Top sellers of 2006

Posted on January 11, 2007 by Brigid Alverson

Cold Cut lists the top 300 comic books of 2006. To save you some time, Simon Jones has extracted the manga. (Link is, as always, NSFW.) It looks like Viz had a pretty good year, but IIRC, a lot of publishers aren’t represented on the list. Hard to imagine Tokyopop wouldn’t be in there somewhere. And it’s interesting (and no doubt gratifying to Simon, even though Icarus only got one spot on the list) that the top-ranking adult comic did better than the top-ranking manga. Yes, it’s true: Ice Queens did better than Naruto.

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.
This entry was posted in Mangablog. Bookmark the permalink.

4 Responses to Top sellers of 2006

  1. Andre says:
    January 11, 2007 at 10:05 pm

    I don’t think they distribute TokyoPop [Diamond is their only comic store distro, I think], hence VIZ’s dominance

  2. Brigid says:
    January 11, 2007 at 10:26 pm

    Yeah, that’s what I figured. I meant to say “a lot of publishers aren’t represented by Cold Cut.” Duh.

  3. Matthew High says:
    January 13, 2007 at 12:44 am

    For about three years, Tokyopop was exclusive through Diamond Distribution. But beginning this past summer, they signed a bookstore distribution deal with HarperCollins, and since then Cold Cut has been picking up a few new Tokyopop books as time progresses. Starting with the higher-selling and most-requested titles (such as Kingdom Hearts, Fruits Basket, Kare Kano), and slowly working down the list. But with many thousands of books in print at this point, it will be a long, long while before we could be considered “well stocked” on Tokyopop. Other manga publishers carried by Cold Cut include Dr. Master, CPM, Del Rey and (just recently) Broccoli. Most of the rest of the manga publishers out there (including Dark Horse, CMX, DMP) are exclusive to Diamond.

    One thing to note is that manga in general is underperforming through Cold Cut these days, because most of the manga carried by Cold Cut is purchased through book distribution channels instead of directly from the publisher. This means an extra middleman, which means a lower discount. Most of the manga we sell are to retailers that don’t have a Diamond account, or are doing it for the convenience (i.e. they’re ordering from Cold Cut for other books anyway), or at the various times when Diamond/B&T/whoever happens to be out of stock.

    Also an explanation as to why the yaoi/bl comics rank so high on the charts — because these types of books are less available through other outlets. A comics retailer can buy Naruto or Rurouni Kenshin through several channels, and the popular manga are perpetually in stock at Diamond. But stuff like Be Beautiful is a bit harder to find, and frequently we find ourselves the only source for certain books at times. Hence, the higher relative sales.

    – Matthew (Radio Comix and Cold Cut guy)

  4. Brigid says:
    January 13, 2007 at 8:30 am

    Wow! That was interesting, Matthew! Thanks for the insight.

    For those of us not in the biz, distribution is kind of a black box, and we tend to just accept the numbers uncritically. This is a good reminder that there are lots of gears and levers behind the charts.

Comments are closed.