Manga Xanadu

Over in Japan, the top-selling manga series for 2014 has been published by Oricon. The list includes the top 30 titles and their sales numbers covering the dates from November 18, 2013 to November 16, 2014. Looking the list over, it’s pretty amazing how many of them have been licensed and are currently being released. Seventeen titles are current available, with the eighteenth, Tokyo Ghoul having just been announced by Viz Media at New York Comic Con in October: Rank Sales Title US Publisher 1 11,885,957 One Piece Viz 2 11,728,368 Attack on Titan Kodansha 4 6,946,203 Tokyo Ghoul Viz 6 5,505,179 Naruto Viz 8 4,657,971 Magi Viz 9 4,633,246 The Seven Deadly Sins Kodansha 10 4,622,108 Assassination Classroom Viz 12 4,295,257 Terra Formars Viz 16 3,816,372 Nisekoi Viz 17 3,275,885 Fairy Tail Kodansha 18 2,986,968 Bleach Viz 19 2,644,122 Food Wars: Shokugeki no Soma Viz 23 2,397,887 Kimi ni Todoke Viz 24 2,394,263 Gintama Viz 25 2,380,774 Detective Conan Viz 26 2,289,738 Black Butler Yen Press 27 2,231,805 Noragami Kodansha 28 2,173,339 One-Punch Man Viz We will then have three of the top five titles and, and seven out of the top ten. That’s really not too bad. Should be…

When publishers started to seriously bring manga over from Japan, they started with the creme-of-the-crop. For a lot of people that meant titles from Weekly Shonen Jump. Just in the last thirty years, that has included a lot of manga. But if we look at this article from Rocket News, which looks at the top 20 Shonen Jump best sellers of all time, there are a lot of familiar titles to American readers. Death Note (20), Rurouni Kenshin (12), One Piece (2), and Dragon Ball (1) are among the titles featured on the list. In fact  of the 20 best-of-the-best sellers 14 have been released in the US, and have (mostly) been completed. Of the Viz Media releases, only Jo Jo’s Bizarre Adventure (7) did not get a full release. Only the third part of the story, “Stardust Crusaders”, which was 16 volumes on its own, was released. But at least the whole part was released. So that leaves 6 titles, but haven’t we see some of these non-Viz released titles? Sacrilege you say? How could anyone other than Viz have released Shonen Jump titles? Back when Shonen Jump was just starting, another manga magazine was starting as well; Raijin…

Yokai, the ghosts and monsters of Japanese folklore, appear alot in manga, but how often do they get to be one of the main characters? This list features titles where they yokai is the protagonist of the manga, and not just a monster to be beat up before the hero moves on.