Best-Selling Comic Magazines

When it comes to comic books, people are likely to be more familiar with them having separate issues for their headline stars. Aside from some little strips, adverts or the like, a Superman comic is going to be about the Man of Steel, Batman is going to feature the Dark Knight, and a Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure volume will be about one Jojo or another adventuring bizarrely.

However, Jojo’s chapters were originally published as one of many strips in a comic magazine. It’s pretty much standard practice for most manga, but they didn’t invent the practice. Nearly every nation has its own popular comic magazine, with some catching on so well they sell in their billions. Whether they’re old-school curios or modern classics, these are the best-selling comic magazines around.

10

MAD Magazine

Anarchic Satirical Magazine Falls to the Tides of Time

• 1952-Present.
• Approximate Sales: 430 Million.
• Notable Works: Spy Vs Spy, Monroe, MAD Fold-Ins.

Comic books are essentially a product of American pop culture, yet MAD Magazine is the only active US entry on this list. Kind of. It’s now only available from comic book stores or by subscription these days. Even then, it mostly republishes its old content now, since real life has managed to be madder than anything a satirist today could conjure up.

Nonetheless, for decades, it was the premier satire magazine, poking fun at everything from Hollywood actors to politicians, TV shows to movies, and more. Its bite influenced a host of strips, series, and shows across the decades, like The Simpsons, who would reference the magazine from time to time. Though this didn’t stop MAD from satirizing them back, producing their first (if unofficial) crossover with Family Guy.

9

Ribon

The Original Home of Magical Girl Comics

• 1955-Present.
• Approximate Sales: 594 Million.
• Notable Works: Himitsu no Akko-chan, Love-Berrish!, Nagareboshi Lens.

Shueisha turns up for the first time on this list, and not for the last time either. The publisher is better known for their shōnen magazines, yet they’re no slouch in the shojo department either, as they’ve been printing Ribon magazine since 1955. It’s also managed to pip its rival Nakayoshi (the original home of Sailor Moon) out of the top 10 by 200 million extra sales.

The magazine produced the first magical girl stories in Himitsu no Akko-chan and Sally the Witch, alongside the more slice-of-life Chibi Maruko-chan and the romcom Marmalade Boy. It’s also credited with printing the first yuri strip in Shiroi Heya no Futari, though the bulk of its tales tend to be straight romances like Honey Lemon Soda and Ui x Kon.

8

Classics Illustrated

How Novels Got Turned into Graphic Novels

• 1941-1971.
• Approximate Sales: 1 Billion.
• Notable Works: The Three Musketeers, Ivanhoe, Don Quixote.

MAD Magazine is the only US entry that’s still in print, yet their multiple decades only amounted to less than half the sales of the long-since-defunct Classics Illustrated. Part of this may be because subsequent publishers have since managed to reprint their older issues, or that there are more schools out there eager to get kids into novels than there are people into Alfred E. Neuman.

Throughout its original run, Classics Illustrated was meant to adapt the likes of The Three Musketeers, Moby Dick, and The Iliad, among others, into abridged comics to introduce kids to something more cultured and refined than superheroes. Not that this helped them escape the ire of Dr Frederic Werthem, who found room to condemn the strips for dumbing the novels down to their base elements. There’s no winning with some people.

7

Micky Maus

German Disney Comics Prove to Be Best Sellers

• 1951-Present.
• Approximate Sales: 1 Billion.
• Notable Works: Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy.

Here’s an odd one. US comic books may not need the magazine format to survive, but other nations have managed to profit by doing it for them. For example, Egmont Ehapa has been printing Disney comics in German via Micky Maus magazine since 1951, selling more issues than Ribon and MAD combined.

It helps that little kids worldwide still love Disney’s cast of characters, though it hasn’t escaped the slow dwindling of print media. The magazine reached its peak of 1 billion issues sold in 1998, right in the middle of the Disney renaissance. Since then, it’s slowed down to approximately 75,000 sales per issue on a bimonthly basis.

6

Weekly Young Magazine

Seinen Magazine Skips the Kids’ Games

• 1980-Present.
• Approximate Sales: 1.8 Billion.
• Notable Works: Akira, The Fable, Chobits.

Print publications are still going fairly strong in Japan, since their magazines tend to be as thick as phone books, offering more bang for a reader’s buck (or yen in this case). Though while Micky Maus has been fueled by eager Disney kids, Weekly Young Magazine is kept going by older readers, as it’s Kodansha’s premier seinen magazine.

It was the original home of Akira, the racing strip Initial D, and CLAMP’s seinen strips, like xxxHolic and its sequel xxxHolic: Rei, which is due to resume running in April 2025. Though if it remains on hiatus, readers can check out Toxic Daughter: Chi-chan for more psychological domestic drama from Blood on the Tracks author Shuzo Oshimi.

5

Weekly Shōnen Sunday

Shogakukan’s Best Selling Shōnen Magazine

• 1959-Present.
• Approximate Sales: 1.9 Billion.
• Notable Works: Urusei Yatsura, Ranma ½, Zatch Bell.

Shōnen Jump is generally seen as the be-all, end-all home of shōnen magazines, but it’s not the only one. It’s not even the first magazine to pack shōnen comics together, as Weekly Shōnen Sunday beat it by about a decade. Without it, the manga landscape might look very different today, as its strips rival Jump’s host of iconic comics in fame.

Most notably, it was where Rumiko Takahashi got to publish her most famous works, from Urusei Yatsura to Inuyasha. Case Closed and Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End still run in its pages too, as did Komi Can’t Communicate and Be Blues! Its curious pointing finger design on its interior pages also inspired the design for Friend in the epic mystery manga 20th Century Boys.

4

The Beano

Iconic British Comic Still Has a Place in Print After Nearly 90 Years

• 1938-Present.
• Approximate Sales: 2 Billion.
• Notable Works: Dennis the Menace, Bash Street Kids, Bananaman (since 2012).

Japanese comic magazines are pretty much at the top of the tree in terms of sales these days, yet the relatively slight pages of The Beano have managed to break their strong hold on the upper echelons of this list. As a result, it’s become the best-selling Western comic magazine in the world, as well as the oldest one, with its first issue debuting way back in 1938.

It’s most famous for being the home of Dennis the Menace (not that one), whose success inspired a whole wave of street-smart punk kid strips, like Minnie the Minx and the Bash Street Kids. That said, they’re more a series of one-off gag strips, where its kiddy protagonists outfox dopey parents and stuffy teachers, so readers over the age of 15 might not get much from it compared to its cruder and ruder spoofs like Viz.

3

Weekly Young Jump

Jumping Off to Appeal to Older Readers

• 1979-Present.
• Approximate Sales: 2.2 Billion.
• Notable Works: Kingdom, Kaguya-sama: Love is War, The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You.

The terms used for demographics can be relative. For example, Weekly Young Jump, alongside Weekly Young Magazine and Young Animal, are all seinen magazines aimed at older readers. But those readers are still young men. After that, they tend to move on to more mature publications, like manga about golfing or whiskey or the like.

Nonetheless, WYJ is Shueisha’s seinen offshoot to Shōnen Jump, offering strips with more mature content. Mad Bull 34, Gantz, Elfen Lied, and Tokyo Ghoul gave them blood and guts. Boy’s Abyss, The Climber, and Catenaccio provided the raw, emotional drama. Though it can offer the occasional romcom to lighten the mood too, like Kubo Won’t Let Me Be Invisible and Yokai Girls.

2

Weekly Shōnen Magazine

The Birthplace of Tokusatsu Strips

• 1959-Present.
• Approximate Sales: 5.2 Billion.
• Notable Works: Ashita no Joe, Kamen Rider, Rent-A-Girlfriend.

Popping up around the same time as Weekly Shōnen Sunday, Weekly Shōnen Magazine also beat Shōnen Jump to the punch by 10 years and has its own litany of iconic strips. From the cyborg and sci-fi drama works of Shotaro Ishinomori (Cyborg 009, Genma Wars), to the edgy, borderline seinen likes of Go Nagai’s Devilman and Violence Jack.

It’s still a popular magazine for action strips today, like the arched tokusatsu parody Go! Go! Loser Ranger!, the samurai drama The Blue Wolves of Mibu, and the classic boxing manga Hajime no Ippo. It’s also where CLAMP brought together characters from WYM’s xxxHolic and Nakayoshi’s Cardcaptor Sakura together in Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle.

1

Weekly Shōnen Jump

The Home of Some of the Most Famous Shōnen Strips in Print

• 1968-Present.
• Approximate Sales: 7.6 Billion
• Notable Works: Dragon Ball, My Hero Academia, KochiKame.

Perhaps least surprising of all, Weekly Shōnen Jump is at the top, and by a significant margin, having sold 2.4 billion more issues than the next bestseller in Weekly Shōnen Magazine. For many, Shueisha’s magazine might as well be the home of all manga, as it’s produced some of the most famous strips out there, like Dragon Ball, Naruto, One Piece, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, Fist of the North Star and more.

However, while WSJ has sold the most out of all the other magazines on this list, it’s just as vulnerable to the print sales plughole as MAD, The Beano, and other mags out there, as the rise of digital media has seen its physical sales plummet too. There may come a time when its newer strips, like Akane-banashi and Kagurabachi, may end up on an app service too, with maybe the odd tankobon release for dedicated fans.