Graphic Novels 2024 — Big in Japan… and also the UK

Led by Manga superstars Gege Akutami, Eiichiro Oda and the late, great Kentaro Miura, the UK comics market has continued its sizzling form and is on course for a third-best year since records began.

While sales have contracted slightly from the monster years of 2022 and 2023, they nevertheless remain robust. Thus far in 2024, a tick-over £29m has been shifted through Nielsen BookScan’s Graphic Novels category, a 3% drop on this point in the previous year. But contextually still an excellent result, as we are coming off by far the two biggest years in UK comics history: £53.1m and £48.3m for the full 12-month periods in 2022 and 2023, respectively.

It should be underscored how far comics has come in the UK: we are not even at the three-quarter mark this year – £29m sold through BookScan’s Total Consumer Market already beats all but three full years and is almost double what the Graphic Novels category earned a decade ago.

Once again, Manga is the driving force with over 57% (£16.6m) of that £29m coming from the sub-category. And that actually undersells Manga’s dominance due to some not entirely accurate (OK, shoddy) metadata from publishers. Graphic Novels: General is the second-biggest BookScan sub-genre (£6.7m or a 23% share), but six of its top seven titles are clearly Manga, led by Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Chainsaw Man Vol 12 (translated by Amanda Haley).

Manga’s surge represents a huge shift as, even just five years ago, the Graphic Novels: General and Superheroes categories would combine to represent 60% of the market. We have commented on Manga’s rise previously, but it is roughly due to a combination of retailer (particularly Waterstones) buy-in to the genre and a mainstreaming of the form, which has coincided with anime’s spike in popularity on streaming services like Netflix and the Japanese animation specialist Crunchyroll.

Price also must play a factor in its popularity, as Manga is by far the least expensive of the sub-categories. The average selling price for Manga in 2024 is £11.71, £3 cheaper than Graphic Novels: General and a whopping £8 less than the a.s.p. in Superheroes (BookScan’s Graphic Novels tracks books, and not single-issue “floppy” comics which tend to have r.r.p.s starting at £3.50).

Manga is the driving force with over 57% (£16.6m) of that £29m coming from the sub-category

Manga absolutely dominates the top of the charts. Of the top 50 comics titles in 2024, just three were not originally written in Japanese: Deadpool Kills, an omnibus edition of the Marvel character, boosted by the “Deadpool & Wolverine” film release; Art Spiegelman’s memoir-cum-Holocaust survivor’s tale (and reading list staple) Maus; and Melanie Scott’s The Periodic Table of DC (DK), not a graphic novel exactly, but an illustrated encyclopaedia of the comics publisher’s heroes.

The top 11 bestselling comics authors of the year are all from the Manga world with The Walking Dead co-creator Robert Kirkman the first non-Japanese member of the list. As an aside, we should note that in our top 20 Graphic Novels chart – which is Manga-heavy – we have named the translators when they could be determined. But Manga publishers, with some commendable exceptions, are notorious for obfuscating credit for translators—maddening given the skill and complexity needed in translating Japanese characters to English prose in the limited space of speech bubbles.

Akutami is the star of the charts, with a breakout 2024 which sees them having four titles in the top 10 and an incredible 16 books of their Jujutsu Kaisen series in the Graphic Novel top 50. (Akutami is a pseudonym and the creator’s identity is unknown). Like many Manga series, Jujutsu Kaisen got its start being serialised in the Weekly Shonen Jump magazine and has been published in the West in book form since 2019. But the titles have taken off at the tills since 2023, when the anime version became available in the UK on Crunchyroll.

While we have focused on the adult Graphic Novel side, kids’ is roaring, too. Sales through the TCM for Children’s Comic Strip Fiction & Graphic Novels are £12.6m in 2024 to date, a third up on the previous 12 months and by year’s end the category will certainly eclipse the record of £16.7m, set in 2022. Just two authors – Dog Man creator Dav Pilkey and Bunny v Monkey mastermind Jamie Smart – have accounted for 68% of that £12.6m.