Superheroes, Manga and Asterix: What the Global Comics Numbers Say
France sells more American superhero comics than any other country tracked. It also buys 2.4 million copies of Asterix a year.
Those two facts sat side by side at Frankfurter Buchmesse 2026, the book trade fair scheduled for 7-11 October in Frankfurt, Germany. NielsenIQ BookData commercial directors Hazel Kenyon and Fabien Rondeau laid out recent sales figures for comics and graphic novels in a session titled "From Manga to Graphic Novels: Understanding the Global Comics Opportunity," Publishing Perspectives.
Kenyon is based in Hong Kong. Rondeau is based in Paris, where he covers French-speaking countries.
American comics remain superhero-dominated. Their sales are driven by omnibuses, large high-cost hardcover collections bought as collectables. France is the country where most of those books are sold.
Manga still rules. In most territories, the top three franchises are Koyoharu Gotoge's Demon Slayer, Gege Akutami's Jujutsu Kaisen and Eiichiro Oda's One Piece. France is the second-largest market for manga behind Japan.
The French-language boom has cooled. In French-speaking countries, manga sales peaked in 2022 and have declined since then. Latin America is moving the other way. Print manga sales in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico are growing again after a dip in 2023.
Children's comics are a different engine. Comic strip fiction — stories told in a mix of drawings, panels and text — accounts for 21% of all middle-grade fiction value sales in the U.K. and Ireland. Value sales means money spent, not copies sold. Between 2021 and 2025, the bestselling children's graphic novel authors were Dav Pilkey and Jeff Kinney.
Alice Oseman's Heartstopper took another route to print. Its first print version was funded through a Kickstarter campaign, an online crowdfunding platform, in 2018.
In France, homegrown graphic novels hold their ground. The top sellers over the past five years included Silent Jenny by Mathieu Bablet and World Without End by Christophe Blain and Jean-Marc Jancovici, alongside the ever-present Asterix.
What makes this stand out is the split underneath. For fans, this means no single global comics market. Superhero collectables, long-running manga series and children's humour titles each pull different readers in different places.
The wider book market is growing in most places. Ten out of the 18 territories tracked by NielsenIQ BookData saw volume growth — more copies sold — in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period last year, Publishers Weekly reported. France was the largest market covered, with 124 million books sold, followed by the United Kingdom.
