In 2024, the Children’s Comic Strip Fiction and Graphic Novels category hit an all-time high of £20.2m; it is currently on course to obliterate that, with sales so far in 2025 up 29.4% – an increase that suggests a final year figure of £26.1m could be possible.

Has the increased popularity of graphic novels among a younger audience been mirrored in Adult Graphic Novels? So far in 2025, NielsenIQ BookData’s Graphic Novels category has seen 2,161,645 books sold – 3.2% more copies than in the children’s market, though with an average selling price of £14.13, the sales value is 88.1% higher, with a total so far of £31.1m. Compared with the same period in 2024, value has increased 7.1% from £29.1m – so while it is a rise, it has not shot up as much as its younger counterpart. The adult Graphic Novels category has, however, experienced a massive rise over the past few years, peaking in 2022 when £53.3m was spent on the category, compared to an annual average of £22.1m in 2010-19. Back in 2005, a mere £5m was spent across 547,867 books.

If sales in 2025 continue at the same rate as 2024, the category will notch up just over £52m by the end of December, providing its second-best performance since records began.

The biggest subcategory in the genre is Manga, worth £17.7m so far this year, up 7.8% compared with 2024. Back in 2001, just £736 was spent in the Manga category in the UK; now, it accounts for 56.9% of total Graphic Novels sales – although that share has dropped slightly against the same period in 2024, thanks to the Superheroes category rising 31.6% to £6.7m.

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Unlike other fiction categories, Graphic Novels is heavily reliant on backlist, with the bestselling title so far this year first being published in 2019. Jujutsu Kaisen: Vol 1 by Gege Akutami has seen 13,602 copies pass through bookshop tills in the first eight months of 2025 – down 18.5% on the same period in 2024, when it went on to sell 26,426 copies – comfortably topping the chart with a gap of more than 9,000 units between it and second place.

You have to travel down to fourth place to find the first title released in 2025 in the current ranking – a position held by the 25th volume of the Jujutsu Kaisen series – and there are just eight books in the entire Top 50 published in 2025, with volumes 24 and 26 of Akutami’s series taking up another two of those slots.

The series has experienced a slight drop in volume sales of 2.3%, although value has risen 2.2% to £943,771, placing Akutami in second on the bestselling author list, down from his number one ranking at this point in 2024. The top spot is taken instead by Eiichiro Oda – who rises from second place with an 11.6% jump in sales to £992,277. The One
Piece series, though, has only one more release in 2025, with the 110th volume expected in the second half of December, while Akutami is due two more volumes, with the 27th instalment in his series scheduled for the beginning of October.

Whichever of those two ends up topping the list, it is all gravy for their shared publisher VIZ Media, which so far in 2025 has earned £10.5m and taken 31 of the available slots in the Top 50. Though, perhaps disappointingly, while value has risen 2.2%, the San Franciso-based arm of Japan’s Shogakukan-Shueisha conglomerate had 40 of the total spaces in 2024, so its commanding market share is eroding ever so slightly.

Another American Manga stalwart, Yen Press (a joint venture between Japan’s Kadokawa and Hachette US) has increased its Top 50 showing from three slots to nine and boosted revenue by a third to £2.6m, making it the third-biggest publisher in the category, just behind DC Comics’ £2.9m, which is also up a third on its
2024 performance.