A recently assembled list of the best-selling manga from 2008 through 2021 has been released, and One Piece once again claims the crown. Other prominent series such as Demon Slayer, Attack on Titan and Kingdom were also among the highest-selling.
The sales data comes from the Japanese company Oricon, which gathers the information on everything from music and TV to, of course, manga. Oricon began tracking manga sales in 2008, and data for each year since is available on its website, so enterprising Twitter user WSJ Oricon translated and added up the data to create a list made up of data from each of the 13 years available. While the data is considered accurate, it does only take into account copies sold in Japan, and only accounts for collected volumes rather than magazine subscriptions.
The utter dominance of One Piece should come as no surprise, since the long-running shonen series topped the annual lists every year from 2008 to 2018. Selling an incredible 215 million copies over that time frame, One Piece has moved nearly twice as many volumes as the number two entry, but One Piece has the advantage of having been an established franchise since long before Oricon's sales data was recorded. The number two seller is, shockingly, relative newcomer Demon Slayer (Kimetsu no Yaiba) at 126 million copies. While One Piece's sales have been adding up since 2008, Demon Slayer only began running in 2016 and ended serialization in 2020. In fact, it was Demon Slayer that finally unseated One Piece from the number one slot in 2019, moving 12 million copies that year alone. The real kicker is 2020, when Demon Slayer sales soared to over 82 million, boosted heavily by the wild success of the Demon Slayer: Mugen Train film, which released that year. Of course, 2020 was a bit of an unusual year in general due to the pandemic disrupting media production for just about every medium except for manga, which has proliferated in the time since.
In third place is Attack on Titan, with 78 million copies to its name dating back to the series' debut in 2009, with peak popularity between 2013 (when it ranked second for the year) and 2015 (when it ranked third). Jujutsu Kaizen managed to edge out My Hero Academia for seventh, with 39 million and 38 million, respectively. While Naruto, Bleach, and Fairy Tail also made the list, series such as these are at a bit of a disadvantage due to lacking data from prior to 2008, which would cover some of their most popular years. Some surprise entries for Western manga fans also make the list, such as the long-running historical manga Kingdom coming in fourth, and the shojo romance series Kimi Ni Todoke (which translates as "From Me to You") that ran from 2005 to 2017 in twelfth with 30 million. Neither fits into the traditional "shonen action series" mold, and Kingdom happens to be the most popular manga series to have never had an English localization.
The list provides an interesting portrait of the manga fandom's preferences, and although it doesn't paint a perfect picture, it's still easy to see why the stereotypical shonen formula has stuck around. Other popular series that even slightly diverge from the formula, like One-Punch Man with its satirical take on the genre and Jojo's Bizarre Adventure with its general weirdness and unique style, don't appear on the overall list, although both series do appear on the year-to-year lists. The popularity of series like One Piece shows that, when it comes to manga, a plucky protagonist with indomitable will and strange powers fighting to save the world from evil, just happens to be what the people want.
Source: WSJ Oricon