One Piece Narrowly Beats Demon Slayer in Overall 2019 Sales

When it comes to manga sales, it is a safe bet to assume One Piece will win. For the last several years, Eiichiro Oda’s title has come out on top in annual sales. Not even juggernauts like Attack on Titan managed to take down the Straw Hat crew, but it looked like Demon Slayer would take the top spot this year.

Of course, Monkey D. Luffy was not going to let that fly. In true Straw Hat fashion, One Piece rallied ahead, and a new report from Japan says Oda’s title narrowly beat out Demon Slayer for first place.

According to The Mainichi Shimbun (via ANN), One Piece is the top-selling manga title at Shueisha for 2019. In the last year, Oda’s title has sold 12.7 million volumes. This is compared to the 10.8 volumes which Demon Slayer sold in the same time period.

For fans of both series, this announcement is an awaited one. It would take some serious intervention to alter this result which has Demon Slayer confused. Not long ago, Koyoharu Gotouge’s manga surpassed One Piece in overall sales. The series got a huge boost in sales thanks to its anime, and Japanese stores had trouble keeping Demon Slayer on the shelves. But it seems like One Piece managed to outdo the rising series thanks to its backlog volumes.

With the new year just a few weeks away, it seems One Piece is preparing to accept another big award, but fans of Demon Slayer are not giving up. The growing fandom hopes to pit Tanijiro against Luffy in 2020, and the odds of who will win lies solely with readers.

Are you surprised by this competition’s results? Let me know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter @MeganPetersCB to talk all things comics and anime!

Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece first began serialization in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997. It has since been collected into over 80 volumes, and has been a critical and commercial success worldwide with many of the volumes breaking printing records in Japan. The manga has even set a Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic book by a single author, and is the best-selling manga series worldwide with over 430 million copies sold. The series still ranked number one in manga sales in 2018, which surprised fans of major new entries.