FoxxFireArt (Level 25)

One Piece - King of Manga for 2010!!!!!

It's a day before the end of November and the Oricon(Japanese corporate group that monitors sales and supplies statistics for items such as CDs, DVD, manga, ect.) is out with their Top 25 manga sales of 2010. The sales rankings start from all sales made from November 23, 2009  throughout to November 21, 2010. In the Japanese sales for the year, Shonen Jump's manga line cleared out the vast majority of the Top 25, and One Piece by Eiichiro Oda took all the top five spots. One Piece Volume 60 was only released November 4th and still managed to reach the number four spot with only three weeks on sale, over Volume 56 that was released in December 4, 2009.
 
Every volume of One Piece sold over two million units in the year for a grand total of 12.7 Million.

 
It was back on November 29 when I wrote my guest article of One Piece breaking the one week sales records for a manga. It has been a banner year for the series. It's incredibly impressive sales, but One Piece wasn't the only in the Shonen Jump series to rank very well this year. Fullmetal Alchemist ranked just behind with the last few volumes in the series. Naruto had a strong third showing but scattered along with  Nodame Cantabile & Kimi no Todoke, Hunter X Hunter & Saint Young Men had only a single showing each, and BLEACH rounded off the bottom spots with four volumes.
 
The appearance of Neon Genesis Evangelion Volume 12 should be noted. The series has had an excruciatingly long release schedule. Volume 1 in the series was first released in Japan on August 29th 1995. The series illustrated by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto had a generally erratic release schedule, but it got worse after 2002's release of Volume 8. The volumes were only being released every two years. It was in June 2007 that Volume 11(which appeared to be following The End of Evangelion movie) was published. Only on the tail end of 2010 are we finally getting what should be the final volume of the main Evangelion story in manga form.

Oricon Top 25 Sale Ranking 2010

Rank	Volume	Copies Sold
1	One Piece Vol. 59	2.594 Million
2	One Piece Vol. 57	2.579 Million
3	One Piece Vol. 58	2.557 Million
4	One Piece Vol. 60	2.492 Million
5	One Piece Vol. 56	2.480 Million
6	Fullmetal Alchemist Vol. 25	1.341 Million
7	Fullmetal Alchemist Vol. 24	1.298 Million
8	Nodame Cantabile  Vol. 23	1.242 Million
9	Fullmetal Alchemist Vol. 26	1.214 Million
10	Naruto Vol. 49	1.211 Million
11	Naruto Vol. 50	1.200 Million
12	Naruto Vol. 52	1.194 Million
13	Kimi ni Todoke Vol. 10	1.148 Million
14	Naruto Vol. 51	1.145 Million
15	Kimi ni Todoke Vol. 11	1.134 Million
16	Kimi ni Todoke Vol. 12	1.83 Million
17	Naruto Vol. 53	1.30 Million
18	Nodame Cantabile Vol. 24	0.968 Million
19	Hunter X Hunter Vol. 27	0.942 Million
20	Saint Young Men Vol. 5	0.896 Million
21	Neon Genesis Evangelion Vol. 12	0.843 Million
22	BLEACH Vol. 42	0.822 Million
23	BLEACH Vol. 44	0.780 Million
24	BLEACH Vol. 45	0.770 Million
25	BLEACH Vol. 46	0.769 Million

 
The final Fullmetal Alchemist Vol. 27 came in at a bad time since it was released on November 22nd, the day after Oricon stopped the 2010 rankings. This could be mixed news. It could mean that it has the entire year to build up sales for a strong showing in next year's Top 25. It also puts it in the position of having to compete with every manga that comes out next year. An unfortunate bit of scheduling for  Hiromu Arakawa's popular series and it's grand finale.

Source:  Oricon

 -Kristoffer Remmell (  FoxxFireArt) is a freelance graphic artist, writer, and over all mystery geek.-