In recent years, the manga industry has seen tremendous growth for both the print versions of the comics and the digital versions. However, the popularity of Japanese comics is having an inexorable impact on the graphic novel and comics industry, as evidenced by the photos that have gone viral.

User Ursula K. LeChina shared two photos on her Twitter page showing the opening of one of her city's bookstores plenty of space for manga displays and few shelves for graphic novels. The commentary alongside the images is quite direct, expressing regret and concern at a competition that American comics cannot win.

Those two images, that direct comparison between the general public demand for a single library, were enough to make many readers concerned about the future of graphic novels. These doubts also find concreteness in the data shared by NPD BookScan, which takes into account the sales of the various publishing sectors year by year. In 2022, manga accounted for 53% of sales Comic industry totals, including graphic novels.

Figures that summarize with a 4.1 percent growth compared to previous years and a 1.4 percent decline in the publishing category that acts as a direct competitor to comics, ie children's fiction. Adult superhero comics also saw one of the sharpest declines, down 1.7 percentage points. The popularity of manga has seen publishers like Viz Media and Kodansha Comics set new sales records at the same time Growth of manga consumption through official digital platformslike manga plus.

With the abundance of works on the market and all the productions currently underway, it seems difficult to pin down the reasons for the growth of manga and the apparent collapse of comics and graphic novels and many fans with certainty, as you can see in the posts below they tried to motivate this situation. And what do you think? We await your opinion in the comments.

Before we say goodbye, let's remember that Kodansha presented the K Manga digital platform, which will most likely be the one Main competitor of the service offered by Shueisha on MangaPlus.


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Sweety Otaku

One of the best parts of watching anime is how many times a show can surprise you. Sometimes for good, sometimes for bad. But if the Otaku know one thing, it's that anything is possible.

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