One Piece is now the 2nd highest selling ongoing comic series behind Superman

[Lvenger]

https://thenewspocket.com/one-piece-beats-batman/

This week it was announced that One Piece's worldwide sales have reached a total of 490 million units. This puts the massively popular shonen series ahead of Batman's lifetime sales, which currently stand at around 480 million according to various sources. Now that Batman has been moved down to the third best selling series, it's possible One Piece could overtake Superman to become the best selling comic series of all time. Since his creation in 1938, Superman has currently sold approximately 600 million units in total, yet One Piece has managed to surpass Batman and Spider-Man's lifetime sales since its debut in 1997. Although the One Piece manga is nearing the end of its story according to the mangaka Eiichiro Oda, who has stated that One Piece will continue for another 5 years. Nonetheless, given the recent lacklustre sale rankings of Philip Kennedy Johnson's Superman titles, this news highlights the ever growing sales of Japanese manga and the possibility that one series could take the top spot away from the world's first superhero.

Any thoughts or insights on the sales trends of comics versus manga and how these two media are distributed are always welcome.

[Quinlan58]

It's completely deserved.

[FFJamie94]

It makes sense, One Piece has been going on for years and has established a loyal fan base.
I can certainly see it overtaking Superman.
Saying that, it's purely down to population and culture. Manga not only appeals to Japan, but to America and parts of Europe. American comics get a lot of their fanbase from America and the UK.

Also, Manga is self contained, if you wanted to read One piece, you start at volume 1 and go from there.
Superman has numerous volume 1s, stories get dropped out of canon and come back in canon, numerous titles and writers.
It starts to become unappealing to a larger audience.
That and the fact American publishers are terrible ay advertising their own books. So yeah, it makes sense.

[Jim Kelly]

No shade to Lvenger, who is simply posting an article, but this is just meaningless wordage. Obviously websites have to generate content. So writers have to put strings of sentences together to fill the word quota, so they can get paid. And it has to have enough content words in the post that make it searchable. But it's just a jumble of factoids that add up to nothing.

What is the thesis? What is proven? It's not worth anything. A search online tells me that Lipitor is one of the highest selling items of all time. Petroleum is another thing that sells in high quantities. Putting these two factoids side by side, I must be a genius.

[Alkaeus]

No shade to Lvenger, who is simply posting an article, but this is just meaningless wordage. Obviously websites have to generate content. So writers have to put strings of sentences together to fill the word quota, so they can get paid. And it has to have enough content words in the post that make it searchable. But it's just a jumble of factoids that add up to nothing.

What is the thesis? What is proven? It's not worth anything. A search online tells me that Lipitor is one of the highest selling items of all time. Petroleum is another thing that sells in high quantities. Putting these two factoids side by side, I must be a genius.

I think the subtext is "here's more proof that manga is outselling American (Big Two) comics." Also that One Piece is still a juggernaut in its native Japan.

[DABellWrites]

American comic book publishers need to pay attention to how Japanese publishers are marketing and pushing their stories. First and foremost, the anime doesn't overtake the source material like it does in American comics and the stories are actually adapted. Rather than loosely inspired by or the (TV/film) writers take elements from here and there.