How Japan's beloved comics conquered the world

Manga range from sci-fi epics to teen romance and sellout faster than they can be printed. But what has driven this new appetite for graphic novels?

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Ihead to a bookshop on my lunch break to find something for my daughter's 12th birthday. I never seem to get it quite right when choosing books for her, so I ask the bookseller (in her 20s) for a recommendation, and she directs me to I the manga shelves. It's cool, you read it from right to left, she'll love it, I'm told. Komi Can't Communicate, about a socially anxious high school student, could work. Or how about dark fantasy Tokyo Ghoul: slightly age-inappropriate, but that's what preteens love. As we search the shelves, however - four whole bays, devoted to manga! - volume one in every potential series appears to be missing. The store just can't keep them in stock, the bookseller explains, because they are so ridiculously popular.

Manga, broadly defined as comics originating in Japan, has been huge in its home country for decades. But over the past five years, sales have been exploding around the world. The UK numbers for the graphic medium, which spans many genres and is typically printed in black and white, are staggering. According to Nielsen BookScan, in 2012 there were 434,633 copies of manga titles sold, for a value of £3.17m ($3.6m). By 2019 this had reached 983,822 copies, for £9.1m. So far this year, 1.8m manga have been sold-nearly double the full-year sales of three years ago.

In the US, the figures are equally eye-watering. In 2020, there were 9.68m copies of manga titles sold, says NPD BookScan, and the following year sales jumped 160% to 25.2m. In 2021, manga was the leading growth category in the total print book market in the US, outpacing the next-highest growth category (romance) by three times.

English-language distributor Viz Media says it has seen "phenomenal" increases in the past 18 months across all its territories - Canada, Australia and New Zealand as well as the US and the UK.