Top selling manga for January (direct market)

Posted on February 19, 2008 by Brigid Alverson

ICv2 has posted Diamond’s sales figures for January, and it looks like it was a good month for graphic novels, with sales up 18 percent. (As always, remember that these are sales in the direct market, i.e. local comics shops). They also list the top 100 graphic novels, and since we only care about manga around here, here are the top selling manga (the rank on the overall GN chart is in parentheses, sales for this month are after the title).

1. (12) Berserk, vol. 21 (4,026)
2. (27) Negima, vol. 16 (3,042)
3. (48) Trigun Maximum, vol. 12 (2,550)
4. (51) Oh My Goddess, vol. 28 (2,274)
5. (57) InuYasha, vol. 32 (2,006)
6. (80) Samurai Deeper Kyo, vol. 26 (1,573)
7. (85) My Hime, vol. 5 (1,446)
8. (91) Nana, vol. 8 (1,357)
9. (94) Shaman King, vol. 18 (1,320)
10. (95) Death Jr., vol. 1 (1,312)
11. (99) He Is My Master, vol. 3 (1,282)

This is a much shorter list than usual—while manga don’t necessarily make it into the top ten, the bottom half of the list is generally pretty manga-rich. Perhaps we’re seeing the after-effects of the Naruto wave—no one has any allowance left. With the exception of InuYasha and Nana, the titles on this list seem to skew older and more male than usual, even for the DM. Or maybe people are just buying their manga elsewhere.

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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One Response to Top selling manga for January (direct market)

  1. Hige says:
    February 19, 2008 at 6:38 pm

    I wonder if this list is reflective of the area of the market it takes its numbers from. The direct market seems more like the domain of superhero comics and such – like you say, there’s definitely a few titles in there that seem more appealing to that kind of readership.

    But then, there’s titles like Nana and My Hime that challenge that. The lack of Naruto is surprising, nonetheless.

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