Home Retailing & Marketing Tilting at Windmills #297: Bookscan 2023 – comics sales sag but Scholastic...

Tilting at Windmills #297: Bookscan 2023 – comics sales sag but Scholastic was still a powerhouse

Our annual blockbuster

04/11/2024 5:30 pm

2023 Manga

Here’s a year-to-year comparison chart for the Top 750:

Year	# of placing titles	Unit sales	Calculated Retail Value
2003	447	3,361,966	$34,368,409
2004	518	4,603,558	$45,069,684
2005	594	5,691,425	$53,922,514
2006	575	6,705,624	$61,097,050
2007	575	6,837,355	$61,927,238
2008	514	5,624,101	$53,033,579
2009	451	4,414,705	$41,068,604
2010	436	3,117,019	$30,212,561
2011	392	2,627,570	$27,017,081
2012	367	1,908,186	$21,324,368
2013	315	1,665,487	$21,256,777
2014	271	1,748,185	$22,601,720
2015*	279	2,033,534	$26,191,474
2016*	311	2,629,366	$35,915,488
2017	284	2,427,380	$35,433,489
2018	299	2,641,158	$35,955,537
2019	332	3,539,031	$49,900,429
2020	358	5,419,328	$77,703,520
2021	495	15,945,960	$218,310,280
2022	458	16,905,898	$246,052,418
2023	398	10,219,816	$192,446,367

Sales and calculated dollars are solidly down for the category in 2023, but so are the number of placing books. Despite this correction, this is still the third best year for Manga in twenty-one years of tracking! Be clear, however, that calculated dollars is a pretty fictional measurement because no one anywhere knows how much any individual book is actually selling for. While it started over the pandemic, my experience as a book buyer says that manga was especially hampered by availability of product: especially the most-popular titles. At one point this was called the “North American Manga Shortage”, and also stemmed from massive paper shortages – but by 2023 this feels more like a “new normal” as it stayed continually frustrating to try and keep first volumes in stock.

As is typical with Manga, this is driven by the near-exclusive domination of series in the manga world – often when there’s not a strong anime driving sales, manga tankobon series start to perform more like periodicals than books (albeit over a wider horizon); rather than generally building a strong core backlist that sells forever, year-in-and-year out, manga tends instead to ebb and flow with culture and fashion (and especially what anime is airing currently) – Manga sales are broadly not about a specific graphic novel selling, they’re mostly about the series.

While there are 398 individual volumes of Manga placing in the Top 750 this year, those only represent 107 distinct properties. For example, the best-selling Manga this year is Demon Slayer: Kimetsu – there are a big twenty-seven different volumes of this series (or spinoffs) that place in the Top 750. The number two series, Chainsaw Man, has thirteen different editions chart. Spy X Family is #3 and has all ten volumes chart, #4 is Jujutsu Kaisen with 23 books, while number five is Berserk, with 18 entries. Just these five series are almost 25% of the volumes placing in the Top 750.

Manga, as a category, has a “long tail”, where we’re looking at all sales for the year, and not just within the Top 750 best-sellers:

Year	# of listed items	Percent Change	Total Unit Sold	Percent Change	Calculated Retail Value	Percent Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	6231	——	11,323,487	——	$108,770,537	—–	1,817	$17,456
2008	7842	20.54%	10,173,091	-11.31%	$100,800,283	-7.91%	1,297	$12,854
2009	8756	11.66%	8,148,490	-19.90%	$81,770,442	-18.78%	931	$9,339
2010	8764	——	6,239,725	-23.42%	$67,092,668	-17.95%	712	$7,655
2011	8991	2.59%	5,690,327	-8.80%	$62,810,728	-6.38%	633	$6,986
2012	6332	-29.57%	3,510,057	-38.32%	$40,943,613	-34.81%	554	$6,466
2013	7024	10.93%	3,516,208	0.01%	$44,651,823	9.06%	501	$6,357
2014	7452	6.09%	3,914,385	11.32%	$51,557,925	15.47%	525	$6,919
2015*	4412	-40.79%	4,580,434	17.02%	$62,253,624	20.75%	1,038	$14,110
2016*	4968	12.60%	5,821,892	27.10%	$81,314,479	30.62%	1,172	$16,368
2017	10,248	106.8%	5,865,412	0.75%	$85,581,224	5.25%	572	$8,351
2018	10,839	5.77%	6,100,260	4.00%	$87,421,299	2.15%	563	$8,065
2019	9928	-8.40%	7,461,077	22.31%	$110,577,066	26.49%	752	$11,138
2020	12,423	25.13%	10,766,492	44.30%	$161,611,294	46.15%	867	$13,009
2021	13,006	4.69%	27,717,479	157.44%	$396,260,629	145.19%	2,131	$30,468
2022	14,595	12.22%	29,593,184	6.77%	$438,873,124	10.75%	2,028	$30,070
2023	14,869	1.88%	21,847,240	-26.17%	$381,166,290	-13.15%	1,469	$25,637

Title count slowed down dramatically, with only 1.88% more titles being available, but unit sales dropped considerably now that we’re “post-pandemic”, losing more than a quarter of volume in 2023 – but sales would have to cut in half to get back to where things were in 2020, so Manga is still doing fine, thanks! And calculated dollars (which is pretty much fiction), are down by much less, showing the strength of more expensive editions, including hardcovers and “3-in-1” editions.

When you start breaking down the manga portion of the chart by publisher, there’s really not any contest at all: there’s a two-ton gorilla, and then a bunch of smaller houses struggling in their shadow. This chart represents all 14,869 books that are “manga” in Circana BookScan in 2023, by quantity sold, and represents the entire “long tail” of the charts:

Viz is unquestionably the dominant player, selling 57% of all manga sold in 2023. This is down a smidge from 60% the previous year

If we look solely within the Top 750, the picture is very similar: The #1 publisher is Viz who takes 253 of the 398 manga spots in the Top 750, keeping them as the overwhelmingly dominant player with almost two thirds of the placing titles! Within the Top 750, Viz (and their Yaoi sub-imprint of Sublime) charted about 7.2 million pieces, for more than $125 million in calculated retail dollars.

Viz controls the manga charts as they have for a very long time now. It is nearly impossible to envision anyone really challenging them substantially for that role because they are more than four times the size than their nearest competitors in the segment.

Viz’s #1 Best-seller is Demon-Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba, and v1 is the year’s best-selling manga with just over 148k sold., Additionally, all 23 released volumes make the Top 750, as well as the Boxed Set of those 23, and three spin-off series – together, those 27 volumes sell 928k copies.

Viz’s #2 selling book in the Top 750 is Chainsaw Man – v1 is the #2 book, with 140k sold, two additional volumes in the Top Ten (v12 is #6 with 99k sold, and v2 at #10 with 86k sold), and all thirteen released volumes (and a boxed set) are in the Top 750, with combined sales of nearly 933k.

Spy X Family is Viz’s #3 book on 2023’s charts, with three volumes placing in their top ten (v1 shifts 129k, while v9 is #7 with 94k, and v2 is #9 with 87k sold). As with the previous, all eleven books place with the Top 750, for a combined 676k sold.

Jujutsu Kaisen comes in at #4 for Viz with v1 selling 128k, and v0 just under it at #5 and 102k sold. Twenty-two volumes of this series (and a boxed set) all make the top 750, with just a bit over a million copies sold in total.

The last unique title placing in Viz’s Top Ten, at #8 is My Hero Academia with v1 shifting 94k copies. “Only” 19 of the total volumes place within the Top 750 in 2023 (v1-7, v28-36, a box set of 1-20, and v1 and v3 of “Team Up Missions”) for 555k sold in the Top 750.

MHA is a great example of “The Hammock Principle.” Briefly stated, this is books in a series that generally sell in a sales pattern that looks like a hammock if you chart it out: the first few volumes and the last few volumes sell the best, with the ends running down into the middle volumes which have the lowest sales, like the sagging part of a hammock. The problem with this is both that stores don’t have infinite rack space, as well as publishers that need a certain volume and velocity to keep things in print, so that sagging middle becomes unsustainable for most series over time, and many stores start to only carry the first and last few volumes. In the case of MHA, v1 sold 93k, while v33 (the highest volume with nearly the full 2023 on sale) sold nearly 76k, while v18 represents the bottom of the “hammock” with just a handful over 4k sold. That’s a pretty massive gap in sales that is running down the hammock, and shows just how hard it is for retail stores to carry every volume in a series so wide.

Other strong series for Viz outside of their Top Ten include One Piece, where v103 (!!) sells an impressive 71k while the 3-in-1 omnibus v1 does almost 55k, Kaiju No. 8 where v5 moves 52k copies, and Spider-Man: Fake Red sells a bit over 50k. That one is more impressive when you consider the best selling comic Marvel itself can sell is just 12k copies of Spider-Punk – less than a quarter of Viz’s manga. There will be more on this topic a few pages down when we get to the ”western” comics! Finally, though it misses 50k by just six copies sold, I think it is worth mentioning Junji Ito’s Uzumaki because it was so close to that threshold. All-in-all Viz sells a big 37 individual books over 50k copies. That’s better than virtually everyone.

For Viz’s Yaoi imprint, Sublime, the best-seller is 17k copies of v7 of Given, followed fairly closely 15k copies of v1 of The Dragon’s Betrothed.

Shall we take a look at the “long tail” of Viz? This is their sales of all products sold for the entire year, whether or not it made the Top 750

Year	# of listed items	Percent Change	Total Unit Sold	Percent Change	Calculated Retail Value	Percent Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	2018	——	6,249,324	——	$55,123,347	—–	3,097	$27,316
2008	2447	21.26%	5,536,286	-11.41%	$50,311,791	-8.97%	2,263	$20,561
2009	2793	14.14%	4,819,407	-12.95%	$44,310,790	-11.93%	1,726	$15,865
2010	3088	10.56%	3,576,671	-25.79%	$35,041,305	-20.92%	1,158	$11,348
2011	3393	9.88%	3,276,297	-8.40%	$32,766,960	-6.49%	966	$9,657
2012	3518	3.68%	2,099,560	-35.92%	$22,433,721	-31.54%	597	$6,377
2013	3636	3.35%	1,853,211	-11.73%	$21,586,923	-3.77%	510	$5,937
2014	3765	3.55%	1,855,161	0.11%	$22,732,074	5.30%	493	$6,038
2015*	2264	-39.87%	2,150,656	15.93%	$28,134,971	23.77%	950	$12,427
2016*	2405	6.23%	2,811,978	30.75%	$38,854,681	38.10%	1,169	$16,156
2017	4443	84.74%	2,958,351	5.21%	$41,594,729	7.80%	666	$9,362
2018	4637	4.37%	3,184,274	7.64%	$44,423,434	6.80%	687	$9,580
2019	4702	1.40%	4,329,369	35.96%	$60,817,993	36.91%	921	$12,934
2020	4856	3.28%	6,614,179	52.77%	$94,768,000	55.82%	1,362	$19,516
2021	5183	6.73%	15,804,613	138.95%	$208,440,832	119.95%	3,049	$40,216
2022	5270	1.68%	17,816,487	12.73%	$233,268,459	11.91%	3,381	$44,263
2023	5200	-1.33%	12,292,894	-31.00%	$205,326,626	-11.98%	2,364	$39,486

Despite being down in 2023, Viz’s long-tail is still pretty impressive. They marginally cut SKUs, and while they lost a straight 31% of circulation, calculated retail is only down by 12% – that seems pretty OK to me, given that a post-pandemic crash was utterly predictable. Viz in 2023 has five books over 100k, 32 more over 50k, another thirty-eight over 30k, an additional fifty-five over 20k, and an impressive one hundred and six others over 10k. They are a very very very strong publisher in short, and they completely blow past the scales we’ve invented to describe most other publishers.

In second place among manga publishers in 2023 is Yen Press, which rises up a place and places 56 titles into the Top 750, for about 1.1 million copies sold, and $17.4 million of calculated retail gross. Yen is a division of Hachette (more on them later).

Yen’s biggest hit in 2023 is Solo Leveling, which actually comes from its Korean comics sub-imprint called Ize Press (this is technically “Manwha”, rather than “Manga” if you want to split hairs) that began this year. V1 of Solo Leveling is Yen’s #1 book, with 57k sold. It is also #4 (v6, 52k), #7 (v7, 34k), and #9 (v2, 32k), while v3-5 are all close below, still in Top Twenty, between 24-26k each) – all seven entries sum up to 251k total.

Coming in at #2, from the core Yen Press, is Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun, which takes four of their ten best-selling spots. V1 (their #2 best-seller) sells 54k copies in 2022, while v17 (#5) pulls in 38k, v2 (#6) sells 35k, while v3 (#8) racks up 32k. While not in the Top Ten, all 19 volumes of this series (plus a v0), appear within the BookScan Top 750, for a total of 407k sold.

Also from the core Yen is [Oshi No Ko], where v1 is #3 for them, with 53k sold, and v2 is #10 with 30k sold. V3 & 4 are also in the BookScanTop 750, for a total sold of this series of 113k

That’s it for the Top Ten for Yen, but there are a few other titles to flag: Ize’s Villains are Destined to Die (v1 sells 27k, v2 does 22k, v3 does 16k), The Remarried Empress (v1 does 18k), The World After The Fall (v1 sells 16k), and My Gently Raised Beast (v1 does 14k) – all pretty strong sales for a new imprint. On the Yen-proper side: Bungo Stray Dogs (v1 does 20k), The Summer Hikaru Died (v1 does 17k), and a new edition of Fruits Basket (v1 does 16k).

In the Long Tail Yen things show solid growth

Year	# of listed items	Percent Change	Total Unit Sold	Percent Change	Calculated Retail Value	Percent Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	10	——	12,896	——	$147,449	—–	1,290	$14,745
2008	90	800.00%	110,126	753.95%	$1,237,860	739.52%	1,224	$13,754
2009	211	134.44%	330,962	200.53%	$3,697,113	198.67%	1,569	$17,522
2010	344	63.03%	560,983	69.50%	$6,650,871	79.89%	1,680	$19,334
2011	460	33.72%	764,125	36.21%	$9,953,966	49.66%	1,661	$21,639
2012	548	19.13%	647,948	-15.20%	$8,735,264	-12.24%	1,182	$15,940
2013	654	19.34%	692,380	6.86%	$9,715,421	11.22%	1,059	$14,855
2014	776	18.65%	682,135	-1.48%	$9,985,502	2.78%	776	$12,868
2015*	649	-16.37%	917,620	34.52%	$13,248,445	32.68%	1,414	$20,414
2016*	793	22.19%	1,072,008	16.82%	$15,520,207	17.15%	1,352	$19,572
2017	1403	76.92%	928,962	-13.34%	$13,866,675	-10.65%	662	$9,884
2018	1737	23.81%	890,228	-4.17%	$13,051,751	-5.88%	513	$7,514
2019	1846	6.28%	884,596	-0.63%	$13,008,175	-0.33%	479	$7,047
2020	2010	8.88%	1,090,002	23.22%	$15,797,758	21.44%	542	$7,860
2021	2147	6.82%	3,018,454	176.92%	$43,696,021	176.60%	1,406	$20,352
2022	2297	6.99%	3,224,346	6.82%	$47,913,494	9.65%	1,404	$20,859
2023	2657	17.20%	2,870,543	-10.97%	$44,600,600	-6.91%	1,080	$16,786

Yen Press in 2023 has a dip, but is generally outperforming the wider manga market. They have four books over 50k, six more over 30k, another seven selling over 20k copies, and thirty-five more that place over 10k. This is a solid performance.

Coming in at #3 for Manga in 2023 we have Kodansha Comics. (They also publish as Vertical, which they completed purchase of in 2020), which falls a slot while placing only 37 titles within the top 750, with just under 805k in units sold, and $12.8 million in calculated retail dollars.

Kodansha’s licenses formerly were both the original backbone of Tokyopop, as well as being the majority of Del Rey Manga. Kodansha pulled Tpop’s license in March of ’09 and Del Rey in October of ’10. You may want to look at those publisher’s listings below to get a better historical overview.

Kodansha’s #1 best-seller in 2023 was Blue Lock, which placed v1 (#1, selling 70k), within the BookScan Top 750 v2 (#3, 45k), v5 (#6, 37k), v3 (#7, 34k), v4 (#8, 33k), and v6 (#10, 27k). v7-9 are also in the top 750, all volumes selling 297k combined.

At #2 for Kodansha, it’s Attack on Titan, where the 3-in-1 “Omnibus” v1 sells 46k, while the stand-alone v1 is #5 with 38k sold. This is a pretty big drop for AoT, where v1 sold 88k last year, and 170k in 2021! There are four more AoT volumes in the Top 750 (a box set selling 2k, v2 of the Omnibus selling just under that, v34 with 15k, and v2 with 12k), but the bloom seems to be off the rose with the 97 combined volumes of AoT (and spinoffs!) selling just 351k copies total – this was 800k in 2022.

Also within the Top Ten for Kodansha is Sailor Moon (v1 is #4 with 42k sold), and Vinland Saga (v1 is #9 with 27k sold)

The best-seller of the Vertical imprint is v1 of The Complete Chi’s Sweet Home, which sells almost 24k, a nice raise from last year’s 17k.

Also worthy of flagging (though not in the Top Ten) are Witch Hat Atelier (v1 sells 21k), Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir (v1 sold just under 21k, and PTSD Radio, where Omnibus 1 moved 16k.

These Long Tail figures are for Kodansha-published titles, and they reflect that Kodansha, itself, first started publishing in 2010. I have adjusted the figures from 2011 on to now include Vertical as well:

Year	# of listed items	Percent Change	Total Unit Sold	Percent Change	Calculated Retail Value	Percent Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2010	9	——	13,291	——	$322,717	——	1,477	$35,857
2011	192	2033.33%	246,083	1751.50%	$3,236,474	902.88%	1,282	$16,857
2012	364	89.58%	369,853	50.30%	$4,697,856	45.52%	1,016	$12,906
2013	479	31.59%	563,460	52.35%	$7,427,739	58.11%	1,176	$15,507
2014	629	31.32%	904,610	60.55%	$11,972,992	61.19%	1,438	$19,035
2015*	617	-1.91%	965,519	6.73%	$12,894,698	7.70%	1,565	$20,899
2016*	772	25.12%	1,154,178	19.54%	$15,527,849	20.42%	1,495	$20,114
2017	1164	50.78%	1,098,812	-4.80%	$16,795,188	8.16%	944	$14,429
2018	1399	20.19%	1,033,780	-5.92%	$15,396,607	-8.33%	739	$11,005
2019	1564	11.79%	1,152,720	11.51%	$18,674,181	21.29%	737	$11,940
2020	1740	11.25%	1,548,349	34.32%	$24,524,651	31.33%	890	$14,095
2021	1975	13.51%	5,655,992	265.29%	$84,299,372	243.73%	2,864	$42,683
2022	2255	14.18%	4,289,828	-24.15%	$69,249,595	-17.85%	1,902	$30,709
2023	2473	9.67%	2,836,059	-33.89%	$49,758,602	-28.15%	1,147	$20,121

Kodansha is in a bad state of decline at the moment – second straight year of decline, and 2023 is about 50% under 2021, owies. Much of this is still the receding tide from Attack on Titan, but they need some new hits. Kodansha has one book selling over 50k, seven more over 30k, nine others over 20k, and eighteen more titles that sell over 10k – that Yen has now topped them, and that they’re strongly trending lower than the Manga market as a whole is a concerning turn.

Rising up to #4 manga publisher in the Top 750 in 2023 is Dark Horse. They place twenty titles in the Top 750, whose combined sales represent 651k copies sold and $29.1m in calculated retail.

The strength of Dark Horse’s position is almost entirely Berserk with the $50 hardcover editions outselling the cheaper softcovers: 18 of Dark Horse’s placing books are Berserk. The HC of v1 (#1 for Dark Horse) scores 116k sold, which is a great number, especially for a $50 book! V2 (#2) sells 59k, and v3 (#3) racks 45k. Then the softcover of v1 jumps back in at #4 (39k) for a little palette cleanser before we drop back to the hardcovers again with v4 (#5, 39k), v13 (#6, 38k), v5 (#7, 38k), v12 (#8, 31k), v6 (#9, 31k), and v7 (#10, 28k), there are eight more volumes in the Top 750, and others that don’t make the top of the chart, and altogether there are fifty-seven volumes of Berserk listed on BookScan that collectively sold 728k copies in 2023. This is down a little from last year’s 799k.

Other than Berserk, Dark Horse also does well with Mob Psycho 100 and Hellsing Deluxe where v1 of each sells 13k (within 100 copies of one another).

Looking at the Long Tail, this is what Dark Horse’s (manga only!) recent performance looks like – like most manga in 2023 it declined, though not as much as many others. There is much more on Dark Horse down below in the “Western Publishers” section.

Year	# of listed items	Percent Change	Total Unit Sold	Percent Change	Calculated Retail Value	Percent Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	341	——	249,943	——	$3,329,464	—–	733	$14,745
2008	420	23.17%	248,981	-0.38%	$3,176,870	-4.58%	593	$7,564
2009	455	8.33%	226,497	-9.03%	$2,915,693	-8.22%	498	$6,408
2010	473	3.96%	194,494	-14.13%	$2,633,077	-9.69%	411	$5,567
2011	497	5.07%	189,329	-2.66%	$2,602,230	-1.17%	381	$5,236
2012	493	-0.80%	112,373	-40.65%	$1,631,038	-37.32%	228	$3,308
2013	521	5.68%	103,538	-7.86%	$1,678,563	2.91%	199	$3,222
2014	559	7.29%	100,894	-2.60%	$1,617,251	-3.65%	180	$2,893
2015*	303	-45.80%	135,444	34.24%	$2,238,167	38.39%	447	$7,387
2016*	225	-25.74%	174,298	28.69%	$2,291,355	2.38%	775	$10,184
2017	527	234.22%	238,089	36.60%	$3,795,506	65.64%	452	$7,202
2018	531	0.76%	224,010	-5.91%	$3,579,135	-5.70%	422	$6,740
2019	384	-27.68%	329,034	46.88%	$7,280,058	103.40%	857	$18,958
2020	472	22.92	430,762	30.92%	$11,111,354	52.63%	913	$23,541
2021	431	-8.69%	1,009,527	134.36%	$26,954,363	142.58%	2,342	$62,539
2022	455	5.57%	1,113,260	10.28%	$39,082,966	45.00%	2,447	$85,897
2023	361	-20.66%	949,746	-14.69%	$34,938,276	-10.60%	2,631	$96,782

What’s interesting here is the 21% drop in number-of-books on sale, but that pieces are only down by 15%, and dollars by 10%. This also yielded the only Average-Sales and Average-Dollars per-title numbers that went up year-over-year! But, let’s be real: this is almost solely about Berserk right now: 728k sold of the 950k this year were Berserk! Dark Horse Manga has one book over 100k, one more over 50k, seven more over 30k, another seven over 20k, and four more books over 10k. As long as they keep the license for Berserk, Dark Horse Manga seems in pretty good shape.

Falling a little to the #5 manga publisher as represented by the Circana BookScan Top 750 is Seven Seas, which places nineteen titles for 232k copies sold combined and a calculated value that comes out just under $4.9 million.

Seven Seas also includes imprints Ghost Ship and Steamship, though neither imprint places anything in the Top 750 this year.

Seven Seas’ biggest success in 2023 is the Omnibus editions of Tokyo Revengers: v1 (#1) sells almost 17k, while v4 (#5) is at 14k.

Filling out the Top Ten for Seven Seas is Dai Dark (v1 is #2, and also almost 17k), Killing Stalking (v2 is #3, at 14k), Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (v2 is #4, also 14k), The Titan’s Bride (v2 is #6 at 13k, while v1 is #10 with 11k), Love is an Illusion (v2 is #7 and 12k), the hardcover version of The Girl From The Other Side: Siúil A Rún (v1 is #8 at 12k), and Who Made Me a Princess (v1 is #9, a bit under 12k). It’s pretty unusual to have that many v2s selling better than v1s!

The best-seller for the Ghost Ship imprint is Darling in the Franxx at under 9k

Seven Seas’ Long Tail shows another “best year ever”!

Year	# of listed items	Percent Change	Total Unit Sold	Percent Change	Calculated Retail Value	Percent Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	54	——	50,641	——	$558,450	—–	938	$10,342
2008	76	41.74%	80,112	58.20%	$833,667	49.28%	1,054	$10,969
2009	97	27.63%	74,967	-6.42%	$807,666	-3.12%	773	$8.326
2010	93	-4.12%	75,764	1.06%	$875,612	8.41%	815	$9,415
2011	118	26.88%	116,360	53.58%	$1,426,618	62.93%	986	$12,090
2012	151	27.97%	124,262	6.79%	$1,684,994	18.11%	823	$11,159
2013	223	47.68%	204,419	64.51%	$2,942,608	74.64%	917	$13,196
2014	300	34.53%	284,484	39.17%	$3,979,338	35.23%	948	$13,264
2015*	304	1.34%	374,715	31.72%	$5,177,568	30.11%	1,233	$17,031
2016*	417	37.17%	491,947	31.29%	$6,960,634	34.44%	1,180	$16,692
2017	554	32.85%	478,336	-2.77%	$6,801,527	-2.29%	863	$12,277
2018	906	63.54%	667,556	39.56%	$9,511,591	39.84%	737	$10,498
2019	1049	15.78%	671,362	0.57%	$9,498,329	-0.14%	640	$9,055
2020	1230	17.25%	699,127	4.14%	$9,913,480	4.37%	568	$8,060
2021	1518	23.41%	1,590,317	127.47%	$22,972,596	131.73%	1,048	$15,133
2022	2031	33.79%	1,967,627	23.73%	$30,001,482	30.60%	969	$14,472
2023	2539	25.01%	1,995,404	1.41%	$32,251,267	7.5%	786	$12,702

Seven Seas has eighteen titles that sell more than 10k, but that’s it. You can see why I said we have to judge Viz on a different scale than everyone else. On the other hand, they are the rare Manga publisher here whose year-over-year sales went up. And that ain’t nothing!

Maintaining their #6 placement is relatively new imprint Square Enix Manga – they launched in late 2019. And, largely because they’re so young, they’re in their growth phase now, and also show “up” in their long tail! This year within the Top 750, they place thirteen titles that combine for 204k sold, and just over $3 million in calculated dollars.

Square Enix’s best seller is My Dress-Up Darling, which takes six of the top ten. V1 (#1) sells 27k while the other five all sell between 12 and 21k. This is broken by My Happy Marriage, with v1 at #4 (19k), v2 at #5 (18k), and v3 at #8 (15k). Also placing is “Soul Eater” v1 (#7) at 15k

As noted: this is one of two Manga Long Tails that are up, though it isn’t by much given how much the title count soared.

Year	# of listed items	Percent Change	Total Unit Sold	Percent Change	Calculated Retail Value	Percent Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2020	20	——–	49,251	——-	$703,806	——-	568	$8,060
2021	50	150%	294,520	498.00%	$4,298,970	510.82%	5,890	$85,979
2022	99	98%	485,713	64.92%	$7,516,321	74.84%	4,906	$75,922
2023	183	84.85%	532,292	9.59%	$8,010,909	6.58%	2,909	$43,775

Square Enix has two books over 20k, and another ten over 10k.

New this year to the Manga charts is another new publisher: Webtoon Unscrolled – they formed right at the very end of 2021, and Bobbie Chase is (was?) the EIC, but they’re already regularly placing books in the Top 750, and they are thus the #7 manga publisher according to BookScan 2023 reporters. They place five books in, all Korean Webtoons, for 92k copies and $1.8m in sales.

Their best-seller is True Beauty where v1 (#1) sells 29k, and v2 (#3) sells 19k. This is followed by Cursed Princess Club, where v1 is #2 (22k) and v2 is #4 (12k), and Doom Breaker where v1 is just a hair under 10k. This is a good start for a new company.

Let’s make them a brand new Long Tail, then!

Year	# of listed items	Percent Change	Total Unit Sold	Percent Change	Calculated Retail Value	Percent Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2022	4	——–	26,968	——-	$539,920	——-	6,742	$134,980
2023	30	750%	159,824	592.64%	$3,168,959	586.93%	5,327	$105,632

Webtoon Unscrolled has two books over 20k, and another ten over 10k.

After this there are no other manga that appear in the BookScan Top 750 in 2023. The next best-selling manga would be Disney Manga: Stitch and the Samurai v1 from Tokyopop’s Disney Manga imprint. It sells fewer than 9k copies in the year

2023 Western Publishers

When I say “Western” here, I mean publishers/work from Europe and America, as opposed to Asia, not publishers of the genre of “western” comics!

Circana BookScan itself does not try to control how data gets initially logged (or changed), leaving that all to publishers. I think that I understand this reasoning: the publisher is the customer to BookScan, and they should have some level of control over how they are represented, but as a person who tries to decipher the data each year, I know that I would prefer some sort of internally-consistent (and externally-petionable!) method of categorizing titles that doesn’t seem to change in some fashion from year-to-year – Books will still appear and disappear year over year, and it makes showing you anything even resembling consistent data staggeringly difficult. And much of this is a function of how publishers assign BISACs and in what order – please please read the long section below on how the sausage is made! ANCHOR TEXT

I’d also like to continue to give you a top-level reminder that back in 2008 there was some sort of behind-the-scenes recategorization in what got sent to me – I now know this is probably a change in BISAC codes! – and most of the “cartoon-strip humor” books like “Calvin & Hobbes” and “The Far Side” suddenly disappeared, so there’s kind of a not-strictly apples thing going on with the pre-2008 numbers here. Do keep that in mind when making comparisons both in the Top 750 chart, as well as the Long Tail.

Another observation I have to repeat is that Circana BookScan tracks (theoretically at least, since again, publishers set their own BISACs) Adult reading distinctly from YA and Kids. I don’t. Part of this is that I’m a bookseller, and I’m rather agnostic about who specifically buys books as a result. But I have to be certain to make this point as clearly as I can again and again: the market for who is buying comics is changing, and it is changing for the wider and the better. The eight year old who is inhaling Dav Pilkey in 2023 is going to be the comics-literate adult of 2036 (or whatever), which is going to change what comics readers in the 2030s will want or expect from comics. The kids reading comics in 1965 totally imagined what the 1980’s comics scene could and would be, which is why we’re where we are today, but the shape of the Western industry in the future is absolutely what today’s children read and see.

Ignore this at your deadliest of perils: the future is always shaped by the present, even if that isn’t what you personally want.

OK, enough editorializing, let’s look at the market!

Here’s the Western Top 750 over time:

Year	# of placing titles	Unit sales	Calculated Retail price
2003	304	2,133,618	$32,360,644
2004	233	1,467,535	$22,713,802
2005	142	1,315,920	$21,537,155
2006	174	1,689,571	$29,314,852
2007	175	1,746,962	$33,247,187
2008	236	2,710,175	$48,327,594
2009	299	3,219,748	$52,147,410
2010	314	3,297,317	$54,515,605
2011	358	3,068,593	$77,254,870
2012	383	3,530,143	$68,593,986
2013	435	3,988,864	$74,805,932
2014	479	4,910,846	$90,166,989
2015*	471	6,729,449	$115,035,044
2016*	439	7,338,541	$123,594,588
2017	466	7,846,357	$117,761,519
2018	451	9,114,745	$129,929,990
2019	418	11,998,489	$176,470,137
2020	392	12,825,951	$196,604,939
2021	255	14,752,121	$225,424,778
2022	292	14,104,511	$225,392,545
2023	352	14,638,628	$245,627,916

2023 Circana BookScan’s Top 750 for Western publishers is looking good: the indicators are up, and pretty significantly compared to manga – we’re much closer back to parity of number of titles in each tranche. Growth is not exceptional (3.5% in pieces, nearly 9% in calculated dollars) – but it is growth, so there’s that. It’s also the 2nd largest number of copies sold in twenty-one years of charting this!

If we were to look at the entirety of all of Circana BookScan’s reported numbers for the total 38,597 distinct “Western” comics, things look generally like this: there are 2158 publishers/imprints listed in the 2023 chart, but only 13 of them manage to capture 1% or more of the market

This is not quite as lopsided as the Manga chart… But it is still a bit overwhelming that one publisher (Scholastic) is 39% of all graphic novels sold. Also note that Marvel and DC combined are under 10% in the book market.

***

Let’s start with a look at the Long Tail for Western publishers collectively. As you see the comparison against the Top 750 is leaning harder on best-sellers – the best-selling books in the Top 750 sell around 64% (!) of the volume of all western graphic novels sold in 2023 as reported to Circana BookScan. Please pay attention: the “other” nearly 38,000-plus books really don’t sell all that well. This is how the book business generally works!

Year	# of listed items	% Change	Total Pieces	% Change	Calculated Retail Value	% Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	6950	—	3,029,039	—	$74,595,605	—	436	$10,733
2008	9728	39.97%	5,368,678	77.24%	$98,233,459	31.69%	552	$10,098
2009	10,936	12.30%	5,946,595	10.76%	$107,263,294	9.19%	544	$9,808
2010	13,229	20.97%	5,890,507	-0.01%	$105,342,577	-0.02%	445	$7,963
2011	14,954	13.04%	6,001,731	1.89%	$112,823,763	7.10%	401	$7,545
2012	17,031	13.89%	6,052,179	0.84%	$123,471,753	9.44%	355	$7,250
2013	17,468	2.57%	6,637,420	9.67%	$131,767,547	6.72%	380	$7,543
2014	19,524	11.77%	7,905,939	19.11%	$156,040,431	18.21%	405	$7,992
2015*	18,019	-7.71%	10,689,116	34.44%	$197,553,909	26.60%	593	$10,964
2016*	16,328	-9.38%	11,516,867	7.74%	$212,698,759	7.67%	705	$13,027
2017	25,183	54.23%	12,544,715	8.92%	$217,360,776	2.19%	498	$8,631
2018	27,583	9.53%	13,865,209	10.53%	$230,924,408	6.24%	503	$8,372
2019	30,816	11.72%	17,233,606	24.29%	$288,745,613	25.04%	559	$9,370
2020	31,893	3.49%	18,495,127	7.3%	$318,796,963	10.41%	580	$9,996
2021	34,624	8.56%	24,105,059	30.33%	$430,020,217	34.89%	696	$12,420
2022	35,461	2.42%	23,021,158	-4.50%	$424,701,052	-1.24%	649	$11,977
2023	38,559	8.74%	22,889,348	-0.57%	$431,386,473	1.57%	594	$11,188

The Long Tail for Western publishers is essentially flat in 2023: sales marginally down year-over-year, but dollars up… and to the largest Calculated Retail value we have ever calculated. Of course, that’s an aspirational, yet fictional number (since we can’t know how much books really sold for!), but it’s a fun enough talking point.

Next, we’ll survey each of the publishers, and their best-selling titles, ranking them by the number of pieces they sold this year with the Top 750 of Circana BookScan. We’ll also look at the “long tail” for each entry discussing the entirety of Circana BookScan.

It is now the ninth year in the row that our #1 Western publisher in the Circana BookScan Top 750 is Scholastic. Given that they only started “doing” comics in 2005, and in that time they’ve grown to 39% of the market with only 596 SKUs… well, that is an insanely good achievement. Further, it seems unlikely to get supplanted anytime soon unless kids collectively decide that they suddenly don’t like Dav Pilkey any longer. Think that a nine year old who started reading during the first year Scholastic become the #1 BookScan publisher is now an eighteen years old, and is maybe five years from making their own graphic novels? Things are going to change, and I’m not clear that the Direct Market is exactly prepared for this.

Within the Top 750, Scholastic sells a staggering 8.5 million copies, from 116 placing books. Every number reported here is only from retail sales through Circana BookScan reporters – this doesn’t count what I will assume are much larger numbers of copies that happen via the incredibly successful Scholastic Book Fairs, direct to students. Nor does this count any sales that are being done to elementary and middle school libraries, numbers that likely exceed retail sales. Not that we have any proof, but it seems logical at least.

Also consider that the next largest publisher sold under 2m copies in the Top 750, or under a fourth of Scholastic’s volume. Or, how about this: if you combine the Top 750 performance of all of the traditional Direct Market “Premiere” publishers (Boom!, Dark Horse, DC, Dynamite, IDW, Image and Marvel) those combined best-sellers are fewer than 750k books sold, combined, or under a tenth of Scholastic alone. Scholastic is, quite simply, the ruler of the Top 750 in the Western charts.

Scholastic has several imprints, but virtually all of their sales action is happening either as “Scholastic” or as Graphix – those are certainly the only two to place within the Top 750 itself. The other imprints don’t.

Arthur A. Levine is one of the imprints that doesn’t hit the top 750. Their best seller remains Shaun Tan’s The Arrival but it’s only a little over 5k.

Blue Sky appears to be a dead imprint? The best-selling book labeled as being from Blue Sky on the comics charts is Dav Pilkey’s The Adventures of Ook and Gluk, Kung-Fu Cavemen From The Future, which sells, erm, all of 18 copies this year – that reads as “not actually in print!” to me

The Graphix imprint is where all of the action is. Up above at the top of the column in the “Top Twenty” section we talked about Dav Pilkey, and Graphix’s other hits like “Wings of Fire”, “Baby Sitter’s Club” or “Five Nights at Freddy’s”, so there doesn’t seem to be an enormous need to talk about all of the same books again? And those books are all in Scholastic’s Top 20 as well. I think the only book that wasn’t mentioned already uptop is Heartstopper by Alice Oseman, where v5 comes in at #20 for Scholastic, with 117k sold. V2 also comes in at #28 with 103k.

Also over 100k is Raina Telgemeier with Smile (at 103k) – Guts falls a bit to “just” 98k, though it’s only a drop compared to the relative heights Raina has two years ago. Raina also places Drama at 90k, Sisters at 85k, and Ghosts at 68k, which only seem small in relation to the big hits of Scholastic – those would be seen as big numbers anywhere else. Some of this can be seen in the difference between Dav Pilkey doing 2-3 new books a year, and Raina being “off the market” for about five years so far since Guts.

Kazu Kibushi is in a similar boat as we waited in 2023 for the release of the last volume of Amulet – v1 has dropped to just 38k sold this year, which would comparatively look like a massive hit still. I would expect this to change in a big way in 2024 when the charts show v9’s release.

Also over 50k and worthy of paying attention to would be v7 of the “I Survived” series with The Great Chicago Fire – that does 58k – as well as Invisible by Christina Diaz Gonzalez (55k) as well as Allergic by Megan Wagner Lloyd (51k)

After this, we’re looking at books under 50k, though many of these still sell much better than things you would otherwise expect – one super-clear example is the 34k copies of Scholastic’s Miles Morales: Shock Waves, which sells about three times better than any other Marvel graphic novel published by Marvel. The success of Scholastic is funny to me in that I start drawing arbitrary lines at 50k as “important enough to mention”, when almost any other publisher is incredibly lucky to have more than three or four titles selling that well.

The Long Tail for Scholastic looks like this – steady on in a down year:

Year	# of listed items	Percent Change	Total Unit Sold	Percent Change	Calculated Retail price	Percent Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	28	——	203,900	——	$2,018,694	—–	7282	$72,096
2008	39	39.29%	346,134	69.76%	$3,498,012	73.28%	8875	$89,693
2009	52	33.33%	432,070	24.83%	$4,654,686	33.07%	8309	$89,513
2010	60	15.38%	361,086	-16.43%	$4,084,718	-12.25%	6018	$68,079
2011	72	20.00%	419,010	16.04%	$4,708,860	15.28%	5819	$65,401
2012	76	5.56%	325,088	-22.42%	$3,955,249	-16.00%	4277	$52,043
2013	91	19.74%	437,590	34.61%	$5,365,921	35.67%	4809	$58,967
2014	97	6.59%	846,277	93.39%	$10,204,175	90.17%	8725	$105,198
2015*	140	44.33%	1,449,296	71.26%	$17,170,714	68.27%	10,352	$122,648
2016*	131	-6.43%	1,940,760	33.91%	$23,919,704	39.31%	14,815	$182,593
2017	166	26.72%	2,823,345	45.55%	$33,884,541	41.66%	17,008	$204,124
2018	224	34.94%	4,623,212	63.75%	$54,645,209	61.27%	20,639	$243,952
2019	270	20.54%	6,868,794	48.57%	$88,878,195	62.65%	25,440	$329,179
2020	343	27.03%	7,164,029	4.30%	$95,638,289	7.61%	20,886	$278,829
2021	436	27.11%	9,987,540	39.41%	$137,156,876	43.43%	22,907	$314,580
2022	520	19.27%	9,236,437	-7.52%	$135,077,506	-1.52%	17,762	$259,764
2023	596	14.62%	9,030,932	-2.23%	$136,132,796	0.08%	15,153	$228,411

Scholastic has one book over a million copies (!), another one over 300k, five more over 200k, 21 more over 100k, 23 others over 50k, 34more over 20k, and an additional 26 over 10k. Whew! Any other publisher would be satisfied with a tiny fraction of that (as you will clearly see if you keep reading along) – this is also known as “the Viz Problem”

Even with the 2% year-over-year drop in circulations, Scholastic still feels like a juggernaut to me: the vast majority of their portfolio is extremely likely to continue as “perennial seller” status. And I continue to lustily fantasize about what might happen if they decided to do two streams of revenue and serialized first before eventual collection. Seriously, yo.

Solidly at #2 is one of the traditional “Big Five” book publishers: Penguin Random House. They land 38 titles into the 2022 Circana BookScan Top 750, selling 1.5 million copies for just over $28m in calculated gross sales.

Like a lot of the “big five” book publishers, these companies have lots and lots of imprints built up over decades of publishing books – enough to drive a guy like me crazy! Penguin Random House, as best as I can tell, has fourteen distinct imprints that appear in the Top 750 list for 2023 – Alfred A. Knopf, Del Rey, Dial, G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books, Inklore, Pantheon, Penguin, Random House Books For Younger Readers, Random House Graphic, Razorbill, Tarcherperigee, Triangle Square, Tundra, and Viking.

They’re also, in the long tail: (deep breath!) Ace, Ballantine, Bantam, Berkley, Blue Snake, Broadway Books, Clarkson N. Potter, Crown, Delacorte, Doubleday, Dutton, Emblem, Flammarion, Golden, Gotham Books, Grossett & Dunlap, Hudson Street, InkLit, Knopf, Labyrinth Road, McClelland & Stewart, Montena, Nan A. Talese, New American Library, One World, Philomel, Plume, Potter Style, Prestel, Price Stern Sloan, Puffin, Putnam, Riverhead, Rodale, Schocken, Schwartz & Wade, Ten Speed, Three Rivers, Villard, Waterbrook, Watson-Guptill and Yearling. (whew!)

However, they are not (Brian writes down here so he remembers this research each year – you’d be shocked how long it take me to sort through this stuff every time!) the PRH-distributed-only Angry Robot, BCN Multimedia, Beacon, Black Balloon, Booksurge, Campfire, Catapult, Charlesbridge, Devil’s Panties, Dragonfly, Fawcett, Frog In Well, Gefen, Hippo Park, Library of America, Little Bigfoot, Margeret Ferguson books, M Press, MIT Press, New York Review, Nobrow, NoStarch, North Atlantic, Other Press, Overlook Press, Pixel+Ink, Powerhouse, Pushkin Press, Quirk, Ramble House, Rizzoli, Sasquatch, Semiotext(e), Seven Stories Press, Shambhala, Smithsonian, Soft Skull, Sonoma Valley Press, Squid Works, Sunday Press, Tibet House, Toon Books, Universe, Verso, or Wordsong (I am sure I missed a few!!)

They are also the bookstore distributor for Archie, Dark Horse, DC, IDW, Marvel, and Titan

Looking at those imprints in alphabetical order, within the Top 750:

Alfred A. Knopf places two books into the Top 750, though none within PRH’s Top Twenty: Roughly 18k copies of White Bird: A Wonder Story is their best seller.

Del Rey has one placing title for 2023, the Dave Wenzel adaptation of The Hobbit for about 19k copies, and this is a solid, steady perennial volume that has consistently placed for years and years. Publication rights switch over to William Morrow in 2024, a HarperCollins company.

Dial places three books in the Top 750, and two are by Victoria Jamieson: When Stars Are Scattered (#8 for PRH over all) at almost 49k copies, Roller Girl (not in the Top Twenty) at about 12k. They also have Mexikid by Pedro Martin which sells 19k in its first frame.

G.P. Putnam & Sons places a single book in the Top 750: PAWS v2: Mindy Makes Some Space, which just cracks 20k.

Inklore is a sub-imprint of the imprint “Random House Worlds”, which makes my head all itchy – what distinguishes this from other “RHW” books, or even, for that matter, for other things published under a more generic “Random House” brand? How does it help anyone sell books? These are the mysteries of our universe. But the biggest book they publish is Rachel Smythe’s Lore Olympus which does pretty shockingly well with split formats. In hardcover, v4 is the #6 book for PRH overall, with 70k sold. Then it goes to v1 in paperback (#14 overall for PRH, 37k sold). But then it goes back to hardcover (that’s really unusual!) for v3 (#17, 34k), v1 (#18, 28k), v2 (#19, 28k) and v5 (#20, 28k), before the softcovers start placing again (between 16k and 26k each). Seriously: I don’t know that I can think of any other series where hardcovers sell better than paperbacks. Smythe has herself some fans!

Pantheon is their “literary” comics wing, and has some of PRH’s steadiest-sellers. There are seven books placing in 2023, including Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus, where volume 1, My Father Bleeds History (#1 for PRH overall) sells more than 236k copies. Are you old enough to remember that Maus isn’t a “graphic novel”, per se: it’s a collection of an originally serialized mini-comic that was bound into “Raw” Magazine in the early 1980s. This is one of the reasons it is actually split into two volumes, and v2, And Here My Troubles Began (#4 for PRH overall) sells about 95k copies. The complete hardcover edition of both volumes (#2) also sells another 118k copies. In addition to this, v1 Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (#3 for PRH overall) sells very well at 105k – this only sold 50k last year. As always surprises me with Pantheon books, way way less people read v2 – less than a tenth, at 8852 copies, not even making it into the Top 750! But the Complete edition of Persepolis (#11) sells 43k (again, massively up from 23k last year). I’m genuinely not sure that I understand these sales patterns, though my assumption is that Pantheon simply isn’t doing a good job explaining these are multi-volume series. Finally, the adaptation Anne Frank’s Diary sells 11k copies in 2023.

From Penguin Group is a bit more than 14k copies of Pencilmation: The Graphite Novel by Ross Bollinger. They also sell almost 10k copies sold of Penguin Classics: Amazing Spider-Man v1, which reprints a bit more than the first nineteen issues of ASM, along with text essays. It’s worth observing that Marvel itself also publishes this same material: in a slightly smaller “Mighty Marvel Masterworks” format for $16 (vs the $28 here), that only shifts about 7k as well in the $45 full sized “Epic” collection which sells about 2200 copies, as well as a $125 hardcover, which trickles out fewer than 500 copies sold. It’s utterly wild to me that Marvel is the worst publisher for Marvel comics, with Penguin, Scholastic, and Viz all doing meaningfully better in selling Marvel products – even the “exact same” product, as in this case.

Random House Books For Younger Readers and Random House Graphic are, unless I am really dumb, essentially the same imprint, so I will lump them together here. They have 24 placing titles within the Top 750, and several are among PRH’s personal Top 20, led by Sweet Valley Twins: Best Friends (#5 for PRH overall, 89k in sales), and Sweet Valley Friends: Teacher’s Pet (#9, 47k) Following that is Pizza & Taco v5: Rock Out! (#13, 38k sold), with another five volumes charting with sales between 11k and 26k, and that’s followed by K. O’Neill’s The Moth Keeper (#16, 34k). Other successful books for the imprint include Katie the Catsitter by Colleen Venable (three volumes selling between 17k-27k) and Judd Winick’s Hilo (v9 does 23k).

Razorbill places two volumes of Paws by Nathan Fairbairn into the Top 750 – both do right around 14k.

Tarcherperigee has a single book, Oddballs: the Graphic Novel, which sells 15k copies.

Triangle Square also places a single book: around 11k of Sex is a Funny Word by Cory Silverberg.

Tundra has nine placing volumes of Ben Clanton’s Narwahl: Unicorn of the Sea series. V1 is #10 for the company overall, with almost 44k sold, with v8 (#12 – 41k), and v7 (#15, 35k) are not far behind. The other six books sell between 11-19k each.

And finally, there is Viking with Max Brailler’s The Last Comics on Earth which is #7 for PRH overall, selling 51k copies.

Penguin Random House formed out of a merger in 2013 – prior to that they were separate publishers: Penguin, and Random House. Here’s what the Long-Tail for the combined Penguin Random House looked like in 2023 – almost 20% growth!:

Year	# of listed items	% Change	Total Pieces	% Change	Calculated Retail Value	% Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2013	282	——-	447,174	——-	$7,259,364	——-	1,586	$25,742
2014	252	-10.64%	428,634	-4.15%	$7,415,712	2.15%	1,701	$29,427
2015*	450	78.57%	513,611	19.83%	$8,517,761	14.49%	1,141	$18,928
2016*	293	-34.88%	435,877	-15.13%	$7,150,087	-16.06%	1,488	$24,403
2017	409	39.59%	664,858	52.53%	$10,136,224	41.76%	1,626	$24,783
2018	613	49.88%	760,314	14.36%	$11,136,058	9.86%	1,240	$18.166
2019	635	3.59%	1,013,092	33.25%	$15,745,448	41.39%	1,595	$24,796
2020	551	-13.23%	1,380,328	36.25%	$21,157,243	34.37%	551	$38,398
2021	809	46.82%	1,901,467	37.75%	$30,131,057	42.41%	2,350	$37,245
2022	760	-6.06%	2,330,883	22.58%	$41,906,282	39.08%	3,067	$55,141
2023	976	28.42%	2,762,617	18.52%	$49,882,072	19.03%	2,831	$51,109

However, I’m not willing to pull an “We’ve always been at war with Eurasia” moment, so let’s look at the individual pieces of the past. This is what Penguin Putnam (Ace, Berkley Books, Dial, Dutton, Gotham Books, Grossett & Dunlap, Hudson Street, InkLit, New American Library, Penguin, Philomel, Plume, Price Stern Sloan, Puffin, Putnam, Razorbill, Riverhead and Viking) used to look like alone)

Year	# of listed items	% Change	Total Pieces	% Change	Calculated Retail Value	% Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	18	——	13,545	——	$178,260	——	753	$9,903
2008	28	55.56%	28,606	111.19%	$310,856	74.38%	1022	$11,102
2009	39	39.29%	40,288	40.84%	$444,928	43.13%	1033	$11,408
2010	45	15.38%	50,628	25.67%	$623,650	40.17%	1125	$13,859
2011	53	17.78%	123,749	144.43%	$1,576,161	152.73%	2335	$29,739
2012	60	13.21%	121,769	-1.60%	$1,499,660	-4.85%	2029	$24,994

This is what Random House (Alfred A. Knopf, Ballantine, Bantam, Broadway, Crown, Del Rey, Doubleday, Pantheon, Random House, Schocken, and Three Rivers) looked like alone:

Year	# of listed items	% Change	Total Pieces	% Change	Calculated Retail value	% Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	74	—	216,580	—	$2,890,347	—	2,927	$39,059
2008	77	5.47%	383,105	76.89%	$5,698,922	97.17%	4,975	$74,012
2009	109	41.56%	405,598	5.87%	$5,398,890	-5.26%	3,721	$49,531
2010	132	21.10%	389,410	-3.99%	$5,831,814	8.02%	2,950	$44,180
2011	144	9.09%	397,143	1.99%	$6,356,212	8.99%	2,760	$44,140
2012	185	28.47%	375,254	-5.51%	$7,124,794	12.09%	2,028	$38,512

Penguin Random House has one book over 200k, two others 100k, another four over 50k, 24 additional books over 20k, and another 32 books over 10k.

Solidly at #3 largest publisher in Western comics in Circana BookScan Top 750 in 2023: HarperCollins. Worth remembering is that HarperCollins completed the purchase of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2021 – HMH was the 11th largest Top 750 Circana BookScan publisher in 2020, if you will recall. Harper places 49 books into the Top 750 for about 1.3 million copies sold, and a calculated retail cover price of almost $22 million. There’s a lot of imprints with the word “Harper” in the title in the Long Tail (Harper, Harper Paperbacks, Harper Teen, Harper Festival, Harper Teen, and so on), and Harper is also Blazer & Bray, Clarion/Etch, ET, Katherine Tegan, Mariner, Quill Tree and William Morrow (in the Top 750); as well as Amistad, Dey Street, Ecco, Fourth Estate, Friday Project, Greenwillow, Harvest, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Joanna Cotler, IT books, Thomas Nelson, Versify, William Collins and Zondervan (out of the Top 750)

In alphabetical-by-imprint order:

At Balzer & Bray they place six titles into the Top 750, and it continues to be all about Terri Libenson. Surprisingly Sarah is her newest book (it appears to be the seventh book in the series, though HC doesn’t refer to this in titling or metadata) and is the #7 overall best-seller for HarperCollins. It sells about 50k copies. The other five volumes sell between 10k and 20k each.

Clarion/Etch was a formerly Houghton Mifflin Harcourt middle-grade imprint. Clarion places a dozen titles within the Top 750, led by the success of the web-first Hooky by Miriam Bonastre Tur – v1 (#2 overall for HarperCollins) leads with almost 77k copies, while v2 (#4) comes in at 75k sold, while v3 (#5) sells 73k – that’s a remarkably consistent sales pattern. This is followed by the success of Kayla Miller, and six books from her, first with Crunch (37k), then Camp (27k), Clash (#10, 36k), as well as four other books from her which sell between 11k-16k. Clarion also places The Crossover (18k) and Booked (12k) by Kwame Alexander, and The Giver by Lois Lowrey (just under 10k).

It’s probably a typo, but my chart also shows an imprint called ET, but it’s another Kayla Miller book that would have otherwise been in the Etch imprint – this is a second volume of Besties which sells a smidge over 10k

At the various Harper-named imprints, they have nineteen titles within the overall Circana BookScan Top 750. Their biggest hit is from gaming stars from YouTube. FGTeev’s Out of Time! is #1 for HarperCollins, with a bit over 100k sold. This is followed by Saves The World! (#9) with 41k sold Three other FGTeev books are in the chart mostly in the mid-30ks. HarperAlley has also tried to spin that success off with other YouTubers – Prestonplayz’s The Mystery of the Super Spooky Secret House sells about 32k, while Lankybox’s Epic Adventure sells a bit under 30k. The other big success is Johnnie Christmas’ Swim Team (#8, 46k). Also of note is James Dean’s Pete the Cat and the Sprinkle Stealer which almost does 30k, a pair of Erin Hunter “Warriors” comics selling 21, and Molly Ostertag’s Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Club: Roll Call which is just under 21k.

Katherine Tegan’s best-seller in 2023 is The First Cat In Space Ate Pizza which sold 18k in hardcover as well as 16k in paperback (unusual!).

Mariner was also a former HMH imprint, and has two in the Top 750: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home at 17k sold, and an adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 with 11k sold.

The Quill Tree imprint places four books, including Harper’s #3 best-seller for the year: Jerry Craft’s New Kid with 75k sold, while at #6 is Craft’s School Trip (55k), while Class Act sells 23k. And soaring up to #10 (thanks Netflix!) is N.D. Stevenson’s perennial Nimona, with 41k (up from 14k last year!)

Finally, the William Morrow imprint is in the Top 750 overall, but not a Top Twenty book for Harper – they sell 23k of the forever perennial Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud.

Here is the Long Tail for Harper, with HMH included as of 2022:

Year	# of listed items	Percent Change	Total Unit Sold	Percent Change	Calculated Retail value	Percent Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	18	——	36,940	——	$600,540	—–	2,052	$33,363
2008	36	100.00%	48,264	30.66%	$863,808	43.84%	1,341	$23,995
2009	42	16.67%	81,774	69.43%	$1,308,891	15.53%	1,947	$31,164
2010	41	-2.38%	64,429	-21.21%	$719,328	-45.04%	1,571	$17,545
2011	50	21.95%	75,394	17.02%	$1,083,609	50.64%	1,508	$21,672
2012	80	60.00%	159,573	111.65%	$2,113,744	95.07%	1,995	$26,422
2013	68	-15.00%	197,595	23.83%	$2,667,933	26.22%	2,906	$39,234
2014	115	69.12%	158,193	-19.94%	$2,398,836	-10.09%	1,376	$21,042
2015*	109	-5.22%	188,181	18.96%	$2,646,378	10.32%	1,726	$24,279
2016*	108	-0.09%	261,183	38.79%	$4,473,589	69.05%	2,418	$41,422
2017	107	-0.09%	357,972	37.06%	$5,530,994	23.64%	3,346	$51,692
2018	148	38.32%	517,800	44.65%	$7,506,751	35.72%	3,499	$50,721
2019	154	4.05%	891,701	72.21%	$13,894,052	85.09%	5,790	$90,221
2020	220	42.86%	1,219,785	36.79%	$19,396,157	39.60%	5,544	$88,164
2021	403	83.18%	1,668,202	36.76%	$26,028,053	34.19%	4,139	$64,586
2022	522	29.53%	1,852,589	11.05%	$28,095,121	7.94%	3,549	$53,822
2023	610	16.86%	1,861,205	0.47%	$30,626,452	9.01%	3,051	$50,207

Even modest growth is growth! HarperCollins has one book over 100k, another six over 50k, a further 15 books over 20k, and another 23 more over 10k.

Just for the historical record to remain intact, here is what Houghton Mifflin Harcourt used to sell before HarperCollins bought them in 2021; these numbers are not included in the above chart:

Year	# of listed items	Percent Change	Total Unit Sold	Percent Change	Calculated Retail value	Percent Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	4	——	20,474	——	$434,495	——	5119	$108,624
2008	6	50.00%	14,183	-30.73%	$307,019	-29.34%	2363	$51,170
2009	14	233.33%	24,568	73.22%	$436,328	42.12%	1755	$31,166
2010	17	21.43%	29,163	18.70%	$532,539	22.05%	1715	$31,326
2011	18	5.88%	24,239	-16.88%	$450,536	-15.40%	1347	$25,030
2012	21	16.67%	23,562	-2.79%	$402,575	-10.65%	1122	$1,9170
2013	29	38.10%	44,558	89.11%	$687,920	70.88%	1536	$23,721
2014	27	-6.90%	32,751	-26.50%	$552,884	-19.63%	1213	$20,477
2015*	33	22.22%	78,357	239.25%	$1,214,786	219.72%	2374	$36,812
2016*	38	15.15%	60,359	-22.97%	$943,188	22.36%	1588	$24,821
2017	27	-28.95%	42,963	-28.82%	$710,481	-24.67%	1591	$26,314
2018	60	222.22%	41,596	-3.18%	$701,891	-1.21%	693	$11,698
2019	59	-1.67%	192,157	361.96%	$2,909,580	314.53%	3257	$49,315
2020	75	27.12%	253,602	31.98%	$3,611,395	24.12%	3381	$48,152

Coming in at #4 is Macmillan, owned by Holtzbrink, another of the “big five”, and is also one of those publishers with lots and lots (and lots) of imprints, although only FirstSecond, Hill + Wang, Roaring Brook and Square Fish place within the Circana BookScan Top 750 – I have also identified Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Feiwel & Friends, Griffin, Henry Holt, Imprint, Metropolitan, Picador, Rodale Press, St. Martins Griffin, Times books, and Tor. Macmillan also distributes several other publishers they don’t own (including Bloomsbury, Drawn & Quarterly, Papercutz, and Seven Seas) Holtzbrinck-owned companies placed 21 titles in the Top 750, for about 723k copies sold and about a calculated $10.5m gross combined.

First Second is their most successful imprint by far, and their biggest hit is John Patrick Green’s Investigators series. We actually start with the new spin-off series: Investigators: Agents of S.U.I.T. where v1 is #1 with 83k sold. Then it goes back to the main Investigators series with v7, All Tide Up (#2) does 73k, followed by v6, Heist and Seek (#3, 63k), v1 at #4 (49k), v5 Braver and Boulder at #7 (42k), v4 Ants in our P.A.N.T.S. at #8 (40k), and v2 Take The Plunge at #10 (35k). v3 Off the Hook would be #11 if we counted past ten (also 35k) – this is a popular series! Worth noting that none of the volume numbers or sequences are noted in any of the metadata for nearly any Macmillan published book.

Also hitting from FirstSecond is Claribel Ortega’s Frizzy (#5, 44k), Clint McElroy’s Adventure Zone v5: Eleventh Hour (#6, 43k), and Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese (#9, 38k). Also of note: Zack Weinersmith’s Bea Wolf with nearly 23k sold.

Hill & Wang places within the Top 750 with the adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which sells nearly 12k.

Roaring Brook has three placers with Nick Bruel’s Bad Kitty, with what looks to be v5, Supercat selling 30k, while v2, Gets a Phone sells 23k. Additionally, Leigh Bardugo’s Demon in the Woods sells 13k.

Finally at Square Fish, Macmillan’s imprint of primarily cheaper-priced books that succeeded at other imprints (I don’t really get this strategy as a book seller, to be honest) places a single book, the adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, which sells 12k

Here’s Macmillan’s Long Tail, which shows a solid uptick in 2023:

Year	# of listed items	Percent Change	Total Unit Sold	Percent Change	Calculated Retail value	Percent Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	39	——	31,452	——	$559,681	—–	806	$14,351
2008	66	69.23%	63,473	101.81%	$1,132,767	102.40%	962	$17,163
2009	88	33.34%	84,090	32.48%	$1,438,044	26.95%	956	$16,341
2010	108	22.73%	68,599	-18.42%	$1,085,311	-24.53%	635	$10,049
2011	139	28.70%	114,243	66.54%	$1,794,084	65.31%	822	$12,907
2012	165	18.71%	126,745	10.94%	$2,077,143	15.78%	768	$12,589
2013	187	13.33%	142,375	12.33%	$2,395,569	15.33%	761	$12,811
2014	222	18.72%	190,682	33.93%	$3,096,858	23.27%	859	$13,950
2015*	104	-53.15%	99,223	-47.96%	$1,804,001	-41.75%	954	$17,346
2016*	272	161.54%	272,668	174.80%	$4,240,075	135.04%	1,002	$15,589
2017	336	23.53%	437,258	60.36%	$6,616,130	56.04%	1,301	$19,691
2018	427	27.08%	723,096	65.37%	$11,701,046	76.86%	1,693	$27,403
2019	494	15.70%	946,680	30.92%	$15,814,819	35.16%	1,916	$32,014
2020	552	11.74%	1,022,598	8.02%	$16,455,419	4.05%	1,853	$29,811
2021	602	9.06%	1,214,283	18.74%	$18,989,371	15.40%	2,017	$31,544
2022	683	13.46%	1,203,338	-0.01%	$18,701,422	-1.52%	1,762	$27,381
2023	746	9.22%	1,269,148	5.47%	$20,650,460	10.42%	1,701	$27,682

Macmillan has three books over 50k, ten more over 20k, and three others over 10k.

Next in the Top 750 at #5 publisher is Andrews McMeel. This is a publisher that often has frustrated me by how they’ve been represented by Circana BookScan – as I noted, it used to be that “humor” books like Far Side and Calvin & Hobbes used to rule the Circana BookScan charts. Until, one day, poof! Almost all of those books disappeared entirely from the dataset I was given, throwing off a whole lot of my comparables. And, for the most part, comic strip reprints have stayed out of these charts for half a decade. But, they’ve started creeping back into the listings for the last few years (See below!). I’m actually fine with comic strips and comic books co-existing in the same places – at least they’re both comics – but the inconsistency just drives me nucking futz.

I found 26 titles from AMcM in the Top 750 in 2023, for 457k copies and $11.3 million in calculated dollars, but clearly that number would scale up to some degree if it listed all of the strip collections they publish. What’s interesting about Andrews McMeel is that, for the most part, their “graphic novels” are reformatted/repackaged newspaper strips. In other words, this is basically the other paid-for way one can serialize work: through syndicated newspaper pages – as diminished as it is.

2023’s top book for Andrew’s McMeel is Lincoln Peirce’s Big Nate, where v28 (Nailed It!) is #1 with nearly 40k sold. In addition, v29 “Move It or Lose It!” is #5 (26k), v27 Release the Hounds! is #6 (24k), v26 Beware of Low-Flying Corn Muffins is #9 (20k) and v2 Prank You Very Much is #10 (almost 19k). Also within the Top 750 are a few two-in-one volumes (these are not numbered for some reason): Very Funny! sells almost 19k, No Worries! does almost 18k, and Stays Classy is under 10k.

Following this is the new paperback edition of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson which is the #2 best-seller for Andrews McMeel, with 33k sold. Because this edition is $135 retail, it’s actually the #3 dollar book for the entire 2023 BookScan, selling almost $.5 million in calculated dollars. The hardcover edition of this same package sells another almost 9k copies, and because of that edition’s $225 cover price, it would have been #23 overall in calculated dollars. In addition, the newest Calvin reformat, the Portable Compendium” books, sold almost 16k copies. And, if we’re talking about conventional strips, the paperback edition of Gary Larson’s The Complete Far Side also placed in the Top 750, a bit under 10k.

Following this comes Animal Rescue Friends where v2 is #3 for Andrews McMeel, while v1 is #4 (both sell right around 27k)

Then comes Dana Simpson’s Phoebe and Her Unicorn with the self-titled v1 is #7, selling about 24k. A few others of this series place in the Top 750, with v17, Punk Rock Unicorn selling about 14k copies, v16 (Unicornado) selling about 12k, and a pair of unnumbered “two in one” editions, one selling about 12k, the other under 10k.

After that, the last title within their Top Ten is v1 of the three-in-one editions of Enola Holmes which comes in at #8 and sells about 21k. v2 of that bind-up sells about 11k. No other Andrews McMeel book sells over 20k.

Andrews McMeel’s Long Tail chart is for sure my most frustrating one because they publish a whole lot of comics (humor strips, like “Calvin & Hobbes”) where the BISAC changed to something we’re having a hard time properly getting – so almost certainly they’re doing several times better than this chart would suggest because of those books. Further, things appear and disappear in a way I’ve never been able to make sense of – it might be them changing BISACs after the fact. Most of my comparatives are terrible and counterproductive here, and I really apologize for the crappiness of my data in this specific publisher’s instance.

Year	# of listed items	Percent Change	Total Unit Sold	Percent Change	Calculated Retail Value	Percent Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	22	——	29,835	——	$461,238	—–	1,356	$20,965
2008	20	-9.09%	25,115	-15.82%	$388,965	-15.67%	1,256	$19,448
2009	21	5.00%	26,205	4.34%	$401,982	3.35%	1,248	$19,142
2010	19	-9.52%	47,181	80.05%	$544,852	35.54%	2,483	$28,676
2011	17	-10.53%	116,850	147.66%	$1,222,171	124.31%	6,874	$71,892
2012	31	82.53%	225,546	93.02%	$2,737,935	124.02%	7,276	$88,320
2013	43	38.71%	343,681	52.38%	$3,747,799	36.88%	7,993	$87,158
2014	59	37.21%	373,713	8.74%	$4,387,252	17.06%	6,334	$74,360
2015*	76	28.81%	502,061	34.34%	$5,950,368	35.63%	6,606	$78,294
2016*	85	11.84%	472,145	-5.96%	$5,147,673	-13.49%	5,555	$60,561
2017	140	64.71%	520,554	10.25%	$5,644,031	9.64%	3,718	$40,315
2018	273	95.00%	735,184	41.23%	$11,862,349	210.18%	2,693	$43,452
2019	277	1.46%	611,784	-16.79%	$11,078,977	-6.60%	2,209	$39,996
2020	288	3.97%	644,390	5.33%	$13,539,999	22.21%	2,237	$47,014
2021	359	24.65	929,267	44.21%	$20,557,874	51.83%	2,588	$57,264
2022	374	4.18%	913,185	-1.73%	$17,581,342	-14.48%	2,442	$47,009
2023	350	-6.42%	836,627	-8.38%	$19,228,644	9.37%	2,390	$54,939

Andrews McMeel has eight books over 20k, and 14 others over 10k.

In a pretty surprising move forward this year, IDW Publishing jumps up another place to become the #6 Western publisher in the BookScan 2023 Top 750 – surprising because of whom they just moved in front of – placing seven books for a total of 286k sold, and a bit under $7m in calculated dollars. The vast majority of this growth comes down to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin, but any “W” is a “W”. Further, this now makes IDW the best-performing “Direct Market native” publisher in the bookstore market Top 750, which is a really big power move. IDW has a lot of imprints, including Artist Editions, Black Crown, Library of American Comics, Top Shelf, Yoe Books, and, of course, IDW itself.

As implied above, their best-seller from regular IDW branding is TMNT: The Last Ronin (#1), which sells and amazing 148k in its sophomore frame (up significantly from 66k in the previous year), and while they also sell almost 23k copies of the sequel volume TMNT The Last Ronin – Lost Years (#4). In addition, they sell a good amount of Sonic The Hedgehog comics – with Sonic & Tails: Best Buds Forever (#5) selling 21k copies, while v1 of the ongoing series is #6 with 14k sold.

The rest of their best-sellers come from Top Shelf. George Takei’s They Called Us Enemy (#2) sells nearly 44k this year, while the award-winning March is #3 for Book One (23k) and #7 for Book Three (13k) – Book Two hammocks with just 5300 copies sold, so weird how people buy things!!

Here is IDW’s Long Tail for 2023 – solid growth!

Year	# of listed items	Percent Change	Total Unit Sold	Percent Change	Calculated Retail value	Percent Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	233	——	102,118	——	$2,090,647	—–	438	$8,973
2008	335	43.78%	146,125	43.09%	$2,766,505	32.33%	436	$8,258
2009	477	42.39%	215,907	47.76%	$4,346,836	57.12%	453	$9,113
2010	623	30.61%	161,578	-25.16%	$3,653,680	-15.95%	259	$5,865
2011	785	26.00%	206,136	27.58%	$4,884,606	33.69%	263	$6,222
2012	937	19.36%	162,599	-21.12%	$4,329,973	-11.35%	174	$4,621
2013	1059	13.02%	180,694	11.13%	$4,443,372	2.62%	171	$4,196
2014	1134	7.08%	228,895	26.68%	$5,309,992	19.50%	200	$4,641
2015*	959	-15.43%	310,512	35.66%	$6,478,023	22.00%	324	$6,755
2016*	978	1.98%	343,197	10.53%	$8,194,098	26.49%	351	$8,378
2017	1639	67.59%	346,368	0.92%	$8,278,617	1.03%	211	$5,051
2018	1811	10.05%	279,435	-19.32%	$6,525,696	-21.17%	154	$3,603
2019	1817	0.33%	330,051	18.11%	$7,443,310	14.06%	182	$4,096
2020	1906	4.90%	527,405	59.80%	$12,365,146	66.12%	277	$6,487
2021	1979	3.83%	512,757	-2.78%	$12,723,523	2.90%	259	$6,429
2022	1898	-4.09%	567,910	10.76%	$14,192,263	11.54%	299	$7,477
2023	1879	-1.00%	602,982	6.18%	$16,056,897	13.14%	321	$8,545

IDW has one book over 100k, three books over 20k, and another two over 10k.

Dropping to the #7 publisher in the Top 750 is DC Comics. DC spent a really long time as the #1 Western publisher before losing it to Scholastic, and was at least #2 until 2018. If there was a traditional Direct Market publisher that already had all of the tools they needed to compete in the book market (at least, before AT&T Discovery started laying people off) it was DC, but modern DC can’t get much traction in the book market any longer, so it seems to me that the brain drain from their cost-cutting layoffs has done them dramatically more harm than good.

In 2023 they placed just 14 titles in the Top BookScan 750 for 215k units, and $4.6 million in calculated retail price. This is DC’s worst sales performace in the Top 750 since 2004. Down in the long tail we can still track America’s Best Comics, Black Label, DC Ink, CMX, Jinxworld, Paradox, Mad, Minx, Vertigo, Wildstorm, and Zoom – makes you wonder how stores still have those handful of copies to sell of imprints that in some cases have been defunct for two decades now! But a certain amount of this should be wholly in DC’s control as they control their metadata.

Here’s a year-to-year comparison chart of the Top 750 for DC (Because I started from my first BookScan survey with a complete Direct Market bias, but I hate throwing away charts, especially ones with twenty-one years of provenance):

Year	# of placing titles	Unit sales	Calculated Retail price
2003	74	336,569	$6,151,258
2004	39	179,440	$3,135,983
2005	42	298,484	$5,440,001
2006	59	551,160	$10,246,082
2007	58	487,467	$9,953,976
2008	71	1,015,864	$19,805,098
2009	93	1,223,733	$24,061,834
2010	96	648,403	$12,523,128
2011	107	660,706	$13,083,378
2012	104	688,870	$14,811,979
2013	130	767,686	$15,620,981
2014	131	931,239	$19,207,755
2015*	119	1,074,304	$21,701,088
2016*	117	1,234,047	$23,203,071
2017	101	827,544	$15,234,525
2018	47	360,414	$7,810,753
2019	33	413,923	$9,691,574
2020	29	442,163	$10,332,226
2021	17	396,475	$8,335,338
2022	20	396,743	$8,986,139
2023	14	214,583	$4,614,151

2023 is not very good for DC in the Top 750.

DC’s #1 book via Circana BookScan reporters in 2023 is Teen Titans: Robin by Kami Garcia and Gabriel Picola, which sells 34k. This is v4 of the YA Titans graphic novel series, originally branded as being from Zoom. V3, Teen Titans: Beast Boy Loves Raven is #10, selling a little bit over 10k.

At #2 is the paperback of Alan Moore & Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen, for about 24k copies, while the hardcover edition is #9, with almost 11k more sold.

At #3 is Neil Gaiman’s Sandman where the new reformatted Book One sells 23k copies. Book Two only sells about 8300 copies, I will repeat what I said last year: As a bookseller, I’m pretty certain that moving to four $40 volumes, as opposed to ten $20 volumes a) depressed the maximize size of the audience (since far fewer people will “jump in” at the more expensive initial price point) and 2) cost them money in absolute terms ($80 vs $200 for the entire story), but I guess that’s why I “just” sell comics for a living.

This is followed by five Batman comics – Year One by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli is #4 (19k copies sold), I am a little surprised that the next is Batman ‘89 at #5 – a continuation of the original Tim Burton film – with about 16k sold. Killing Joke by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland is #6 (15k), while Scott Snyder & Jock’s The Batman Who Laughs is #7 (12k). Then at #8 I see a place where I messed up and miscategorized v1 of Joker: One Operation Joker by Satoshi Miyagawa, which sold 11k – that should have been in Manga! As should have Batman: Justice Buster v1 which sells under 10k. I will get those cleaned up for next year. It is worth noting that Viz’s Spider-Man manga sold nearly 50k, so these could be considered an under-performance. Either way, there’s no other “traditional” Batman comic (Dark Knight Returns, Hush, Long Halloween, Court of Owls, etc) that sells even 10k copies, which is genuinely confounding to this viewer.

The only other book that sells over 10k for DC in 2023, as reported by BookScan, is V For Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. And that’s only by a few hundred copies.

2022 had showed some good legs for Young Adult and Middle Reader DC comics, but 2023 washed a lot of that away. Except for the above noted YA Teen Titans comics, the next most successful in 2023 is “Primer” which does less than 9k this year – dropped substantially from 14k last year. I was also a little surprised to see a fairly low number for the webtoon-originated Batman: Wayne Family Adventures where v1 only trickled in about 6700 copies. And let’s maybe try to forget the other webtoon titles Zatanna and the House of Secrets or Vixen NYC where v1 of those didn’t even sell enough copies to pay for the printing costs – 757 and 302 respectively. But if DC can’t sell traditional versions of their characters, and they are also not getting traction with either manga or YA-focused webtoon-first material, then it isn’t really looking very good for them, if you ask this observer.

Here’s DC’s Long Tail – and it is the single worst year we have ever recorded for them, despite having the most number of SKUs ever tracking.

Year	# of listed items	% Change	Total Pieces	% Change	Calculated Retail Value	% Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	1644	—	1,181,218	—	$22,033,212	—	719	$13,402
2008	2057	25.12%	1,719,330	45.56%	$33,609,704	52.54%	836	$16,339
2009	2264	10.06%	1,902,181	10.64%	$37,816,864	12.52%	840	$16,704
2010	2442	7.86%	1,320,262	-30.59%	$25,982,910	-31.29%	541	$10,640
2011	2423	-0.07%	1,323,630	0.26%	$27,130,811	4.42%	546	$11,197
2012	2452	1.20%	1,206,198	-8.87%	$26,729,997	-1.48%	492	$10,901
2013	2551	4.04%	1,369,850	13.57%	$29,881,153	11.79%	537	$11,714
2014	2746	7.64%	1,638,901	19.64%	$35,388,570	18.43%	597	$12,887
2015*	1690	-38.46%	1,997,577	21.89%	$43,031,546	21.60%	1,182	$25,462
2016*	1214	-28.17%	2,262,888	13.82%	$47,963,215	11.46%	1,864	$39,508
2017	3152	259.64%	1,948,037	-13.91%	$42,921,514	-10.51%	618	$13,617
2018	3364	6.73%	1,333,836	-31.53%	$31,844,186	-25.81%	397	$9,466
2019	3229	-4.01%	1,303,807	-2.25%	$33,428,626	4.98%	404	$10,353
2020	3668	13.59%	1,338,405	2.65%	$36,315,104	8.63%	365	$9,901
2021	3905	3.46%	1,694,306	26.59%	$49,650,333	36.72%	434	$12,715
2022	3985	0.20%	1,466,165	-13.47%	$43,450,832	-12.49%	368	$10,904
2023	4011	0.65%	1,095,006	-25.31%	$33,170,363	-23.66%	273	$8,270

DC has three books over 20k, and just eight more that come in over 10k.

It is a massive four-position surge forward for #8 of the Western Publishers in the Top 750, and it’s another of the “Big Five” traditional book publishers with Simon & Schuster. They manage to place nine titles into this year’s Top 750. These nine titles place 198k copies, for about $2.6m in calculated dollar sales.

Simon has several imprints, including Aladdin, Atria, Atheneum, Free Press, Gallery 13, Little Simon, Margaret K. Elderberry, Pocket, Scribner, and Touchstone, though not all of those imprints made it into the Top 750.

Simon’s #1 book is the kids-aimed Spy School (36k sold), from their self-named Simon For Younger Readers imprint, in addition to placing Spy Camp (#4, 24k sold). Both are by Stuart Gibbs.

From Aladdin is Keeper of the Lost Cities: The Graphic Novel, Part 1 V1 by Shannon Messenger, at #2, with 30k sold.

The Atheneum imprint places two books: Bunnicula by James Howe (#5, 18k), and Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds (#9, 13k)

From Little Simon is The Coldfire Curse by Jordan Quinn (#6, 16k)

Simon Spotlight has three books, all by Coco Simon: Katie and the Cupcake Cure” (#3, 29k), Emma on the Thin Icing (#7, 16k) and Mia in the Mix (#8, 16k)

Nothing other than that sells 10k

Here is Simon & Schuster’s Long Tail for 2023, very solid growth!

Year	# of listed items	% Change	Total Pieces	% Change	Calculated Retail Value	% Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	12	—	8,317	—	$158,014	—	693	$13,168
2008	26	116.67%	14,917	79.36%	$211,798	34.04%	574	$8,146
2009	41	57.69%	109,558	634.45%	$1,430,544	575.43%	2,672	$34,891
2010	46	12.20%	214,828	96.09%	$2,660,094	85.95%	4,670	$57,828
2011	62	34.78%	187,531	-12.71%	$2,383,491	-10.40%	3,025	$38,443
2012	63	1.61%	165,831	-11.57%	$2,844,453	19.34%	2,632	$45,150
2013	67	6.35%	258,931	56.14%	$4,165,350	46.44%	3,865	$62,169
2014	71	5.97%	383,878	48.25%	$6,520,821	26.55%	5,407	$91,843
2015*	75	5.63%	910,341	237.14%	$13,386,461	205.29%	12,138	$178,486
2016*	75	——	618,922	-32.01%	$9,477,798	-29.20%	8,252	$126,371
2017	89	18.67%	449,243	-27.42%	$6,788,432	-28.38%	5,048	$76,275
2018	88	-1.12%	38,804	-91.36%	$739,664	-89.10%	441	$8,405
2019	100	13.64%	80,795	108.21%	$1,502,286	103.10%	808	$15,023
2020	128	28.00%	93,785	16.08%	$1,841,672	22.59%	733	$14,388
2021	193	50.78%	247,842	164.27%	$3,454,596	87.58%	1,284	$17,899
2022	287	48.70%	344,299	38.92%	$4,526,426	31.03%	1,200	$15,772
2023	367	27.87%	434,478	26.19%	$6,294,866	39.06%	1,184	$17,152

[Almost all of that 2018 drop was my reconsidering hybrid-prose books like Rachel Renee Russell’s “Dork Diaries” as not properly being “comics”, so that was on me, not them!]

Simon & Schuster has four books over 20k, and five more books over 10k in 2023.

Coming in at publisher #9 in the Top 750 for 2023’s BookScan is religious publisher David C Cook who publishes Sergio Cariello’s The Action Bible: God’s Redemptive Story. The book sells 167k copies – a really substantial number of copies, in fact, the eleventh best-selling book of the year, and up significantly from last year’s 107k sold.. I’m not going to make a formal long tail here, since they publish nothing else that does nearly as well – their next best-selling book is The Action Bible Christmas: 25 Stories About Jesus’ Arrival which doesn’t even pull in 6800 sold. But still: really register that those over 167k copies is more than a few publishers sell annually for everything they publish combined!

And closing out the Top Ten publishers for the Circana BookScan Top 750 this year, at #10, while not considered one of the book world’s “Big Five”, is Harry N. Abrams. They are also not considered a traditional Direct Market publisher, putting out Abrams Comicarts, Harry N. Abrams, as well as Amulet Books. They distribute, but do not publish, U.K. publisher SelfMadeHero, and are distributed themselves by Hachette. Abrams places nine books that they publish, selling 137k copies for $2.2m in calculated dollars.

Abrams’ best-seller in 2023 is from the Abrams imprint: #1 is Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales v12: Above the Trenches which sells 26k. From the same series is v11 Cold War Correrespondent at #4 (13k), v7 Raid of No Return at #6 (12k), v4 Treaties, Trenches, Mud and Blood at #7 (12k), and v1 One Dead Spy at #9 with about 9400 sold.

Also placing from Abrams is Spider-Man: Animals Assemble (#3, 17k… and selling better than any native-to-Marvel title), Matthew Gubler’s The Little Kid With the Big Green Hand (#5, 12k), and The Best We Can Do by Thi Bui (#8, 10k)

Finally, from the Amulet imprint is El Deafo by Cece Bell as their #2 best-seller, selling 25k copies.

Here is your long-tail, with some reasonable growth:

Year	# of listed items	Percent Change	Total Unit Sold	Percent Change	Calculated Retail value	Percent Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2008	3	——	10,031	——	$148,675	——	3,344	$49,558
2009	25	733.33%	24,116	140.41%	$640,635	330.90%	965	$25,625
2010	41	64.00%	48,240	100.03%	$1,109,444	73.18%	1,177	$27,060
2011	49	19.51%	31,846	-33.98%	$731,054	-34.11%	650	$14,919
2012	62	26.53%	37,522	17.82%	$756,650	3.50%	605	$12,204
2013	70	12.90%	72,538	93.32%	$3,278,063	333.23%	1,036	$46,829
2014	88	25.71%	74,083	2.13%	$2,324,820	-29.10%	842	$26,418
2015*	92	4.55%	145,633	96.58%	$1,898,267	-18.35%	1,583	$20,633
2016*	112	21.74%	177,127	21.63%	$2,326,956	22.58%	1,581	$20,776
2017	124	10.71%	248,580	40.34%	$3,449,807	48.25%	2,005	$27,821
2018	138	11.29%	258,334	3.92%	$3,776,138	9.46%	1,872	$27,363
2019	148	7.25%	265,300	2.70%	$4,089,631	8.30%	1,791	$27,633
2020	152	2.70%	306,087	15.37%	$4,891,229	19.60%	2,014	$32,179
2021	181	19.08%	372,948	21.84%	$6,803,571	39.10%	2,060	$37,589
2022	212	17.13%	336,512	-9.77%	$6,279,071	-7.71%	1,587	$29,618
2023	250	17.92%	362,117	7.61%	$6,610,786	5.28%	1,448	$26,443

Abrams has two books over 20k, and six more over 10k in 2023.

That is it for the top ten publishers within the Top 750 of BookScan 2023, but there’s a few more publishers that are worth singling out for attention because they have a historical importance, they are significant for either the book or comics markets, they are growing, or there is otherwise something of note about them!

Since this is a report on bookstore sales, let’s start with the last of the mainstream book world’s “Big Five”: Hachette, which includes the imprints of Algonquin, Atria, Back Bay, Basic Books, Black Dog & Leventhal, Bold Type, Carrol & Graf, Da Capo, Grand Central, Hodder, Ilex, Jimmy Patterson, JY, Little Brown, Nation Books, Orchard, Orion, Running Press, Trapeze, Virago, Voracious, Warner Books and Workman in the Long Tail. In the Top 750 only JY places anything, and it is just three books, selling 76k copies and $987k. They also publish manga as Yen which is up above in the previous manga section.

The JY imprint is home to Svetlana Chmakova’s work, and her three books are the only placers within the Top 750: Enemies (#1 with 38k sold), Awkward (#2 with 24k sold, and Crush (#3, with 14k sold). None of their other imprints manage to score any titles at 10k or over.

Here’s the Long Tail of just the Western books for Hachette. It’s not looking good in 2023

Year	# of listed items	Percent Change	Total Unit Sold	Percent Change	Calculated Retail value	Percent Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	15	——	39,181	——	$689,383	——	2,612	$45,959
2008	18	20.00%	37,519	-4.24%	$596,609	-13.46%	2,084	$33,145
2009	18	——	40,172	7.07%	$642,935	7.76%	2,232	$35,719
2010	19	5.56%	160,992	300.76%	$3,097,996	381.85%	8,473	$163,052
2011	24	26.32%	88,131	-45.26	$1,273,500	-58.89%	3,672	$53,063
2012	28	16.67%	110,897	25.83%	$1,565,744	22.95%	3,961	$55,919
2013	24	-14.29%	39,093	-65.75%	$584,783	-62.65%	1,629	$24,366
2014	32	33.33%	38,853	-0.61%	$593,667	1.52%	1,214	$18,552
2015*	30	-0.63%	61,539	58.39%	$830,047	39.82%	2,051	$27,668
2016*	56	86.67%	81,648	32.68%	$1,654,511	99.33%	1,458	$29,545
2017	78	39.29%	220,591	170.17%	$2,998,501	81.23%	2,828	$38,442
2018	203	260.26%	363,575	64.82%	$4,541,954	51.47%	1,791	$22,374
2019	152	-25.12%	356,334	-1.99%	$4,469,594	-1.59%	2,344	$29,405
2020	216	42.11%	359,018	0.75%	$5,141,443	15.03%	1,662	$23,803
2021	261	20.83%	382,223	6.46%	$5,411,286	5.25%	1,464	$20,733
2022	270	3.45%	360,902	-5.58%	$4,894,962	-9.54%	1,337	$18,129
2023	315	16.67%	286,171	-20.71%	$4,046,436	-17.33%	908	$12,846

And if you add the Manga from Yen, the combined total looks slightly better, like this:

Year	# of listed items	Percent Change	Total Unit Sold	Percent Change	Calculated Retail value	Percent Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	25	——	52,077	——	$836,832	—–	2,083	$33,473
2008	108	332.00%	147,645	183.51%	$1,834,469	119.22%	1,367	$16,986
2009	229	112.04%	371,134	151.37%	$4,340,048	132.78%	1,621	$18,952
2010	363	58.52%	721,975	94.53%	$9,748,867	124.63%	1,999	$26,856
2011	484	33.33%	852,256	18.05%	$11,227,466	15.17%	1,761	$23,197
2012	576	19.01%	758,845	-10.96%	$10,301,009	-8.25%	1,317	$17,884
2013	678	17.71%	731,473	-3.61%	$10,300,204	—–	1,079	$15,192
2014	808	19.17%	720,988	-1.43%	$10,579,169	2.71%	892	$13,093
2015*	742	-8.17%	994,407	37.92%	$14,304,955	35.22%	1,340	$19,279
2016*	849	14.42%	1,153,656	16.01%	$17,174,718	20.06%	1,359	$20,229
2017	1481	74.44%	1,199,553	3.98%	$16,865,176	-1.80%	810	$11,388
2018	1940	30.99%	1,253,803	4.52%	$17,593,705	4.32%	646	$9,069
2019	1998	2.99%	1,240,930	-1.03%	$17,477,769	-0.66%	621	$8,748
2020	2226	11.41%	1,449,020	16.77%	$20,939,201	19.80%	651	$9,407
2021	2408	8.18%	3,400,677	134.69%	$49,107,307	134.52%	1,412	$20,393
2022	2567	6.60%	3,585,248	5.43%	$52,808,456	7.54%	1,397	$20,572
2023	2972	15.78%	3,156,714	-11.95%	$48,647,036	-7.88%	1,062	$16,368

Hachette has two titles over 20k, and one more over 10k, on the Western charts.

While not one of the “Big Five”, Hyperion/Disney Press is also a bookmarket-first publisher who has books in the Top 750. They place four books, which sell 79k, or $896k calculated

Disney Press / Hyperion is, like Marvel, also owned by Disney. Technically, that probably means I should fold them together like I do with the various individual companies that make up a publisher like Penguin Random House, but I resist, how I resist (largely because they have been distributed completely separately prior to this year where everything is now through Penguin Random House). But I have to point out that once again, Hyperion/Disney Press did better than Marvel did – Hyperion would be the #13 publisher in the Top 750, while Marvel would have only been #16. Even combined they still would only have been #11

Their best-selling title is Spidey and His Amazing Friends: Team Spidey Does It All! with 36k sold. Again: that’s the fourth publisher that sells more copies of Marvel products than Marvel itself. This is followed by the adaptation of Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief (18k), then Gravity Falls: Lost Legends (15k), with Part of Your World: A Twisted Tale just over 10k.

Here is the Long Tail for Hyperion/Disney. Finally reversing their plunge, perhaps due to the switch in distribution to Penguin Random House.

Year	# of listed items	Percent Change	Total Unit Sold	Percent Change	Calculated Retail value	Percent Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	10	—–	39,121	—–	$336,771	—–	3,912	$33,677
2008	19	90.00%	41,005	4.82%	$409,051	21.46%	2,158	$21,529
2009	24	26.32%	23,301	-43.18%	$234,078	-42.78%	971	$9,753
2010	26	8.33%	30,860	32.44%	$314,067	34.17%	1,187	$12,080
2011	29	11.54%	46,553	50.85%	$392,652	25.02%	1,605	$13,540
2012	31	6.90%	33,105	-28.89%	$376,735	-4.05%	1,068	$12,153
2013	33	6.45%	102,537	209.73%	$1,298,672	244.72%	3,107	$39,354
2014	38	15.15%	77,045	-24.86%	$1,015,188	-21.83%	2,028	$26,715
2015*	57	50.00%	63,290	-17.85%	$831,477	-18.10%	1,110	$14,587
2016*	36	-36.84%	61,730	-2.46%	$926,504	11.43%	1,715	$25,736
2017	41	13.89%	99,589	61.33%	$1,592,970	71.93%	2,429	$38,853
2018	54	31.71%	132,623	33.17%	$2,228,412	39.89%	2,456	$41,267
2019	63	16.67%	158,896	19.81%	$2,473,413	10.99%	2,522	$39,261
2020	49	-22.22%	149,565	-5.82%	$2,362,499	-4.48%	3,052	$48,214
2021	45	-8.16%	125,017	-16.41%	$1,966,885	-16.75%	2,778	$43,709
2022	43	-4.44%	86,720	-30.63%	$1,291,665	-34.33%	2,017	$30,039
2023	50	16.28%	140,717	62.27%	$1,828,771	41.58%	2,814	$36,575

Hyperion/Disney has one book over 20k, and three more books over 10k.

Also very not a “Big Five” bookstore publisher is Candlewick, who manages to get two books into the Top 750 this year – this looks like the first time ever, despite them being a publisher of some longevity (since 1992). These books are Hoops: A Graphic Novel by Matt Tavares (17k sold) and Tom Angleberger’s Two Headed Chicken from the Walker Books imprint which is the lowest selling book on the Top 750, with just 9639 sold.

If Candlewick can place two books next year too, I’ll go back and build the historical long tail! Otherwise, they just have one book over 10k.

THE DIRECT MARKET FAVES

Outside of those bookstore-native publishers, we’ve got a couple of publishers who placed more than two titles into the Top 750. All three of these are Direct Market-natives.

Let’s do them in Alphabetical order?

First up is Dark Horse Comics. They place three titles into the Top 750 for 52k, and $972k in calculated retail value.

Dark Horse’s Western best-seller is Minecraft (v1 is #1, with 23k sold). Next comes Avatar: The Last Airbender, where the large paperback omnibus format is the king. At #2 (18k) is The Search, while at #3 (11k) is The Promise

Here’s what Dark Horse’s Western performance looks like in the Long Tail. Second year down.

Year	# of listed items	Percent Change	Total Unit Sold	Percent Change	Calculated Retail value	Percent Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	597	——	413,022	——	$7,607,264	—–	692	$14,745
2008	734	22.95%	552,815	33.85%	$9,329,828	22.64%	753	$12,711
2009	798	8.72%	455,924	-17.53%	$7,757,240	-16.86%	571	$9,721
2010	955	19.67%	445,248	-2.34%	$7,852,063	1.22%	466	$8,222
2011	1025	7.33%	389,514	-12.52%	$7,102,710	-9.54%	380	$6,929
2012	1133	10.54%	377,322	-3.13%	$6,907,772	-2.74%	333	$6,097
2013	1238	9.27%	383,391	1.61%	$7,391,831	7.01%	310	$5,971
2014	1420	14.70%	421,708	9.99%	$8,982,411	21.52%	297	$6,326
2015*	947	-33.31%	376,231	-10.78%	$8,120,937	–9.59%	397	$8,575
2016*	877	-7.39%	461,297	22.61%	$9,076,526	11.77%	526	$10,350
2017	1598	82.21%	478,658	3.76%	$9,256,795	1.99%	300	$5,793
2018	1615	1.06%	485,919	1.52%	$9,410,362	1.66%	301	$5,827
2019	1612	-0.18%	459,996	-5.33%	$9,617,364	2.20%	285	$5,966
2020	1686	4.59%	971,551	111.21%	$20,408,830	112.21%	576	$12,105
2021	1894	12.34%	988,766	1.77%	$22,230,359	8.93%	522	$11,737
2022	1930	1.90%	806,402	-18.44%	$18,718,651	-15.80%	418	$9,699
2023	2002	3.73%	627,703	-22.16%	$14,977,650	-19.99%	314	$7,481

Dark Horse, on the Western charts alone, has one title over 20k, and two more over 10k.

Dark Horse’s Manga offerings are up in that section. Dark Horse is one of the rare publishers that does a significant business in both Eastern and Western comics, and I’m sure they’d prefer all of their numbers to be represented together. In which case, their Long Tail actually looks like this:

Year	# of listed items	Percent Change	Total Unit Sold	Percent Change	Calculated Retail value	Percent Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	938	——	662,965	——	$10,936,728	—–	707	$11,660
2008	1075	14.61%	801,796	20.94%	$12,506,698	14.36%	746	$11,634
2009	1253	16.56%	682,421	-14.89%	$10,672,933	-14.66%	545	$8,518
2010	1428	13.97%	639,742	-6.25%	$10,485,140	-1.76%	448	$7,343
2011	1522	6.58%	578,843	-9.52%	$9,704,940	-7.44%	380	$6,376
2012	1626	6.83%	489,695	-15.40%	$8,538,810	-12.02%	301	$5,251
2013	1759	8.18%	486,929	-0.56%	$9,070,394	6.23%	277	$5,157
2014	1979	12.51%	522,602	7.33%	$10,599,661	16.86%	264	$5,356
2015*	1250	-36.84%	511,675	-2.09%	$10,359,104	-2.27%	409	$8,287
2016*	1102	-11.84%	635,595	24.22%	$11,367,881	9.74%	577	$10,316
2017	2125	92.83%	716,747	12.77%	$20,624,676	81.43%	337	$9,706
2018	2146	0.99%	709,929	-0.09%	$12,989,497	-37.02%	331	$6,053
2019	2023	-5.73%	977,155	37.64%	$19,467,752	49.87%	483	$9,623
2020	2158	6.67%	1,402,313	43.51%	$31,520,184	61.91%	650	$14,606
2021	2325	7.74%	1,998,293	42.50%	$49,184,722	56.04%	859	$21,155
2022	2385	2.59%	1,919,662	-3.93%	$57,801,617	17.52%	805	$24,235
2023	2363	-0.92%	1,577,449	-17.83%	$49,915,926	-13.64%	668	$21,124

Everything down this year – however bear in mind this does not take sales in the DM itself into account.

Image Comics comes next. Image has seven titles placing within the Top 750 in 2023, which sell 120k copies, for a bit over $6m

Because Image is a primarily Direct Market retailer, we’ve always built a special year-by-year chart for them in the Top 750 (Hey! I have my own biases!), and this is what Image’s performance has looked like over the years:

Year	# of placing titles	Unit sales	Calculated Retail Value
2003	1	2,328	$30,148
2004	1	402	$5,206
2005	3	8,699	$100,236
2006	1	5,311	$113,465
2007	4	28,349	$344,026
2008	9	55,033	$830,574
2009	11	78,874	$1,210,094
2010	22	289,044	$6,479,930
2011	27	367,265	$8,670,917
2012	33	701,050	$20,389,762
2013	38	651,390	$19,371,269
2014	47	691,804	$17,554,492
2015	71	878,262	$22,587,672
2016	72	908,655	$22,917,758
2017	52	556,196	$11,092,960
2018	42	402,584	$7,611,777
2019	26	223,569	$5,446,399
2020	6	55,711	$1,927,993
2021	5	111,451	$6,863,339
2022	5	89,662	$4,933,090
2023	7	120,333	$6,041,659

Nice to see Image back up again, in the Top 750.

The #1 book for Image was v1 of the $65 Invincible Compendium, which sold a solid 33k copies via Circana BookScan reporters, while v2 was #2 (22k) and v3 was #3 (17k). And to continue Robert Kirkman’s streak, you can find at #5 the first volume of the Walking Dead Compendium (13k)

Following that is Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples’ Saga where v10 is #4, with 14k, while v11 is #6 with 11k.

Bringing up the back of the Top 750 is Zoe Thorogood’s It’s Lonely at the Centre of the Earth (#7, about 9900 copies sold)

Here’s what Image’s Long Tail looks like. Another down year. This could change meaningfully in 2024 as Simon & Schuster takes over their bookstore distribution from Diamond Books? (Simon is their new distributor for bookstores as of Q3 2023)

Year	# of listed items	Percent Change	Total Unit Sold	Percent Change	Calculated Retail Value	Percent Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	438	——	116,015	——	$2,313,477	—–	265	$5,282
2008	515	17.58%	121,001	4.30%	$2,445,765	5.72%	235	$4,749
2009	571	10.87%	156,466	29.31%	$3,207,033	31.13%	274	$5,617
2010	642	12.43%	359,238	229.59%	$8,152,806	254.22%	560	$12,699
2011	749	16.66%	466,637	29.90%	$11,041,187	35.43%	623	$14,741
2012	868	15.89%	794,419	70.24%	$22,797,279	106.47%	915	$26,264
2013	994	14.52%	776,507	-2.25%	$22,085,860	-3.12%	781	$22,219
2014	1006	1.21%	830,735	6.98%	$20,309,973	-8.04%	826	$20,189
2015*	842	-16.30%	1,070,299	28.84%	$26,175,438	28.88%	1,271	$31,087
2016*	876	4.04%	1,187,316	10.93%	$28,267,847	7.99%	1,355	$32,269
2017	1531	174.77%	938,991	-20.91%	$18,564,975	-34.32%	613	$12,126
2018	1706	11.43%	769,180	-18.08%	$14,923,335	-19.62%	451	$8,748
2019	1757	2.99%	641,353	-16.62%	$14,305,501	-4.14%	365	$8,142
2020	1844	4.95%	511,927	-20.18%	$11,432,907	-20.08%	278	$6,200
2021	1888	2.39%	707,850	38.27%	$19,509,633	70.64%	375	$10,333
2022	1970	4.34%	622,897	-12.00%	$17,116,221	-12.27%	316	$8,688
2023	2160	9.64%	572,481	-8.09%	$16,779,036	-1.97%	265	$7,768

Image has just two titles over 20k, and four more over 10k.

And Oni Press wraps up the alphabet in this section. Maia Kobabe’s amazing Gender Queer, which was the most banned book in 2022 AND 2023, is their #1 book. Gotta love it when a plan comes together, because Gender Queer sold a fantastic 31k copies. Thanks blue noses?

At #2 for Oni is the first softcover volume of Scott Pilgrim with a bit over 10k

Here is the Oni Long Tail. They keep swinging back and forth between rise in sales and dropping. But this is an up year!

Year	# of listed items	Percent Change	Total Unit Sold	Percent Change	Calculated Retail value	Percent Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	125	——	11,294	——	$141,829	—–	90	$1,135
2008	138	10.40%	21,843	93.40%	$320,799	126.19%	158	$2,325
2009	149	7.97%	51,584	136.13%	$713,121	122.30%	346	$4,786
2010	156	4.70%	446,791	866.14%	$5,882,247	824.86%	2864	$37,707
2011	177	13.46%	162,275	-63.68%	$2,786,438	-52.63%	917	$15,743
2012	171	-3.39%	80,560	-50.36%	$1,594,016	-42.79%	471	$9,322
2013	195	14.04%	68,140	-15.42%	$1,401,748	-12.06%	349	$7,188
2014	213	9.23%	61,584	-9.62%	$1,303,069	-7.04%	289	$6,118
2015*	165	-22.54%	65,254	5.96%	$1,478,997	11.35%	395	$8,964
2016*	191	15.76%	90,222	38.26%	$1,992,643	34.73%	472	$10,433
2017	283	48.17%	117,950	30.73%	$2,847,629	42.91%	417	$10,062
2018	323	14.13%	108,897	-7.68%	$2,595,362	-8.86%	337	$8,035
2019	378	17.03%	129,934	19.32%	$2,786,185	7.35%	344	$7,371
2020	460	21.69%	125,464	-3.44%	$2,599,092	-6.72%	273	$5,650
2021	513	11.52%	195,328	55.68%	$3,782,328	45.52%	381	$7,373
2022	507	-1.17%	178,019	-8.86%	$3,516,734	-7.02%	351	$6.937
2023	495	-2.37%	192,444	8.10%	$4,216,643	19.90%	389	$8,518

Oni has one book over 20k, and one over 10k

Everyone from here on is just placing a single title in 2023’s BookScan Top 750, but many have Long Tails I have built for a long time. Let’s keep with the alphabetical order, shall we?

First up is Bloomsbury who sells nearly 11k copies of Roz Chast’s newest book, I Must Be Dreaming. Since Bloomsbury has never placed more than a single book, we’ve never built the long tail for them yet. Maybe next year?

Boom! Studios Sells only a single title into the Top 750 this year. Boom! uses the imprints Archaia, Boom, Boom Box, Boom Town, and Kaboom. Boom!’s biggest success is the Keanu Reeves-driven BRZRKR which sells about 9700 copies in the book market.

The Long tail for Boom!:

Year	# of listed items	Percent Change	Total Unit Sold	Percent Change	Calculated Retail value	Percent Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	21	—–	10,462	—–	$246,984	——	498	$11,761
2008	44	109.52%	10,943	4.60%	$394,361	59.67%	249	$8,963
2009	93	111.36%	25,378	131.91%	$485,485	23.11%	273	$5,220
2010	202	117.20%	64,770	155.22%	$1,140,019	134.82%	321	$5,644
2011	253	25.25%	75,472	16.52%	$1,435,514	25.92%	298	$5,674
2012	307	21.34%	59,758	-20.82%	$1,160,894	-19.13%	195	$3,781
2013	347	13.03%	86,637	44.98%	$1,650,374	42.16%	250	$4,756
2014	388	11.82%	108,504	25.24%	$1,894,658	14.80%	280	$4,883
2015*	295	-23.97%	126,029	16.15%	$2,159,071	13.96%	427	$7,319
2016*	309	4.75%	134,386	6.63%	$2,313,502	7.15%	435	$7,488
2017	633	104.85%	171,133	27.34%	$2,983,775	28.97%	270	$4,714
2018	768	21.33%	198,773	16.15%	$3,659,046	22.63%	259	$4,764
2019	825	7.42%	228,120	14.76%	$4,344,256	18.74%	277	$5,266
2020	951	15.27%	236,779	3.80%	$4,634,903	6.69%	249	$4,874
2021	1022	7.47%	295,639	24.86%	$5,643,860	21.77%	289	$5,522
2022	1041	1.86%	230,394	-22.07%	$4,640,840	-17.77%	221	$4,458
2023	1031	-0.96%	198,183	-13.98%	$4,304,364	-7.25%	192	$4,175

Boom! has no book over 10k in 2023.

Cartoon Books is the next in the alphabet with the steady and regular perennial sales of Bone: The Complete Cartoon Epic in his self-published black & white paperback. It sells a pretty dependable and predictable 11k copies. The hardcover edition adds about 700 more. No “Long Tail” chart here for Cartoon – it’s always just the one book.

Cartoon has the one book over 10k.

Drawn & Quarterly places a single book into the Top 750: Kate Beaton’s Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, which sells a bit under 10k in its Sophomore year. It sold 14k in its debut.

Their Long Tail looks right here:

Year	# of listed items	Percent Change	Total Unit Sold	Percent Change	Calculated Retail value	Percent Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	62	—	24,689	—	$500,764	—	398	$8,077
2008	82	32.26%	42,038	70.27%	$912,774	82.28%	513	$11,131
2009	107	30.49%	42,957	2.19%	$920,014	0.79%	401	$8,598
2010	126	17.76%	44,737	4.14%	$1,009,387	9.71%	355	$8,011
2011	145	15.08%	62,286	39.23%	$1,399,793	38.68%	430	$9,654
2012	155	6.90%	43,098	-30.81%	$926,233	-33.83%	278	$5,976
2013	189	21.94%	41,887	-2.81%	$893,905	3.49%	222	$4,730
2014	205	8.47%	46,030	9.90%	$1,032,032	15.45%	225	$5,034
2015*	219	6.83%	73,471	59.62%	$1,680,878	62.87%	335	$7,675
2016*	233	6.39%	57,326	-21.97%	$1,266,170	-24.67%	246	$5,434
2017	247	6.01%	68,087	18.77%	$1,548,813	22.32%	276	$6,271
2018	285	15.38%	79,765	17.15%	$2,055,019	32.68%	280	$7,211
2019	303	6.32%	80,084	4.32%	$2,112,455	2.79%	264	$6,972
2020	329	8.59%	80,384	0.37%	$2,302,356	8.99%	244	$6,177
2021	331	0.61%	80,346	-0.05%	$1,975,217	-14.21%	243	$5,967
2022	334	0.91%	82,109	2.19%	$2,267,686	14.81%	246	$6,789
2023	354	5.99%	71,450	-12.98%	$1,996,306	-11.97%	202	$5,639

Drawn & Quarterly has no book over 10k in 2023

I am going to keep Dynamite in the alphabetical list because they have a previous long tail. However, they did not place a single book into the Top 750. Their best-seller remains v1 of The Boys Omnibus, but it just sold 8033 copies this year. Dynamite is the largest company that is still using Diamond Books as their distribution into the book market, now that Image left, so I suspect this gives booksellers less reason to order Dynamite books from here out. We shall see.

Here’s Dynamite’s long-tail – this was a very bad year for Dynamite in the book stores.

Year	# of listed items	Percent Change	Total Unit Sold	Percent Change	Calculated Retail value	Percent Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	21	—–	1,082	—–	$17,861	—–	52	$851
2008	71	238.10%	7,300	574.68%	$138,083	673.10%	103	$1,945
2009	124	74.65%	23,748	225.32%	$485,272	251.44%	192	$3,913
2010	177	42.74%	31,194	31.35%	$660,904	36.19%	176	$3,734
2011	246	38.98%	57,801	85.30%	$1,300,079	96.71%	235	$5,285
2012	288	17.07%	38,798	-32.88%	$887,083	-31.77%	135	$3,080
2013	347	20.49%	32,296	-16.76%	$799,021	-9.93%	93	$2,303
2014	405	16.71%	31,528	-2.38%	$788,130	-1.36%	78	$1,946
2015*	192	-52.59%	31,452	-0.24%	$797,977	1.25%	164	$4,156
2016*	174	-9.38	42,280	34.43%	$997,956	25.06%	243	$5,735
2017	552	217.24%	38,053	-10.00%	$868,682	-12.95%	69	$1,574
2018	630	14.13%	50,538	32.81%	$1,227,967	41.36%	80	$1,949
2019	654	3.81%	81,198	60.67%	$2,112,720	72.05%	124	$3,230
2020	682	4.28%	100,008	23.17%	$2,735,911	29.50%	148	$4,012
2021	662	-2.93%	73,595	-26.41%	$1,971,384	-27.94%	111	$2,978
2022	678	2.42%	87,671	19.13%	$2,544,245	29.06%	129	$3,753
2023	713	5.16%	49,839	-43.15%	$1,384,048	-45.60%	70	$1,941

Dynamite has no book over 10k.

Next is Fantagraphics Books which has one book in Top 750: a bit more than 11k copies of Monica by Daniel Clowes

Fantagraphics hasn’t appeared in this list since 2019 – I had to go back and fill in the missing years for this long tail!: Welcome back!

Year	# of listed items	Percent Change	Total Unit Sold	Percent Change	Calculated Retail value	Percent Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	201	—	35,903	—	$640,565	—	179	$3,187
2008	239	18.91%	43,675	21.65%	$1,126,587	75.87%	183	$4,714
2009	263	10.04%	46,562	6.61%	$1,149,082	2.00%	177	$4,369
2010	304	15.59%	50,332	8.10%	$1,156,205	0.62%	166	$3,803
2011	339	11.51%	57,278	13.80%	$1,327,308	14.80%	169	$3,915
2012	387	14.16%	47,476	-17.11%	$1,094,131	-17.57%	123	$2,827
2013	422	9.04%	52,278	10.11%	$1,266,936	15.79%	124	$3,002
2014	440	4.27%	53,215	1.79%	$1,685,171	33.01%	121	$3,830
2015*	394	-10.45%	58,938	10.75%	$1,835,796	8.94%	150	$4,659
2016*	421	6.85%	67,241	14.09%	$1,975,421	7.61%	160	$4,692
2017	509	20.90%	81,076	20.58%	$2,599,552	31.59%	159	$5,107
2018	617	21.22%	95,600	17.91%	$2,843,762	9.39%	155	$4,609
2019	673	9.08%	86,569	-9.45%	$2,707,583	-4.79%	129	$4,023
2020	733	8.92%	92,472	6.82%	$2,897,755	7.02%	126	$3,953
2021	785	7.09%	111,475	20.55%	$3,650,443	25.97%	142	$4,650
2022	807	2.80%	94,148	-15.57%	$3,430,125	-6.04%	117	$4,250
2023	843	4.46%	95,580	1.52%	$3,477,732	1.39%	113	$4,125

Fantagraphics has one book over 10k in 2023

And, finally, we have Marvel Comics – the overwhelming majority of sales within the Direct Market; the absolute 800 pound gorilla…. But they’re not much of a player in the Bookstore channel, at least as represented by Circana BookScan.

I will apologize, I can not help but editorialize like mad in this section. First off, let’s here’s the last of my DM-centric charts I have been building since forever, showing Marvel’s overall performance in the BookScan Top 750!

Year	# of placing titles	Unit sales	Calculated Retail value
2003	73	455,553	$8,428,962
2004	50	227,985	$3,756,764
2005	26	153,317	$2,459,027
2006	33	294,852	$5,702,307
2007	37	376,918	$7,599,057
2008	38	303,639	$6,446,359
2009	34	226,541	$5,019,216
2010	33	206,273	$4,979,323
2011	27	128,364	$3,303,496
2012	32	141,145	$3,872,683
2013	39	187,598	$4,229,242
2014	53	342,706	$8,341,787
2015*	63	478,076	$10,611,981
2016*	60	555,715	$12,088,278
2017	50	378,689	$7,840,198
2018	44	363,360	$7,885,015
2019	27	220,845	$4,151,908
2020	6	49,838	$1,292,944
2021	0	0	0
2022	1	16,822	$588,602
2023	1	12,481	$199,571

So, for the good news? They at least placed a single book into the Top 750. Hooray? But this seems paltry when you see that at least four other publishers licensed to publish Marvel characters (Viz with the Manga Spider-Man: Fake Red; 50k, Disney with Spidey & His Amazing Friends: Team Spidey Does it All!, Scholastic with Miles Morales: Shock Waves, 34k; and Abrams with Spider-Man: Animals Assemble”, 16k) beat every single comic Marvel itself published, while Penguin’s reprint of Penguin Classics: Amazing Spider-Man at 9822 beat them all except for Marvel’s #1 best-seller.

If nearly everyone can do better than you selling your characters, it makes one wonder why you’re still in the publishing business. Even more so, Marvel’s bookstore distribution switched from Hachette to Penguin Random House on April 1 2022, so they’ve had nearly a year to see if new distribution could change their trajectory, and it’s very very hard to say that it is.

Marvel has only one book over 10k this year: Spider-Punk: Battle of the Banned (selling 12k) – and that would seem to be a direct result of the second Spider-Verse animated film. Given the huge success of that film, 12k sold seems pretty paltry?

Once again, let’s state the obvious: Marvel is literally synonymous with the very idea of “comics” for a meaningful percentage of the American population, they have utterly dominated pop culture for multiple years here, and the source material of comics is actually usually better realized than the various bits stolen by the adaptations. Plus, on top of that, they have Star Wars (and also all of the 20th Century Fox library now) – it is absolutely incomprehensible to this observer that they are not entirely dominating the sales of western comics to adults. And yet, they can only sell a single book into the book market at over 10k copies? My considered opinion says to me “Someone isn’t doing their job”.

It’s possible, I suppose, that they’re making it all up in the Direct Market, but since there are no longer any sales charts to establish this, and since I know so many retailers who run fairly specifically Marvel-driven stores who are complaining incessantly about the drops in sales of Marvel periodicals, I’m going to strongly doubt that this is actually the case (at least in a sustainable, non-“Franklin Mint” kind of fashion). It’s too bad: a strong comics market could really really use a strong Marvel that leads the market; instead we are stuck with leadership that doesn’t appear to have any vision besides just following trends… and not even doing that especially well. It makes me sad.

With the change to Penguin Random House, there has been some major changes to Marvel’s meta-data, with Marvel being broken into many many “imprints”. Here is the list of those: “Licensed Publishing”, “Marvel”, “Marvel Comics” “Marvel Universe”, “Max”, “Outreach/New Reader” and “Ultimate Universe”. What actually differentiates several of those from one another is utterly unclear to me, or how or if booksellers or consumers could tell one from the other?

Here is Marvel’s Long Tail. They’re not looking very good in 2023, even after a change in distribution. Down double digits, ow.

Year	# of listed items	% Change	Total Pieces	% Change	Calculated Retail value	% Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	1230	—	1,034,023	—	$19,947,737	—	841	$16,218
2008	1559	26.75%	1,032,394	-0.01%	$20,128,825	0.01%	662	$12,911
2009	2067	32.58%	954,335	-7.56%	$19,608,696	-2.58%	462	$9,487
2010	2551	23.42%	870,597	-8.77%	$19,485,662	-0.06%	352	$7,638
2011	2852	11.80%	852,187	-2.11%	$20,225,728	3.80%	299	$7,092
2012	3083	8.10%	726,542	-14.74%	$18,848,013	-6.81%	236	$6,114
2013	3203	3.89%	730,826	0.59%	$17,820,299	-5.45%	228	$5,564
2014	3352	4.65%	918,595	25.69%	$24,369,961	36.75%	274	$7,270
2015*	1882	-43.85%	1,114,414	21.32%	$28,021,290	14.98%	592	$14,889
2016*	1841	-2.18%	1,277,046	14.59%	$31,402,330	12.07%	694	$17,057
2017	3578	94.35%	1,142,061	-10.57%	$28,201,535	-10.19%	319	$7,882
2018	3662	2.35%	1,180,202	3.34%	$29,651,745	5.14%	322	$8,097
2019	3692	0.82%	1,064,633	-9.79%	$26,249,715	-11.47%	288	$7,110
2020	4375	18.50%	785,201	-26.25%	$20,798,624	-20.77%	179	$4,754
2021	5034	15.06%	1,030,272	31.21%	$30,480,039	46.55%	205	$6,055
2022	5022	-0.24%	932,781	-9.46%	$31,414,866	3.07%	186	$6,255
2023	5116	1.87%	799,905	-14.25%	$28,205,729	-10.22%	156	$5,513

Marvel just has one book over 10k, despite having over five thousand different SKUs circulating in bookstores

Whew! That’s done!

A few final bits of number-crunching for fun before we go for the year!

First and foremost: for those of you who have personally seen a Circana BookScan chart, I’m sure you noticed that one of the columns is listed as “publishers”. I’ve never been able to understand why: that column is clearly the distributor column, with the weird exceptions of DC and Marvel Comics. DC and Marvel (and Dark Horse, and IDW, and others) are distributed by Penguin Random House in the bookstore market, not Diamond. Image and Boom! and Viz are distributed by Simon, and so on. Dynamite are the primary remaining Diamond Books Distribution publisher in the book market. Now, most analysis that I do I get fairly rigorous about going in and fixing problems in data, but this is a simple top level search where I’m just going to accept what it tells me without question. So who are the leaders for distribution, over the breadth of the entire Circana BookScan list?

This is by pieces sold, of all 44.7 million books sold in 2023 that Circana BookScan reported. There are two hundred and fifteen different distributors listed for books this year (though many of those individual listings are clearly data entry mistakes!)

Turns out it looks like this in 2023:

Probably not what you pictured in your head, through the normal Direct Market-driven perceptions and reporting.

Anyway, that’s pretty much what Circana BookScan in 2023 looks like to these eyes.

How does it look to you?

* * * * * * * * * *

How Does The Sausage Get Made???

I like methodology, so here is entirely too much detail on what I do, and how I do it each year.

Short version:

I will summarize a few things top level concepts up-front: all sales reported here are generated by Circana, which runs Circana BookScan. These reflect actual sales made through bookstores that report to Circana, which includes Amazon. Circana believes that some 85% or more of book sales are captured by them – so even best-case scenario, these are a little light. They also include a few comic book specialty stores via those stores that use the “ComicsHUB” point-of-sale system, though it is extremely unclear just what percentage of comic store sales they are capturing. HUB is absolutely no better than the #2 POS system, and they could be significantly smaller as reporting says “over 100” stores use ComicsHUB – last industry wide data suggests there are over three thousand comics stores. (More comprehensive thoughts of Direct Market purchases in 2023 can be found in the excellent reports by John Jackson Miller’s Comichron)

But this BookScan report obviously only includes books sold through the venues that report to Circana BookScan – it absolutely doesn’t include sources of sales like, for example, school library purchases, or direct-to-consumer sales through things like the Scholastic book fairs. In some cases, those numbers could potentially be many multiples of the retail trade. I certainly expect that something as broadly popular as Dog Man: 20,000 Fleas Under The Sea (the #1 book in 2023’s BookScan report) is selling at least twice as many copies (and maybe much much more!) through academic channels. However, this is very much beyond the scope of this survey.

This also only includes physical books sold! No digital of any kind. (Super broadly: non-native digital is a nearly insignificant channel, comprising single digit percentages of most printed books. There are a handful of exceptions, but not as many as you’d think.)

The first thing that I have to do once I receive the report from Circana BookScan is to edit the data I am sent, removing all of the things that are not comics. I literally hand-checked thousands of items every YEAR against Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature” to say “is this a comic or not?” I defined “comics” like this: either a) it has multiple panels sequentially producing a narrative (those don’t have to be on ONE PAGE, so someone like Mo Williams is certainly comics) OR b) a single image that, taken solely by itself, provides a complete thought. So, The Far Side is comics, but, no, Diary of a Wimpy Kid is NOT (but very glad to see that number as a comparative)

Using these working definitions, starting in 2018 I decided to cut some items that had previously been included: chief among best-sellers would be Rachel Renee Russell’s Dork Diaries – they have words, they have pictures, but they don’t work together in the way I’d think we’d commonly agree is “comics”. I also removed prose-driven books like DK Publishing’s “Marvel Encyclopedia”, which, while nominally about comics or comics culture, is factually an encyclopedic prose book with pictures. Or “Wonder Woman: Warbringer” which is a straight-up prose novel that happens to feature a comics character, or “DC Super Heroes: My First Book of Girl Power” where the Amazon “Look Inside” clearly shows is an illustrated reader for 2nd graders. There is clearly an enormous market for these kinds of material – in fact, in many cases a larger market than for the actual comics themselves – it just isn’t the “comics” market, as I would define it. [Editor’s note: this purge also included The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charles Mackesy, which on the unedited list was the #5 graphic novel of the year, settling a staggering 357,832 copies. The book is essentially an inspirational picture book, but by the gods of Bisac is always on the GN list.]

And since I am the one writing this analysis, I get to make the definitions!

The long version!

“Direct Market” stores (also known as “your Local Comics Shop”) buy much of their material for resale from Diamond Comics Distributors (though, not, by any means, all of the material your LCS has for sale – many DM stores are also buying from book-market wholesalers, or directly from publishers and have been for years). While many DM stores have Point-of-Sales (POS) systems, because our market typically buys non-returnable what we track in our side of the industry is what sells-in to the store, not what sells-through to the eventual consumer. In a very real way, this means that the DM store owner is the actual customer of the publisher, as opposed to the end consumer.

The bookstore market, however, buys their material semi-returnable, where they can send back some portion of titles that don’t sell (but not, usually, all unsold product). Because of this, bookstores track sell-through data. Bookstores that have POS systems are able to report their sales to Circana BookScan, a subsidiary of The Circana Group (they bought it from Nielsen).

Circana BookScan tracks the specific sales to consumers through its client stores. I had several well trained spies who have, for many years, provided me with access to the Circana BookScan reports at the end of each year. However, since 2018 we have been getting the Circana BookScan reports directly from The Circana Group, with no filter or middleman! This is our third year of doing so.

However, getting “official” details brought a major change: Circana Group no longer wants us releasing the actual data, even the pretty tight “Top 750” as has been our historical practice. I am fairly certain that, if you know how to search the internet, you could probably turn up previously published links from 2003 through 2017, but going forward, you will have to trust my abstract of the charts, rather than seeing the charts themselves. So sorry!

(For points of comparison, try these links to the earlier pieces. A number of these are now, sadly, likely dead:

2022: My Analysis

2021: My Analysis

2020: My Analysis

2019: My Analysis

2018: My Analysis

2017: My Analysis

2016: My Analysis

2015: My Analysis

2014: My Analysis

2013: My Analysis

2012: My Analysis

2011: My Analysis

2010: My Analysis

2009: My Analysis

2008: My Analysis

2007: My Analysis

2006: My Analysis

2005: My Analysis

2004: My Analysis

2003: My Analysis)

2013: BookScan Report and My Analysis

2012: BookScan Report and My Analysis

2011: BookScan Report and My Analysis

2010: BookScan Report and My Analysis

2009: BookScan Report and My Analysis

2008: BookScan Report and My Analysis

2007: BookScan Report and My Analysis

2006: BookScan Report and My Analysis

2005: BookScan Report and My Analysis

2004: BookScan Report and My Analysis

2003: BookScan Report and My Analysis)

For some historical context, we have three “eras” of data: 2003-2005 numbers are “what is YTD sold, IF it made the chart in the last week of the year?”

2006-2016: the full “here’s everything that sold throughout the entire year”, but filtered through a leaker – almost certainly accurate, but absolutely missing some bits due to methodology changes and differences, even year-by-year. Important: in 2015 and 2016 I received lists that appeared to be lightly edited, potentially down to “books that are in print at the publisher level only” (obviously, there’s still stock out there on the shelves of stores and in warehouses that is not “in print” per se). Those two years are asterisked to reflect that!

2017-now: “Everything” sold in the calendar year, with no filter. (Though see further notes below!)

Just bear this all in mind if you compare the various “eras” against one another. These are not inherently apples-to-apples comparisons as a result! Moving forward there should be a much deeper consistency of data.

The biggest and most obvious difference when doing straight comparisons will be in the lower ends of the chart. This year, the “worst selling” book in the Top 750 is just about eleven thousand copies (a drop from about twelve thousand copies last year) In ’03-‘05 there would be many items that didn’t have YTD sales in anything like that amount.

Also of major note is that starting in 2007, I have had the “full and entire” Circana BookScan listing, down to books that have only one copy sold YTD. However, I’ve never tried to really analyze that entire list because that’s too much data, even for a data-junkie like myself. I’ve cut the list off at 750 items because that’s what we’ve historically reported. Still, I have the deeper data, and I’ve summarized it as we go along. As long as I continue to get that much data going forward, I should be able to tell you a few things about “The Long Tail”. In 2023, I possess data on 53,466 items! (in 2022 this was 50,056 items).

This is important, however: this is not a list of every book that sold through every book store – the report is limited to those stores that report to Circana BookScan. According to Circana BookScan, more than 7500 venues report to them, but this still leaves many venues that don’t.

Neilsen claimed in 2013 that approximately 85% of retail, physical book sales are tracked through them, though this number appears very much in doubt as an actionable percentage for any specific individual book. A quick internet search can find any number of cases of authors saying that Circana BookScan numbers show half or less of their royalty statements. There’s some really excellent discussion on why and by how much Circana BookScan numbers might be off right here.

Circana BookScan says “Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Costco, General Independents, Hastings, Target, BJ’s, K-Mart, Hudson Group, Meijers, Follett Books, Books-A-Million, CEO Read, Powells, Toys R Us, Shoprite, SuperValu, Sam’s Club and Walmart are among our many data providers.”

What sales do Circana BookScan not track? Among others, this would include libraries, schools, specialty stores (like most comic book stores!) and book clubs and fairs. Circana BookScan does not track sales at most independent bookstores. For many books those are very very important sales channels, and thus, Circana BookScan under-reports by some potentially significant degree, and don’t, in any way, represent all physical book sales or even all “book stores” selling comic book material.

There’s also a certain amount of miscategorization going on. As an example, for almost all of the last twenty years the purely-prose novel Bloody Crown of Conan appeared on my list, while other books (see; Dork Diaries above) might appear one year, and disappear another. I do not know what the actual extent of miscategorization might be and how it would impact any of the general data analysis! There are simply too many potential data points to possibly connect them all together in the time I have to assemble this column.

I’ve done the best I can to try and root out any items “of significance” that should be on the chart that I’m given, but are not – for example, I have to have The Complete Persepolis and Maus manually pulled for me every year because of how BISAC codes work. Because this relies on me catching these titles to get them on to the list this means there’s almost certainly comics material missing that I didn’t catch. If you can think of a book I might have missed, please email me, and I’ll try to track down the sales for it, and update my listings for the future! Even with my multiple safeguards, the datastream is too wide for me to not make mistakes. I make constant mistakes, as you’ll see further down in the body of the column.

Either way, what I’m trying to get across to you is that this really is entirely unreliable data in terms of the absolute and total number of books sold, and is only able to give the broadest possible outline of what’s happening in book stores, based upon the data-set that I’m being given, which is in no way comprehensive. I still think that’s much much better than having no information, so I persevere in writing this each year. Also, now that I am getting directly from the Circana Group, I feel much more confident that I at least know where the potential problems generally are.

Again, I want to stress that I’m doing my primary analysis on the Top 750 items: the reason for this is that is all that I was able to get in the first four years of this analysis, and otherwise the percentage changes I’m discussing will be even more wrong than they would be otherwise. The Top 750 represents more than half of the total of the full list, and has consistently for years – in 2023 the Top 750 was roughly 24.6 million books sold; the bottom fifty-three thousand-ish represents about 20.1 million books sold. While there are significant sales below the Top 750, the Top 750 probably represents the majority of items you’d be able to “easily” find on the shelf of a bookstore in America. I’d love to analyze the full “long tail” list, but I’m afraid that this might take these little essays to triple their current size, and keeping your attention just through this seems hard enough to me! Maybe if someone paid me by the word…!

Finally, it is probably worth mentioning that although I’m analyzing primarily units sold, I also have some calculations that are purely my own of dollars that they would have been if they were sold at full retail. Circana BookScan does not report on the price that a book actually sold for, so the extrapolation of dollars that I made could be dramatically overstated. More than “could be”: it probably is… because Amazon sells so many books, often at crazy steep discounts. In no way should you take any “Calculated Retail Value” as TRUE – these are just to provide a series of benchmarks, and to help you see the impact and differences that “cover price” can make in sales.

If it was not obvious, this only counts physical books, and does not include any digital sale of any kind; it does however, include physical books sold through Amazon.

One of the things I really never talk about is how I get this data each year. I certainly don’t have a Circana BookScan account (they’re pretty expensive!), so I have historically dependent on leaks from industry sources. But this means that the methodology with which the data was generated may actually be very different from year to year. The thing is, since I don’t generate these, Circana BookScan methodology is still largely a Black Box to me. For a guy who writes these reports for 21 (!) years, I still have only really a passing knowledge of how things work. I am learning, slowly, though!

Now that the Circana Group is directly providing us data, we can assume that the methodology itself will not change going forward, yay!

A Bunch of Information about BISAC codes and how this report is generated!

Here’s where we learn a little bit about the Book Industry Standards and Communications (or “BISAC”) codes. It turns out that the publishers assign them themselves, and that publishers are allowed to assign up to four different BISAC codes per item. For example: “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” is classified as “Juvenile Fiction: Humorous Stories”; “Juvenile Fiction: Comics & Graphic Novels: General”; and “Juvenile Fiction: Social Issues: General”. But the kicker is that Circana BookScan reports will only spit out for the first BISAC listed for any given book. That is why “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” never ever showed on any of our previous reports, because the “comics” designation of the BISAC is listed second for that series! Conceptually I could also ask for “Juvenile Fiction: Humorous Stories” report, too – but that’s going to have thousands and thousands of prose-only, not-even-slightly-comics items on it, and working to cut those would quintuple the hours I spend on this (no thanks!) This is also why I have to manually ask for titles like “Maus” or “Persepolis” or “Understanding Comics” each and every year – not because they don’t contain the BISAC for comics (“CGN00xxxx” are the primary ones, for the record), but because that BISAC isn’t listed first!

Now, historically, this has really been opaque to me, to the point where I didn’t even really know what BISAC was, but The Circana Group has been incredibly forthcoming, and I’m learning enough that I almost understand it. First and foremost, we’re now having the report generated using the codes for “Comics & Graphic Novels” (CGN), as well as the “comics” portions of “Juvenile” fiction (JUV) and nonfiction (JNF), and Young Adult Fiction (YAF) and non-fiction (YAN). Please note that the J and Y series of codes extend far past “comics”, but our search is for the narrower section. In addition to that, the Circana Group pulled records for three prominent authors that seldom showed up without intervention: Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, and Scott McCloud (As well as a small handful of books that I crosschecked against my own best sellers)

So you know, there are more than seventy-five “main” BISACs that we’re pulling in full.

Again, the publishers are the ones who assign the BISACs, and they can assign up to four per book. But reports can only generate (for now) from what the first BISAC code is listed – The Circana Group tells me they’re working on fixing that, but it’s a limitation of the current tools. That’s why they pulled by Author for Art Spiegelman – and look at how MAUS breaks down: the first individual volume has a primary BISAC of HIS022000 (“History: Jewish”), while the complete hardcover is BIO006000 (“Biography: Historical”). But the box set of the two paperbacks is BIO000000 (“Biography: General”), and METAMAUS (the book, with supporting documentation) for some reason is categorized as LIT017000 (“Literary: Comics & Graphic Novels”) which I’m not at all certain how that is different from CGN006000 (“Comics & Graphic Novels: Literary”) – but my point is that you have essentially one book that the publisher itself doesn’t really know what the “primary” BISAC should be.

There’s also more than a few dumb-ass choices, like how JUV008010 (Juvenile Fiction: Comics & GNs/Manga) features a not-even-slightly “manga” HILO by Judd Winick. These kinds of categorization problems pepper the entire database.

Additionally, only (apparently) the publishers can change BISACs, so even if I find errors year after year, it’s really very difficult to convince folks that it matters enough to devote man-hours to fixing up, even if the folks at The Circana Group agree.

If you want to learn more about the theory and practice of BISAC codes, you can go and follow this link. (It’s a trap!)

The main thing to know is that while BISAC is a pretty good system for categorizing books because it is solely in the publisher’s hands it has some pretty extreme limitations when creating reports with it as the sole basis. There is not, however, any other way to generate this data without using those limitations, to the best of my knowledge.

Either way, prior to 2017 numbers, the exact methodology from my leakers was slightly different every year and sometimes we got weird spikes and discrepancies. For example, as far as I can tell, in 2014 and prior we were always getting every book that sold one copy anywhere, then in 2015, and slightly in 2016, we’re getting a lightly edited list that only listed in-print books from some (but not all!) publishers. I put an asterisk on 2015 and 2016 because it was missing several thousand data points… But those very strongly appeared to be datapoints that may not materially affect the actual bottom-line health of dollars and pieces the charts (you’ll see this year, I think). Either way, I really must once again urge you to treat every datapoint presented here as only part of the possible picture!

Hopefully this gave you a good understanding of my methodology.

12 COMMENTS

Denis 04/11/2024 6:15 pm At 6:15 pm

The top 20 list is formatted incorrectly, as the column headers are in spot #1, then it jumps to title 3, 7, then 8-20. so you’re missing the last few titles of the top 20. I’m sure it’s a cut/paste error

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Phil E 04/11/2024 7:01 pm At 7:01 pm

“Ook and Gluk” was probably bought by Pilkey collectors, or as right-wing spite purchases, as Pilkey has disowned it due to what he now regrets as racial stereotypes in the book.

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Brian Cronin 04/12/2024 3:47 am At 3:47 am

Great work, as always, Brian!

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Carl Pietrantonio 04/12/2024 10:38 am At 10:38 am

Dunno if it is my browser or what, but like many articles from The Beat, this is almost unreadable due to the number of intrusive and content blocking ads that CAN NOT be removed or X-ed out. Struggled through the intro plus part of the report and it’s just too much work. Sad because Brian, I always enjoy your work and learn from it.

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thematthewmurray 04/12/2024 12:03 pm At 12:03 pm

Brian lists Maus, vol. 1 as the #5 comic, but it’s not listed in his top 20 list. I’m guessing this is due to (as Brian says at the end) Maus not being classified as a GN.

Also, including “Persepolis” as an “American comic” is funny to me. : )

I’d love to know how many copies Ducks sold in Canada.

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Heidi MacDonald 04/12/2024 1:02 pm At 1:02 pm

Unfortunately, these ads enable us to continue our work here and compensate Brian for his 20+ days of working on this article.

You can of course install an ad blocker. We haven’t gone so far as to install one of those “Turn off your ad blocker” pop-ups.

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Billy Henehan 04/12/2024 2:51 pm At 2:51 pm

Great write up as always, Brian. I look forward to reading this deep dive of yours every year. I did notice a small math error in regards to Sandman. The comparison should be $160 vs. $200, not $80 vs. $200.

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Rouk' 04/12/2024 5:43 pm At 5:43 pm

Thanks for the huge work as always!
Shouldn’t the 7th manga publisher in the pie chart be Webtoon Unscrolled and not Tokyopop?

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Mark Moore 04/12/2024 11:22 pm At 11:22 pm

Great work as always, Brian. I look forward to reading this every year.

I was wondering if you could provide information on how Archie Comics did. Top comics? Total sales? Its rank in and percentage of the “Western comics” and the market as a whole?

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Henry 04/18/2024 1:27 pm At 1:27 pm

Very insightful summary that must represent an insane amount of work, as it does each year. Thank you The Beat for organising such a valuable resource for all.

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Drew 04/23/2024 1:04 pm At 1:04 pm

Great work as always Brian. I have to say, DC being on the list at all is a good thing considering how their parent company is currently baffling christendom by continuing to live.

Also Attack on Titan will probably fall off the list completely as it finished airing last quarter. The whole series is done done. Not sure how the publisher is going to plug that whole in their line-up.

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Stefan 04/24/2024 7:26 am At 7:26 am

Hi Brian,

there seems to be an error in your calculation. When I take your list of complete sales for 2023, and set retail value vs. books sold, I get an average price of about $18,1 instead of about $15 as in your calculation, which makes total sense, since the drop in numbers sold is bigger than the drop in retail dollars, which strongly implies higher prices. You seem to have calculated the number of listed items vs the retail value, but in a strange way: if I calculate 812 thousand dollars vs. 53.000 listed items, I get the 15 bucks from your list. But of course it’s 812 million dollars.

Please tell me if and/ or where I’m wrong.

Greets

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Year	Total Unit	Growth	Calculated Retail Value	Growth
2003	5,495,584	——-	$66,729,053	——–
2004	6,071,123	10.5%	$67,783,487	1.6%
2005	7,007,345	15.4%	$75,459,669	11.3%
2006	8,395,195	19.8%	$90,411,902	19.8%
2007	8,584,317	2.3%	$95,174,425	5.3%
2008	8,334,276	-2.9%	$101,361,173	6.5%
2009	7,634,453	-8.4%	$93,216,014	-8.0%
2010	6,414,336	-15.9%	$85,266,166	-8.5%
2011	5,696,163	-11.2%	$79,961,951	-6.2%
2012	5,438,329	-4.53%	$89,918,354	12.45%
2013	5,654,351	3.97%	$96,062,709	6.83%
2014	6,659,031	17.77%	$112,768,709	17.39%
2015*	8,762,983	31.60%	$141,226,518	25.24%
2016*	9,967,907	13.75%	$159,510,075	12.95%
2017	10,310,682	3.44%	$154,026,517	-3.44%
2018	11,755,903	14.02%	$165,885,527	7.70%
2019	15,537,520	32.17%	$226,370,566	36.46%
2020	18,245,279	17.43%	$274,308,460	21.18%
2021	30,698,081	68.25%	$443,735,058	61.76%
2022	31,010,409	1.02%	$471,444,963	6.25%
2023	24,858,444	*-19.84%*	$438,074,282	*-7.07%*

Year	# of listed items	Percent Change	Total Unit Sold	Percent Change	Calculated Retail Value	Percent Change	Av. Sale per title	Av $ per title
2007	13,181	—–	15,386,549	—–	$183,066,142	—–	1167	$13,889
2008	17,571	24.98%	15,541,769	1.00%	$199,033,741	8.02%	885	$11,327
2009	19,692	12.07%	14,095,145	-9.31%	$189,033,736	-5.02%	716	$9,560
2010	21,993	11.68%	12,130,232	-13.94%	$172,435,244	-8.78%	552	$7,840
2011	23,945	8.88%	11,692,058	-3.61%	$175,634,490	1.86%	488	$7,335
2012	23,365	-2.42%	9,562,236	-18.22%	$164,415,366	-6.39%	409	$7,037
2013	24,492	4.82%	10,153,628	6.18%	$176,419,370	7.30%	415	$7,326
2014	26,976	10.14%	11,820,324	16.41%	$207,598,355	17.67%	438	$7,696
2015*	22,431	-16.85%	15,269,550	29.18%	$259,807,532	25.15%	681	$11,583
2016*	21,295	-5.06%	17,302,891	13.32%	$293,583,180	13.00%	813	$13,786
2017	35,338	65.95%	18,385,086	6.25%	$302,300,435	2.97%	520	$8,555
2018	38,424	8.73%	19,965,469	8.60%	$318,345,707	5.31%	520	$8,855
2019	40,745	6.06%	24,694,686	23.69%	$399,322,754	25.44%	606	$9,801
2020	44,316	8.76%	29,251,619	18.45%	$480,408,257	20.31%	660	$10,841
2021	47,630	7.48%	51,822,538	77.16%	$826,280,847	72.00%	1088	$17,348
2022	50,056	5.09%	52,614,342	1.53%	$863,574,176	4.51%	1051	$17,252
2023	53,466	6.81%	44,736,588	-14.97%	$812,552,764	-5.91%	837	$15,198

	Long Title	Author	Publisher	YTD (Jan 01 2023 – Dec 30 2023)
1	DOG MAN: TWENTY THOUSAND FLEAS UNDER THE SEA: A GRAPHIC NOVEL (DOG MAN #11): FROM THE CREATOR OF CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS	PILKEY, DAV	SCHOLASTIC BOOKS	1,087,771
2	CAT KID COMIC CLUB: COLLABORATIONS: A GRAPHIC NOVEL (CAT KID COMIC CLUB #4): FROM THE CREATOR OF DOG MAN	PILKEY, DAV	SCHOLASTIC BOOKS	323,097
3	CAT KID COMIC CLUB: INFLUENCERS: A GRAPHIC NOVEL (CAT KID COMIC CLUB #5): FROM THE CREATOR OF DOG MAN	PILKEY, DAV	SCHOLASTIC BOOKS	279,045
4	MOON RISING: A GRAPHIC NOVEL (WINGS OF FIRE GRAPHIC NOVEL #6)	SUTHERLAND, TUI T.	SCHOLASTIC BOOKS	249,797
5	MARY ANNE’S BAD LUCK MYSTERY: A GRAPHIC NOVEL (THE BABY-SITTERS CLUB #13)	CHENG, CYNTHIA YUAN	SCHOLASTIC BOOKS	218,723
6	DOG MAN: GRIME AND PUNISHMENT: A GRAPHIC NOVEL (DOG MAN #9): FROM THE CREATOR OF CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS: VOLUME 9	PILKEY, DAV	SCHOLASTIC BOOKS	212,889
7	DOG MAN: MOTHERING HEIGHTS: A GRAPHIC NOVEL (DOG MAN #10): FROM THE CREATOR OF CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS: VOLUME 10	PILKEY, DAV	SCHOLASTIC BOOKS	205,922
8	DOG MAN: FOR WHOM THE BALL ROLLS: A GRAPHIC NOVEL (DOG MAN #7): FROM THE CREATOR OF CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS: VOLUME 7	PILKEY, DAV	SCHOLASTIC BOOKS	178,885
9	FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY’S: FAZBEAR FRIGHTS GRAPHIC NOVEL COLLECTION VOL. 1 (FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY’S GRAPHIC NOVEL #4)	CAWTHON, SCOTT	SCHOLASTIC BOOKS	176,682
10	THE ACTION BIBLE: GOD’S REDEMPTIVE STORY	CARIELLO, SERGIO	DAVID C COOK	167,407
11	DOG MAN: FETCH-22: A GRAPHIC NOVEL (DOG MAN #8): FROM THE CREATOR OF CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS: VOLUME 8	PILKEY, DAV	SCHOLASTIC BOOKS	154,572
12	DEMON SLAYER: KIMETSU NO YAIBA, VOL. 1	GOTOUGE, KOYOHARU	SIMON & SCHUSTER	148,468
13	TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: THE LAST RONIN	EASTMAN, KEVIN	RANDOM HOUSE	148,221
14	DOG MAN: A GRAPHIC NOVEL (DOG MAN #1): FROM THE CREATOR OF CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS: VOLUME 1	PILKEY, DAV	SCHOLASTIC BOOKS	143,189
15	DOG MAN: A TALE OF TWO KITTIES: A GRAPHIC NOVEL (DOG MAN #3): FROM THE CREATOR OF CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS: VOLUME 3	PILKEY, DAV	SCHOLASTIC BOOKS	141,548
16	DOG MAN: LORD OF THE FLEAS: A GRAPHIC NOVEL (DOG MAN #5): FROM THE CREATOR OF CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS: VOLUME 5	PILKEY, DAV	SCHOLASTIC BOOKS	140,433
17	CHAINSAW MAN, VOL. 1	FUJIMOTO, TATSUKI	SIMON & SCHUSTER	140,106
18	FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY’S: FAZBEAR FRIGHTS GRAPHIC NOVEL COLLECTION VOL. 2 (FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY’S GRAPHIC NOVEL #5)	CAWTHON, SCOTT	SCHOLASTIC BOOKS	136,008
19	KAREN’S BIRTHDAY: A GRAPHIC NOVEL (BABY-SITTERS LITTLE SISTER #6)	FARINA, KATY	SCHOLASTIC BOOKS	131,303
20	DOG MAN AND CAT KID: A GRAPHIC NOVEL (DOG MAN #4): FROM THE CREATOR OF CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS: VOLUME 4	PILKEY, DAV	SCHOLASTIC BOOKS	129,804

3,745,329	PILKEY, DAV
1,105,655	FUJIMOTO, TATSUKI
1,037,352	AKUTAMI, GEGE
856,045	GOTOUGE, KOYOHARU
849,745	SUTHERLAND, TUI T.
770,245	CAWTHON, SCOTT
728,148	MIURA, KENTARO
689,450	ODA, EIICHIRO
689,224	ENDO, TATSUYA
639,756	HORIKOSHI, KOHEI
545,839	TELGEMEIER, RAINA
477,837	SPIEGELMAN, ART
422,218	GREEN, JOHN PATRICK
421,664	AIDAIRO
395,269	ITO, JUNJI
394,270	FARINA, KATY
353,292	TORIYAMA, AKIRA
350,801	OSEMAN, ALICE
337,529	ISAYAMA, HAJIME
318,645	SMYTHE, RACHEL
314,799	TARSHIS, LAUREN
304,221	PEIRCE, LINCOLN
300,973	KANESHIRO, MUNEYUKI
269,994	MATSUMOTO, NAOYA
268,008	ODA, TOMOHITO
256,666	ONE
256,354	CHUGONG
236,072	BONASTRE TUR, MĂŤRIAM
233,351	CLANTON, BEN
229,729	MARTIN, ANN M.
229,353	FGTEEV
222,634	OHKUBO, ATSUSHI
220,593	CHENG, CYNTHIA YUAN
214,491	ARAKI, HIROHIKO
212,554	ISHIDA, SUI
208,340	EASTMAN, KEVIN
198,427	HIMEKAWA, AKIRA
190,298	KISHIMOTO, MASASHI
185,038	KIRKMAN, ROBERT
184,527	CARIELLO, SERGIO
183,113	TOGASHI, YOSHIHIRO
181,970	OHBA, TSUGUMI
169,003	AKASAKA, AKA
164,312	SATRAPI, MARJANE
162,544	CRAFT, JERRY
159,597	ASAGIRI, KAFKA
157,181	KUSAKA, HIDENORI
157,036	PASCAL, FRANCINE
154,746	YANG, GENE LUEN
148,170	CHAU, CHAN
147,517	SHASKAN, STEPHEN
144,418	FUKUDA, SHINICHI
143,264	HALE, NATHAN
142,679	SIMPSON, DANA
142,202	YUKIMURA, MAKOTO
140,602	ARAKAWA, HIROMU
140,133	LIBENSON, TERRI
137,135	FURUDATE, HARUICHI
135,605	TAKEUCHI, NAOKO
133,962	MILLER, KAYLA
133,700	TABATA, YUKI
130,752	KIBUISHI, KAZU
126,245	GAIMAN, NEIL
125,865	EPSTEIN, GABRIELA
124,787	KAKU, YUJI
124,397	INOUE, TAKEHIKO
121,425	YAZAWA, AI
118,631	GALLIGAN, GALE
115,318	ASO, HARO
114,251	HUNTER, ERIN
111,897	HAYASHIDA, Q.
111,228	CRENSHAW, ELLEN T.
110,580	FLYNN, IAN
109,181	HARUSONO, SHOU
108,672	MASHIMA, HIRO
106,848	SHIRAI, KAIU
106,774	SUZUKI, YUTO
103,738	OSBORNE, MARY POPE
102,501	ASANO, INIO
100,283	KUBO, TITE

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