One Piece: more than 20 years later, the pirate manga gets the crown in France

news culture One Piece: more than 20 years later, the pirate manga gets the crown in France

Luffy, One Piece star turned manga king

We have all already imagined what a fight between the stars of our favorite manga would look like: who would win between Luffy, Goku and Naruto if they were to face each other? A wacky idea that doesn’t really make sense but which stimulates the (sometimes surly) debates of the fans. In a fight (more cordial this time) of the figures, it would seem that the winds have turned at Glénat. Two days ago, manga journalist @Athan0r shared the publisher’s all-time best-selling figures behind the publication in France of One Piece and Dragon Ball in particular.

And 2021 was a pivotal year for One Piece in France: with 5.6 million copies sold in France, Eiichiro Oda’s manga then reached 29.6 million sales and therefore became the publisher’s best-selling manga in France ahead of Dragon Ball. Akira Toriyama’s manga has sold 26 million copies since its release, including 1.8 million last year. Note the excellent performance of tokyo revenge which exceeded one million units sold. But be careful though: if One Piece has surpassed Dragon Ball in absolute value of sales of its manga, that does (perhaps!) not make it the best-selling manga in France. To be sure, it would be necessary to compare with the sales of Kana and of a certain naruto even if some figures speak of a total circulation of 25 million units.

Despite everything, it must be recognized that the five million volumes sold in 2021 represent a colossal result. This is almost 20% of sales since the publication of the first volume in France in 2000: almost one in five volumes of One Piece was sold in 2021. Huge distributions probably helped by the various confinements and the incessant promotion of the work last year. It should be remembered that the animated series exceeded the threshold of a thousand episodes broadcast in November 2021 while the manga published, in France, volume n ° 100 of the saga.

On this subject, the promotion does not stop since a series live action is being produced by Netflix. Then no later than this morninga card game titled One Piece Card Game was revealed by Bandai Carddass and whose release should arrive this year in France. The success of One Piece is therefore not ready to stop, either in France or around the world: it should be remembered that last July, One Piece was the most distributed manga in the world with 490 million copies sold.