Sponsored by Battle Quest Comics

By Brian Hibbs

“There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics”

Ludicrously, this is the twentieth annual report of something that is hard to exactly perceive and understand: the size and shape of the sales of graphic novels and trade paperbacks through the book store market, as seen through the prism of NPD BookScan.

There is a tremendous amount that goes into making these reports, and a whole lot of detail of how these lists get generated, but my wise editor believes that most folks just want to get to the numbers.  So, if you are interested in how the sausage gets made, please go down to the bottom of the column for lots of in-depth details.

I will summarize a few things top level concepts up-front however: all sales reported here are generated by The NPD Group, which runs NPD BookScan.  These reflect actual sales made through bookstores that report to NPD, which includes Amazon.  NPD 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 how much 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 records of Direct Market purchases in 2022 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 NPD BookScan – it certainly 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 “Cat Kid” (the #1 book in 2022’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. (Broadly, digital is an insignificant channel, comprising single digit percentages of printed books)

Also for a top-level note: I am myself a Direct Market (comic book store) retailer – while my individual focus is on book-format material, I have a lot biases, both visible and invisible that I bring to these reports.  Please bear these in mind as you read my analysis!  Question authority!!!

I have historically divided the data between the “Top 750” because a) that’s all the data I was initially leaked back in 2003, b) it’s a “manageable” chunk of data, and c) “as above, so below” – the top 750 represents about half or more of sales. However, since 2007, I’ve received the “entire” database, which now gives us a solid sixteen years of data to track. I refer to this as “the Long Tail”.   This year’s “Long Tail” has more than 50k items!  That’s a lot!  And a whole lot of those books are selling copies that don’t even add up to one hundred copies sold in a year.

I also do a rough calculation of if you multiply the number of copies sold (a firm number) against the cover price, what you the calculated retail dollar sales be.  This is not actually a real number, because a significant percentage of these books sold for less than cover price (thanks Amazon!)

[Editor’s note: as is our custom, we’ve provided a chart of the Top 750 comics, with sales figures removed. This is the raw Top 750 Bookscan chart with non comics titles – such as Wimpy Kids books – removed by the author. Without this correction the #1 book would be Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Diper Överlöde.] 

The first thing that I have to do once I receive the report from NPD 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 2^nd graders, or even “The Bloody Crown of Conan”, which is a prose book that features a character that originally was created in prose, and that I have had to delete from my reports for literally every of the twenty years I have done this.. 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.

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

The Big Picture

Here’s the big picture for just the Top 750 in 2022:

2022 brought the single highest set of totals we’ve seen in the history of tracking BookScan, but the overall growth dropped to nearly flat.  Still, anything that beat, even by an inch, the record setting numbers of the pandemic-related boom in 2021 is a thing to be praised.  Sales are up just over 1% for the Top 750 in quantity sold, and the Hibbs-created Calculated Retail Value, which is almost certainly wrong because many books are sold at a discount, is up six-and-a-quarter percent

(I want to remind you that while I asterisk 2015-2016 in terms of the sheer number of data points that I was getting was probably edited, it appears to be that the top 750 itself was fairly rock solid – there is more on this down below in the sausage making section)

The trend for print books in general (not just looking at comics) through bookstores in 2022, according to the NPD group and NPD BookScan appears to show a general drop of 6.5%, which does nothing but continue the now nine-year trend of comics-material being significantly stronger than the general curve!

As I discuss in the boilerplate below, I primarily write about the top 750 because a) that’s all the data I was initially leaked back in 2003, b) it’s a “manageable” chunk of data, and c) “as above, so below” – the top 750 represents about half of sales. However, since 2007, I’ve received the “entire” database, which now gives us a solid fifteen years of data to track, that’s“the Long Tail”.

Here’s what the sales of all comics sales NPD BookScan tracks in this category looks like – but, seriously, let me remind you that the dataset changes enough each year this can be an awkward set of comparisons!  Even putting aside “the asterisk years”, prior to 2013 this didn’t include Walmart, for just one example (of scores!) of the lack of direct comparison.

Overall, this is our Topline conclusion for the whole NPD BookScan 2022: Up more than 5% in total number books listed, essentially flat with 1.5% growth of Units Sold, and up 4.5% in the calculated retail value if all books sold for cover price (they didn’t, not in the “bookstore” market) – as you read through individual publisher listings, you can compare their “long tail” performance this year against those benchmarks to see if they overperformed or underperformed the market.

But, as amazing as those topline numbers look, please remember that it really is largely “hits” that are driving the business – the “average” book still only sold approximately one thousand and fifty-one copies, nationwide, in the entire year. Almost no one can earn a living from that (including book sellers!)

Let’s take a look at the Top 20 best-selling items on the 2022 chart, including actual sales, which we’re allowed to run.  It looks like this:

Depending on your exact definitions of intended audiences, it appears that fifteen of the Top Twenty is intended for children or middle readers.  The other five of the Top Twenty are Manga, and if you are looking for a “Marvel / DC-style superhero” comic, you are not even in the top two hundred-and-fifty!  In fact, the first DC superhero comic to appear is at #257 with Batman: Year One.  Jinkies!  As for Marvel?  Their very first appearance isn’t until all the way down at #483 with Moon Knight by Lemire & Smallwood.  Ultimately this means that a comic that started as an homage/parody of Frank Miller’s writing (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) skunked their master (The Last Ronin came in at #115), and that Scholastic’s license of Marvel trounced anything that Marvel published natively (Miles Morales: Shock Waves came in at #204)  (We’ll talk more about this below)

Not a single book in the Top Twenty sells less than 182k copies!  (it was 150k in 2021, and not even 100k as recently as 2019), and the combined circulation of the Top Twenty is over 5.3 million copies – that is: just over 10% of the unit sales of all 50k different graphic novels sold by BookScan reporters in 2022 (52m copies) was being generated by just twenty books.  We appear to have become a “blockbusters”-driven business.

American comics aimed at adults are a small minority at the top of the charts – of the top 100, fifty-three are manga, forty-one are kids books, and a mere six are American comics aimed at adults: three versions of Maus and three volumes of Lore Olympus.  For the second year in a row, manga sells the greatest number of copies overall: of the 52 million graphic novels sold via BookScan in 2022, 29m are manga (roughly 56%)

Dav Pilkey and his various series of books (Cat Kid and Dog Man) remain the current Rulers of comic sales in the bookstores – he is the Top four best-sellers, inclusive, and nine of the Top Twenty.  What’s critical to remember about this is that Scholastic is also presumably selling a metric shedload of these books through the Scholastic Book Fairs, to elementary and middle school libraries, and any number of other places that don’t report to NPD BookScan.  This here continues to be just the tip of the iceberg.

Pilkey’s hold on the charts is very strong, if declining a bit:  The #1 best-seller (Cat Kid v3: On Purpose) sold 623k copies via BookScan in 2022, a bit under half of the 1.3 million copies the same placement (Dog Man v10: Mothering Heights) sold in 2021.

At #2, Pilkey places Cat Kid v2: Perspectives with a bit over 400k, at #3 is Cat Kid v4: Collaborations (326k), while #4 is the first placement of Dog Man (the aforementioned v10, Mothering Heights) with 285k sold.  Then others interrupt his streak and Pilkey’s next placement is #10 with “Dog Man v9” (253k), #12’s “Cat Kid v1” (239k), #13 with “Dog Man v7” (228k), #18 with “Dog Man v8” (188k), and #20 with “Dog Man v1” (182k)

Pilkey’s success isn’t just a trend or a fluke – it is very deep and long lasting.  There are sixty-five Pilkey comics that place on the chart in 2022 (this includes Spanish translations and boxed sets and so on), with nineteen of them in the Top 750.  All combined, Pilkey sells 3.7m copies in 2022, which amounts to just over 7% of all comics sold via BookScan! That’s pretty massive!

But the Top Twenty is not only Dav Pilkey!  What first breaks his hold on the market?  Why, it is more material from the Graphix imprint from Scholastic!  At #5 is v3 of Five Nights at Freddy’s (The Fourth Closet) with 283k sold, while #9 is v11 of Baby Sitter’s Club (Goodbye Stacey, Goodbye) with 255k sold.  #11 is Wings of Fire v5 (The Brightest Night with 248k sold), while #16 & #17 go back to Five Nights at Freddy’s – v2 at 212k and v1 at 207k, respectively.  And at #19 is the 2^nd volume of Heartstopper (187k)

Altogether, Scholastic takes fifteen of the Top Twenty best-sellers in 2022, the same number as last year.  Those fifteen books represent 4.1 million copies sold, or a bit over ten percent of the total of every single book of comics combined sold for the year – these fifteen books are 7.8% of the total sum of all comics sold to BookScan reporters this year. The best-seller drives the fortunes of publishing more than almost anything else.

Scholastic’s hold on the Top Twenty is not total, however, and Viz gets its piece:  Book #6 is our first Manga, Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Chainsaw Man v1 (277k), while #7 is Tatsuya Endo’s Spy X Family (271k) and #8 is Koyoharu Gotouge’s Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba v1 (267k).  Viz sweeps up the last of the Top Twenty with v2 of Chainsaw Man at #14 (224k) and Stories of Water & Flame another Demon Slayer volume at #15 (215k)

No other publisher that Viz or Scholastic places a book in the Top Twenty, and it’s the first volume of Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” at #25 (177k) from Pantheon that first breaks that streak, as well as the first US-produced comic intended for adults.

“Hits!” is the word of 2022 as there are 68 comics that sold over 100k copies – that was 52 in 2021 and just 22 in 2020.  Book #20 sold 182k in 2022, while in 2021 that same placement sold 129k: the floor has risen 41% for slot #20 in a year.

I will continue to underline the fact that not one of these books was created “for” the traditional Direct Market audience, and that the DM (as purchased through Diamond at least) likely does a mediocre job stocking or selling any of these books – although Diamond eliminated sales reports during the pandemic so there’s not actually any way to be certain of what the DM is selling, any longer.  And, to be fair, many DM stores are buying these books from non-Diamond sources (because Diamond uniformly has the worst wholesale pricing for each and every book in the Top Twenty, on top of catastrophically usurious shipping charges)

How about if we sort things by author? There are 10,839 different names on the entire NPD BookScan list for 2022.  Here are people who sold more than 100k copies combined via NPD BookScan reporters in 2022:

These 89 people represent 62% of all sales of NPD BookScan-reported sales in 2022.  What you can take from this is that only a tiny number of creators drive the vast majority of the business in comics (and books in general, as far as I can tell); and conversely, this probably means that the numerical majority of comics published aren’t actually significantly profitable any given year.  I think it’s further worth noting that historically US comics aimed at adults are created by paying a page rate, so that the very creation of comics could allow a living wage for their creators.

Conversely, a great many of the graphic novel creators on this list are either being paid an advance-on-royalties, or in a few cases initially worked for free for the “streaming services”; or in the case of many of the Manga-ka, the creative costs have already long ago been paid from the original publication in Japan.  When you add together those points, along with the “average” sale of a book in the Bookscan-reported market being just around 1000 copies, it would seem very safe to infer that most people making comics today aren’t even making US minimum wage to do so, while just a small minority of people hit the royalty targets to properly “earn out” a living.

There is potentially a lot of money in comics on the higher end, but most creative people aren’t actually seeing much of a financial reward, because the creation of comics is extremely labor intensive.

Let’s now switch our attention to looking at how publishers performed.

As a way to make the publisher breakdowns more readable, I split the chart into “eastern” (Manga) and “western” comics, because I think there are a few clear market distinctions between those categories. So, without further ado:

2022 Manga

Overall sales are up again for the Manga category in 2022 – sales are up by nearly a million pieces within the Top 750 (6%), and rose to 13% in calculated dollars.  For the second year running, Manga is the majority of sales in the US marketplace.

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

Sales and calculated dollars are up for the category in 2022, while the number of placing books is down a bit.  And, once again this is the best year for Manga since we’ve been 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.  For at least part of 2022, manga was also hampered by the “North American Manga Shortage” that began as a result of COVID lockdowns, as well as massive paper shortages – although these factors appear to have been largely fixed by the end of the year.

Once again, despite the record setting unit sales it is still not the greatest number of titles placing – that was the 594 books back in 2005.

As is typical with Manga, this is driven by the near-exclusive domination of series in the manga world – 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 specific graphic novels selling, they’re all about the series.

While there are 458 individual volumes of manga placing in the Top 750 this year, those only represent 127 distinct properties.  For example, the best-selling Manga this year is Chainsaw Man – there are eleven different volumes of this series that place in the Top 750.  The number two series, Spy X Family, has all eight volumes chart. Number three is Demon Slayer: Kimetso No Yaiba, which has 25 entries, number four is Jujutsu Kaiden with 19 books, while number five is My Hero Academia with 29 entries.  Just these five series are more than 20% of the number of volumes placing in the Top 750 – those five series are nineteen of the Top Twenty, with only Berserk left to crack that group

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:

This continues to be terrific general “Long-Tail” growth in the category overall – number of books available hits a new record at over 14k items, while both units sold and calculated dollars are show solid growth.  Average sales per title are down a smidge, but this is still a lot of books sold!

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 14,595 books that are “manga” in NPD BookScan in 2022, by quantity sold, and represents the entire “long tail” of the charts:

Viz is unquestionably the dominant player, selling 60% of all manga sold in 2022.  This is up from 57% last year.

If we look solely within the Top 750, the picture is very similar: The #1 publisher is Viz who takes 301 of the 458 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 12.6 million pieces, for more than $158 million of calculated retail dollars – this is yet another year of strong growth for Viz: they sold 10.8m books the previous year.

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 competitor in their segment.

Viz’s #1 Best-seller is Chainsaw Man, and v1 is the year’s best-selling manga with nearly 277k sold, and there are four volumes within Viz’s Top Ten (at places #4, #8, and #9), and all eleven released volumes make the Top 750 – together, those eleven volumes sell 1.8m copies.  This is a great example of a book which appears to be driven significantly by the anime adaptation.

I’d say much the same for Viz’s #2 seller, “Spy X Famil