Last year, the unthinkable happened. The One Piece manga was knocked from the top spot for the first time in twelve years. In its place was a new manga sales champion: Demon Slayer. That was no fluke.
As Kotaku reported earlier this year, the Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba dominated Japan’s Oricon sales chart for the first half of 2020. Now Oricon has released its full-year rankings for the period dating from December 2, 2019, to November 30, 2020. These estimated sales were compiled with the assistance of 3,975 book sellers across Japan, including online sales.
1. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba: 82,345,447 copies
2. Kingdom: 8,251,058 copies
3. One Piece: 7,709,667 copies
4. Haikyu!!: 7,212,099 copies
5. Jujutsu Kaisen: 6,702,736 copies
As Mothership explains, the reason why One Piece fell from second place to third place this year was that third volumes went on sale during this sales period instead of the usual four.
As we saw with the earlier half-year numbers, the truly staggering total sales are the result of jaw-dropping individual volume sales. Check out the top twenty-five manga by individual volume sold.
1. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba 18: 4,393,137 copies
2. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba 19: 4,243,312 copies
3. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba 1: 3,703,309 copies
4. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba 4: 3,645,580 copies
5. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba 7: 3,636,822 copies
6. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba 9: 3,622,257 copies
7. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba 11: 3,616,800 copies
8. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba 2: 3,613,001 copies
9. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba 10: 3,609,676 copies
10. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba 12: 3,606,418 copies
11. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba 14: 3,588,193 copies
12. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba 3: 3,584,243 copies
13. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba 13: 3,580,286 copies
14. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba 15: 3,554,931 copies
15. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba 4: 3,551,955 copies
16. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba 6: 3,546,800 copies
17. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba 5: 3,546,548 copies
18. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba 16: 3,510,596 copies
19. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba 17: 3,469,660 copies
20. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba 22: 3,105,812 copies
21. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba 20: 2,759,462 copies
22. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba 21: 2,654,558 copies
23. One Piece 95: 2,054,642 copies
24. One Piece 96: 1,898,453 copies
25. One Piece 97: 1,806,133 copies
It’s not only the Demon Slayer manga that’s popular but also its feature animated movie (pictured, top)!
While the Demon Slayer manga, which debuted in 2016, ended this past May, the One Piece manga is still going strong. However, Eiichiro Oda says the One Piece manga will end in the next four or five years.
That’s insane.
I have yet to read it, only watched the anime. Surely the book must be many times better than the show, right? Because the show was flashy/pretty sure, but just decent overall imo.
Like it didn’t do anything bad, but nothing was particularly great either. it was just all around ‘good’.
I can 100% understand it getting pretty popular. But this popular seems insane compared to other things that have taken off but not to this extent.
The manga is good, but it’s a lot harder to tell what’s happening with the action. I picked it up after watching the anime. The movie is the train arc.
I like that each villain has their backstory revealed. Often it’s just small things that end up driving the demons to do horrible things. It’s better than the whole “i want to take over the world because I’m bad!”