One Piece & Jujutsu Kaisen Sales Confirm Manga Industry Is in Trouble
The apparent difference in sales for the mangas currently published in Weekly Shonen Jump suggests that there is a big issue for the Japanese comic book industry, which is still dominated by a couple of big names such as One Piece and Jujutsu Kaisen, with everyone else struggling to even get close.
The manga scene was once dominated by the so-called «big three»: One Piece, Naruto, and Bleach. These three alone were mostly responsible for popularizing Japanese contemporary culture worldwide and for the unprecedented expansion in the early 2000s of an industry that not only includes manga, but also anime, merchandising, movies, and more. All three works are among the best-selling mangas of all time, with One Piece coming first, Naruto sixth, and Bleach eleventh. Despite this, however, the sales volume of manga magazines and manga books in Japan has steadily declined throughout the past decades.
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An assessment of sales for volumes of manga currently published in Weekly Shonen Jump for the first week of April shared by Twitter user Jump Oricon — who tracks the circulation of the Shueisha series — shows what might be the biggest issue. The report states that volume 102 of One Piece sold 1,050,333 copies, and volume 19 of Jujutsu Kaisen sold 1,160,230, two impressive numbers. Every other series, however, is so far behind that it looks like they are in a completely different league. Black Clover volume 32 is the one that did best, with a mere 105,158 copies. This is a manga that has been around for seven years already, so the low number of sales cannot be attributed to a lack of knowledge among manga readers. This case could be made
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