I haven’t looked at manga numbers in the Direct Market in a while, so let’s see what happens when we extract the manga and manga-influenced work from ICv2’s Top 300 Graphic Novels Actual – March 2010, shall we?
(I hope that’s readable. Thanks to Dirk Deppey for the helpful suggestions on how to get a table into a blog post without plunging myself into coding hell.)
It’s not particularly surprising that Young C. Kim’s graphic-novel adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (Yen Press) has been topping the Hardcover Graphic Books list over at The New York Times since its release, but it’s a little unexpected that it would crack the top ten in the Direct Market. Perhaps it was narrow-minded of me to assume that the property’s audience wouldn’t seek it out in local comic shops, or that local comic shops would be particularly inclined to carry it, or that there wasn’t much crossover audience between Twilight and your average comic-shop inventory.
Manga from Dark Horse continues to do well, and I’m pleased to see such a high ranking for the final volume of Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto (Viz). It’s also nice to see all five of last month’s volumes of Eichiro Oda’s One Piece (Viz) crack the top 100. It would have been nice to see higher rankings for the classic titles, but some of them came out late in the month, so maybe that’s the explanation.