): NANA (first), Fruits Basket (second), Ouran, Life, Bokura Ga Ita, Hachikuro (Honey * Clover) and Love*Com, oh, Atshinchi. Glass Mask, Yukan Club and Chibi Maruko-chan were never officialy ended.

    I wonder if some publisher will be interested in Bokura Ga Ita and Love*Com. They’re very popular with teen girls in Japan. They have very cute stories and Bokura Ga Ita is quite sad and the covers are so pretty *-*.

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