‘My Hero Academia’ Dominates 2021 Top 20 Manga Chart

The folks at ICv2 have put together a look at the top twenty manga graphic novels of 2021 as calculated by the NPD BookScan data, which encompasses the majority of standard distribution outlets and paints a really solid picture of what’s going on.

Unsurprisingly, it’s pretty similar to the previous year and it continues to have Viz Media dominating it as they handled the most popular genre of all with the shonen titles. Viz Media has sixteen of the twenty slots and seven of those are My Hero Academia. Demon Slayer grabs four while Chainsaw Man has three.

Kodansha Comics takes the top spot with Attack on Titan with additional slots filling in with the second and thirty-four volumes as people continue on with the property. Yen Press gets one slot with the very well-selling Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun.

As we’ve seen throughout the week with ICV2 covering manga, a lot of other publishers are basically “locked out” of the big shonen titles for obvious reasons between Viz Media and Kodansha Comics. That said, they’re all producing a lot of great books that aren’t charting but are reaching a lot of readers with the diverse material. Shonen powers the train but the other publishers and the long range of titles that they have are what’s keeping in a lot of people, especially as they get older and these publishers are seeking out works aimed at those age brackets.

There are times that I wish ICv2 would publisher a look what’s selling that excludes Viz Media titles just to see where those books are shaking out in terms of what’s popular.

Chris Beveridge

http://www.fandompost.com

Chris has been writing about anime, manga, movies and comics for well on twenty years now. He began AnimeOnDVD.com back in 1998 and has covered nearly every anime release that’s come out in the US ever since.

He likes to write a lot, as you can see.

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