Readership is Up for Action-Battle Comics in Japan.

On Feb. 25, The Research Institute for Publications announced

that the estimated sales of comics in Japan in 2020 were up 23 percent

to $613 billion. After the record of $586 billion set in 1995, they had

been declining due to the reducing sales of comic magazines for 24 years

in a row.

Yet, introducing digital comics to the market helped break the

record for the first time.

Particularly, action-battle comics are one of the most popular genres.

Oricon News reported that the top five best-seller comics in 2020 were

action-battle comics, like Demon Slayer, Kingdom and ONE PIECE. This

is strongly related to a recent flow of women-readers to the market,

according to Keisuke Hagiwara, who is the comic editor of Weekly

Shonen Sunday in Japan.

Shohei Chiyoda, who has been working as a comic editor of

MangaONE for five years said of the trend of battle-action comics, “those

scenes got to be influenced by stories of comics.”

Generally, male readers tend to be captivated by the outer setting

of comics as actions and battles with ideals and expectations.

However, women-readers enjoy more the story than action-

battle scenes. The inner settings like love, interest and sympathy, for

characters greatly attract them.

The editor of comics Hagiwara stated the universal attraction of

action-battle comics with ideals, expectations and big lies.

“The genre of action-battle is fulfilled with ideals, like a hope of

the victory through battling, a masculine instinct for more strength than

anyone, and having friends called fellow soldiers,” said Hagiwara, who

has been in the comic book industry for 14 years.

At the same time, “comics are one of the media how they make an attractive lie to readers, and show it like real,” he said.