It seems like comics can’t be stopped these days. In the last month or so, a lot of reports have come out that show how big the business has gotten around the world. Now, NPD has released a new infographic that shows how to print unit sales of the manga have changed over the past few years. It looks like the business has grown by a factor of four since 2019.
You did read that correctly. Since 2019 and the time before the outbreak, manga sales have gone up by four times. At the moment, these sales are 27 times faster than the whole print book market, and 90% of the yearly growth in adult comics and graphic novels is due to manga.
Also Read: Can’t Get Enough of Jinx? Try These 10 Manga Like Jinx!
Circana Bookscan added up the numbers for print sales of manga in the United States from 2018 to 2022 to break down the information a bit more. In 2018, the manga business put out 5.5 million copies, and in 2019, that number rose to 6.7 million. In 2020, 9.6 million books were sold, and sales kept going up. However, 2021 was a turning point. In that one year, manga sales shot up to 25.2 million books, and in 2022, 28.4 million copies were sold.
As for where this growth happened, it really happened all over the country. In 2022, some parts of the United States grew a lot, and many of those places were towns in the Midwest. Oklahoma City, OK and Kansas City, MO were two of the cities that grew the most. Other cities, like Milwaukee, WI, and Columbus, OH, also moved up the list of places where manga sales are growing the most quickly.
As you can understand, this kind of growth is crazy to see, and this is just for print manga sales in the United States. These numbers don’t take into account how many books are sold in Japan or anywhere else in the world. They don’t even count the sales of digital manga in Japan, so it’s hard to say how big manga would be if those numbers were added in.
Must Read: How Many Episodes Are in Demon Slayer Season 3?
We do know a little bit about the manga market around the world. According to research on the market, in 2022 the world manga market was worth $11.68 billion USD. Forecasts say the business will continue to make more money around the world this year and for many years to come. By 2032, the global market could be worth more than $50 billion, according to forecasts.
