About one in seven books purchased in France in 2022 was a manga, with growth that should continue given the young age of readers, according to a study revealed by the GfK institute.
The institute, which is a benchmark for book sales, noted during the International Comics Festival in Angoulême that manga represented 57% of the comic book market in volume, which itself accounts for 25.2% of the book market.
“The manga is reaching new heights, after having already had a historic year in 2021”
, explained GfK consultant Casseline Rosello at a press conference.
In ten years, the volume of the French manga market, second in the world behind Japan, has quadrupled.
It reached 381 million euros in value in 2022. A genre of manga, shônen (for adolescent boys), alone represents 43% of comic book sales in France.
new followers
While no manga appeared among the 100 best-selling books in 2019, there were three in 2020, 24 in 2021 and 28 in 2022. These very popular titles, like the 253,000 copies in 2022 of the first volume of
One Piece
, are usually low-cost series debuts, to convince the reader to pursue further.
One Piece thus has 103 volumes to date in French.
The role of the Culture Pass, a state subsidy for middle and high school students and students to buy cultural products, should be put into perspective.
“The Culture Pass which would be a manga Pass, it is a received idea”
, underlined Thursday morning in Angoulême the Minister of Culture Rima Abdul Malak.
As for the books purchased using this pass, the number one purchase item for its holders, manga represents 43% of sales in volume, and 29% in value.
GfK noted the expansion of the manga customer base.
In 2022,
“readers who were already buying manga bought slightly less.
We have more growth on the side of those who did not buy it
, “said Casseline Rosello.
This year, the Angoulême Festival welcomed several manga stars such as Hajime Isayama (
Attack on Titan
), Ryoichi Ikegami, designer of the
Crying Freeman
series, among others , or Junji Ito (
Maniac by Junji Ito, macabre anthology
on Netflix) .
