§ It is time for my yearly story on how the yearly Dog Man book by Dav Pilkey is the best selling book in the country this week. Not comic, not kid’s book, just book, all as counted by Bookscan and published in Publishers Weekly. Dog Man: Big Jim Believes: A Graphic Novel (Dog Man #14): From the Creator of Captain Underpants sold 210,049 copies in its first week out. He don’t miss!
Comic fared well in this week’s chart! Comics adjacent Wimpy Kid #20 was #2 on the list after debuting at #1 last week, with 412,567 copies sold to date. The title is Partypooper: a Side-Splitting Birthday Disaster from the #1 International Bestselling Diary of a Wimpy Kid Series (Book 20) and what a great title. Without even reading this book, I think I can imagine what happens in it, but reading the Wikipedia synopsis, no one actually poops themselves at a party. Proving that Jeff Kinney is full of surprises which is why he is a million selling author. Besides, that would be more tragic than funny.
A third graphic novel is also on the top ten, at #10, Darkstalker: A Graphic Novel (Wings of Fire: Legends Graphic Novel) by Tui Sutherland and Jake Parker. This one debuted at number four last week and has sold 63,188 copies to date.
Over on the kid’s fiction best seller list, Dog Man #13, Dog Man: Big Jim Begins is still on the list at #6 with a total of 613,108 copies sold to date this year. That’s on top of 548,414 copies sold in 2024, the year it debuted. Dav Pilkey is proof kids like to read books!
Other graphic novels charting on the children’s list:
#7 – Warriors Graphic Novel: The Prophecies Begin #3: 87,195 copies sold in 2025
#12 – Jessi Ramsey, Pet-Sitter: A Graphic Novel (the Baby-Sitters Club #18): 45,585 copies sold in 2025
#18 – Warriors Graphic Novel: The Prophecies Begin #2: 160,140 sold in 2025
All in all, solid numbers for hugely successful franchises.
§ Comics are here to stay, but they still get snubs. I noted two years ago that Good Reads had “quietly” removed Graphic Novels as a category in their annual Choice Awards, which are voted on readers. Children’s & Middle Grade, and Poetry also got dumped, but they added Romantasy, while retaining both Romance AND Fantasy!
At the time Publishers Weekly wrote that the removal did “spark some outcry“.
Goodreads told PW in a statement, “Our goal is to have the Goodreads Choice Awards reflect the books that are most popular with our members, based on the millions of books added, rated, and reviewed on Goodreads each year. As part of this, we have made adjustments to our categories over time, and, this year, we will not include Children’s & Middle Grade, Poetry, and Graphic Novels as separate categories.
Separately, reflecting the amount of reader interest we’re seeing in Romantasy on Goodreads this year, we are including this as a new category in 2023. We will continue to have separate Romance and Fantasy categories.
Overall, our community is incredibly diverse in the breadth of their reading, with fans across hundreds of genres and sub-genres.”
The outcry did not spark enough shame to return the category, and for 2025, the awards have also lost the Humor category because we now live in a grim wasteland where smiling is not allowed. We still have the Romantasy, Fantasy, Romance troika however!
The remaining categories do reflect the mostly young and female audience that votes in this kind of thing – an audience that also reads quite a few graphic novels. As I noted two years ago, the graphic novel category wasn’t the biggest vote getter but it wasn’t the worst, so a lack of interest isn’t why the category was nuked…and remains nuked.
I took a quick look at the nominees and didn’t see any comics. So 2025 was a wash.
§ It was also a wash for comics in the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025 list. I wouldn’t say there is ALWAYS a graphic novel on this list, but I wouldn’t say it was super rare either. But nothing this time out, unless you count Dan Nadel’s biography Crumb. Which we can totally count! One of us!
Was it really a year when there was no notable literary comic that crossed over to the “mainstream”? It’s easy to see why remarkable books like Ducks and Feeding Ghosts cross over, but despite all the truly excellent books that come out in 2025, none of them made a huge mark in the traditional publishing world.
The Times does continue to cover graphic novels though, most recently in Sam Thielman’s examination of Gilbert Hernandez’s latest, LOVERS AND HATERS, work for which the word “huge” is very appropriate.
Let’s put this up front, as it were: The cartoonist Gilbert Hernandez, whose work spans more than 40 years of fearless invention, draws a lot of very large breasts.
He seems delighted by them. His heroines — originally Luba, the beautiful sheriff of a Latin American town called Palomar, and now Luba’s half sister Fritz — are extravagantly endowed, and the increasing economy of Hernandez’s cartooning draws attention to this fact: As the years go by, more and more space is devoted to the depiction of larger and larger breasts using fewer and fewer lines.
Comics: there is something for everyone, sometimes even two things.
BTW, don’t let Gilbert’s boob-obsession fool you – the man can still draw a hell of a comics page, with or without ’em.
