Let’s take a quick, snapshot look at the state of the industry, shall we?
[ooooo… messy…]
…but even with some unanswered questions about who is going to be publishing the manga in a year or two (with all these stupid rumors, and corporate shuffling, and bad news for retail and the economy, and digital and OEL and […]

[*gasp*]
Well, the ‘confession’ is mostly along the lines of ‘perhaps I’ve unfairly misjudged them’ and the rest… likely also isn’t what you’re thinking.
[here’s the pro forma link to this week’s chart, for those of you surfing in from some other site.]
Under the Hood
It’s still an ‘estimate’ this week, as I can’t quite claim certainty (and […]

All of 2007 –That’s a large mandate; I tried to take a look at retail, publishing, and some specific trends relating to graphic novels — at least as much as I can manage, given my resources.
Bullet points
Economy
[source: Census Bureau]
* Retail Sales were up 3.2% in 2007 …but inflation was up 4.1%. Excluding energy and […]

It’s rare that I get a link from Heidi MacDonald, so rare in fact that this is only the second (hm… third?) time that it’s happened. I felt like clarifying my drunken, rambling post of the 9th for the readership on The Beat, and of course since I know no one bothers to read […]

Bullet Points:

Japanese manga sales slip another 2.3% in 2007, but
the medium is gaining currency as a tool of Soft Power diplomacy
…and increased academic and scholarly attention.

Numbers first–
We’ll begin with My Usual Complaint: sources are hard to come by. It’s not that market research isn’t being done; oh no, it’s that if you want it you’ll […]

In what I hope will become a longstanding tradition, once again I get to blatantly steal from helpfully re-print a selection from the readers’ comments on last week’s commentary:
Comment from Marfisa
: April 26, 2008, 12:18 pm
“Fullmetal Alchemist” was never serialized in the English-language edition of Shonen Jump, because it didn’t appear in Shonen Jump even […]

[commentary and actual analysis (oooh, shiny) on this week’s sales rankings]
I know you folks don’t bother to read comments, or any of my posts for that matter unless a kind friend of the blog happens to post a link, so I’ll take it as a given that you missed the discussion & commentary on last […]

I’ve recently posted the new Manga 500 for this past week, now the fourth week in a row.
I make no guarantees (my New Year’s Resolution is still to post nothing to the blog) but in an effort to both streamline the process and make the charts more user-friendly, I’m asking for feedback from my readers.
Given […]

(commentary only tangentially related to the sales rankings and other charts posted this week)
Picking up from last week: I was riffing on “what is manga” and asked myself the question, “Are Light Novels Manga?”
From 6 April:
“Oooo… that last one is a good topic: why the prose output of Tokyopop & Seven Seas (& Viz, they’ve […]

Let’s just say you just linked in from some other comics blog and weren’t yet acquainted with all the numbery goodness I posted this afternoon. Well, you should start where I do, with the Top 500 Manga. From there it’s your pick, either to the Publishers’ Scorecard to see just how many titles on the […]

This is the commentary on the sales charts. Previously:
Manga Top 500
Top 50 Series
Publishers’ Scorecard
Manga Midlist 500
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Trivia: I spent about 15 hours this week on these damn charts.
Yes, I could re-watch all of Neon Genesis Evangelion (including the movies) in the amount of time I just wasted figuring out that Naruto and Death Note […]

[a follow-up in spirit to this post]
An aside: Hiatus
You might have noticed, the heretofore-weekly manga bestsellers are late. (really late)
I didn’t post the online bestsellers yesterday — and I’m not posting anything today either, in keeping with my new year’s resolution to post nothing to the blog.
…but I’ve got a lot to say […]

I’m running 5-6 days behind on this post, which is problematic considering I’m compiling a weekly bestseller chart. If I wait too much longer I might as well just give it a rest for a day or two and instead double up, cover two weeks worth of charts with a monster commentary on a ‘regularly […]

Corrections:

Last Week, Fruits Basket vol 13 (#94) was misidentified as vol 12.
Also, while Borders lists it as the “Ai Land Chronicles Omnibus,” a mistake I’ve echoed for several weeks (because they’re one of my sources, natch) it seems that based on price and publication date this volume is in fact the Princess Ai Ultimate Edition. […]

[in case you missed the last entry, this is a discussion of the online manga rankings (pdf) for this past week.]
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I think we all can take it as a given, that I’m nuts.
Completely aside from the requisite delusions and dementia that make me assume I have the skill set required to compile an online bestseller […]