No, the highest selling Graphic Novel from 2006 that doesn’t have a hit tv show or movie was Fruits Basket Volume 13, followed by Kingdom Hearts Volume 2, Fruits Basket Volume 14, Kingdom Hearts Voume 1, Kingdom Hearts Volume 3, and _then_ Watchmen.

You could argue that Kingdom Hearts had a hit videogame to boost it’s sales, but no such argument can be applied to Fruits Basket.

Fruits Basket did have a tv show, but it was only released on DVD in the U.S. and that was in 2002 and 2003 (with a boxset in late 2004). It also was hardly some sort of massive hit even by the standards of direct-to-DVD sales. So it’s sales are pretty darn impressive (not that I’m comparing it to Watchmen, which has sold tens of thousands of books a year for two decades now).

Without disputing the actual conclusion expressed here, I want to say that “superheroes” are a genre, while “manga” is not. So at first glance the quote seems to be making a statement about popular subject matter, but it doesn’t really. I mean, “Buddha” isn’t “One Piece” isn’t “Full-Metal Alchemist” etc., etc.

Manga has it’s own genres and creative ghettos. I think you have to look at who’s buying it and why. I teach a comic book drawing class for kids, and they’re all reading manga. Why? Because they’re in school and their friends are reading manga. They’re kids. They wear the same clothes, listen to the same bands, see the same movies, etc. This stuff is aimed at them, while a $50 volume of “Palomar” is not.

It’s absurd to expect the 10 year old that’s reading “One Piece” now to have any clue about Igort’s latest Fantagraphics release.
I think it’s more important to recognize that manga has done what American comics abandoned trying to do; get kids reading comics. I’m happy to see it. Those kids will grow up and either grow out of comics or search for more mature books, hopefully discovering that artists in countries other than Japan draw comics too.

The argument over sales of art comics being misrepresented by BookScan due to undercounting of indy bookstores and certain specialty bookstores strikes me as beside the point. Art comics are like literary fiction. Only occasionally–as when Oprah bestowed fame on The Corrections–does a literary work achieve best-seller status. I suspect that if you looked at the top 750 fiction list from BookScan, it would not include too many works of literary fiction. There’d be a lot of romance and thrillers and “chick lit” and series fiction and books by writing machines like James Patterson and Danielle Steele and Mary Higgins Clark, etc. Maybe occasionally you will get a big name literary author there whose new book is an event book–a Norman Mailer or Don Delillo or Margaret Atwood, for example. But mostly not. National Book Award winners? I bet they typically don’t make the top 750 lists.

And yet, literary fiction keeps getting published and published by big publishers. Why? Lots of reasons, I suppose–publishers want to sell to the widest market; the occasional breakthrough books may justify the low investment cost in the rest; habit; a desire to do the right thing; a desire to be able to brag to educated sophisticated friends about the great books you’ve published; a book of literary fiction that gets acknowledged as a classic can become a long-term backlist earner; maybe a positive marginal profit makes them worthwhile, if not as profitable as “10 Management Secrets of Cheops” or whatever; etc.

What separates our big publishers–Marvel and DC, and I guess also Viz, Tokyopop, and Dark Horse–from Random House or HarperCollins is that they don’t publish the comics equivalent of literary fiction. They don’t publish art comics. DC made an attempt years ago with their Piranha/Paradox line, and there have been occasional oddball books that seem pretty arty–Dark Horse being the most consistent experimenter, I suppose. But perhaps except for Dark Horse, art comics are not part of their mission the way literary fiction is without a doubt part of the mission of Random House. Unlike Random House, the big comics publishers never developed this habit. They are happy to let Fantagraphics and D&Q and whoever have that trade.

So I suspect that even with the undercounting of indy bookstores, Brian Hibbs is largely correct. However, so what? If Fantagraphics is able to sell 5000 to 10,000 of a book in the book trade, in addition to the 2000 it sells in the direct market–well, that’s a lot more than they used to sell when they relied almost exclusively on the DM. Who cares if they aren’t selling Naruto numbers? Does Random House lose sleep over the fact that Leaving Home by Anita Brookner sells substantially less than Sisters by Danielle Steele?

I’d say V for Vendetta is only partly about the movie, unless there was a correlating bump for Watchmen (as the “greatest work”). What is interesting to me as a reader is that DC’s “biggest hits” are populated by many older titles–V, Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns, Kingdom Come, and Sandman are all at least ten and sometimes TWENTY years old.

Contrast that with Marvel’s relatively new offerings that sell the highest. And I have to admit that until today I’d never heard of Neruto!!