Shonen Manga Dominated 2017’s Top-Sellers List

Manga fans are some of the most diverse, and have a wide range of tastes, but they still recognize the wide reach and popularity of a good action series.

Shonen is a genre that’s generally written for young boys and contain a good amount of action, but the popularity goes far beyond that niche.

According to a list posted by Oricon in Japan, the top ten best-selling manga series in Japan are dominated primarily by big Shonen series:

Ranking in the top ten are Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece, Hajime Isayama’s Attack on Titan, Yasuhira Hara’s Kingdom, Kohei Horikoshi’s My Hero Academia, Sui Ishida’s Tokyo Ghoul Re, Haruichi Furudate’s Haikyuu!!, Nakaba Suzuki’s The Seven Deadly Sins, ONE and Yusuke Murata’s One Punch Man, Yuto Tsukuda and Shun Saeki’s Food Wars! Shokugeki no Soma, and Shibobu Otaka’s Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic.

The top-sellers list was gathered from November 2016 to November 2017, and fans will recognize many of the series listed here. All but one of the series, Yasuhira Hara’s Kingdom, currently have ongoing anime productions that have gone on to English language popularity in North America.

As for how the authors themselves feel, the creator of One Piece Eiichiro Oda responded gracefully and humorously with “I love being number one!” The creator of One Punch Man also recently responded to the series’ popularity overseas with the fact that most of it lies with his illustrator’s instructions.

Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece first began serialization in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997. It has been collected into 87 volumes, with a few chapters yet to be included. It 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 430 million copies sold worldwide.

One Punch Man started life as a webcomic by series creator ONE in 2009. After going viral, surpassing seven million hits in June 2012, illustrator Yusuke Murata approached ONE about redrawing the series for a release in Shuiesha’s Weekly Young Jump spin-off webcomics. Thirteen volumes of the series have been released as of this date.

VIZ Media bought the rights to distribute the manga in English, and the series was later adapted into a 12 episode anime series from Madhouse. The series first aired in Japan in 2015, and later debuted its English language broadcast on Adult Swim’s Toonami block in 2016.

What do you think of the top ten list? Talk to me @Valdezology.