Naruto at Tops ICV2's Manga Properties List

From ICV2 Insider Guide # 65: Comics, video games and ICV2 posted their quarterly magazine list of the top manga properties for the month of January to March 2009. With the "property", ICV2 is spotlighting 25 manga series that are generating strong sales in several volumes and reader buzz, as reported by "resellers, distributors and manufacturers." While noting that manga sales have decreased by 17% in this period of time "for a number of reasons, including the general economic crisis in the United States and the declining fortunes of the largest chains of bookstores, manga still plays an important role in the novel Sales chart in the U.S.

The first five should surprise almost no one who was recently read manga, Naruto come on top of the table, followed by Fruits Basket, Vampire Knight, Bleach and Death Note. Shonen manga dominates the chart, but seven shojo manga titles has the top 25, including two slots in the top five. VIZ Media dominates the list, with 14 titles in the top 25. Del Rey Manga follows with six titles including Bakugan Battle Brawlers, their first child-friendly title to their partnership with Cartoon Network.

The other notable trend is the emergence of several relatively new titles that had a good start, as Aya Kanno Otomen, Higurashi: When to Cry Ryukishi07 and Karin Suzuragi, and two young adult novel tie-in titles, Maximum Ride by James Patterson and Nara Lee and In Odd We Trust by Dean Koontz and Queenie Chan.

The future, all we will have is Naruto

I encourage you all to check out Chris Butcher’s “Idiosyncratic Take on the Future of Manga” if you haven’t already. It’s in the interest of both the Direct Market and most midlist manga publishers to develop a better relationship now that the big box book stores are being more choosy about how they stock their shelves:

- It’s entirely possible to successfully publish good manga in North America, if everyone involved reconsiders their point of view on what successful means. The art-comix model espoused by D&Q–good books, released less frequently with lots of fanfare and a 10-cent per page price point rather than less than half that… for some releases. I don’t think anyone should expect Naruto-level sales, or even the sales levels that midlist titles hit a few years back, but if buy-in quantities are going to be capped by bookstores because they want to limit their exposure, doesn’t it make a kind of sense to make sure the price-point is higher on each of those units? At least when the material is intended for anyone outside of the mainstream shonen/shoujo demographic.

This, of course, ties in with ICv2’s recent report that projected manga releases are down for 2009. The DM and manga publishers should have a better relationship in this worsening economy. This is pure anecdotal evidence I realize, but I know of a couple of stores that attempted to make inroads to attract manga readers and failed horribly. Now, you can reasonably argue that they did a poor job of it, but I think it’s also true that most manga-buyers are trained to go either to the big chains or online to get their fix and even in this retail downturn, retraining those readers to come to your store instead can take a huge investment, both in time and money.