Manga in North America is becoming a force, selling large numbers of units on a massive scale as anime has become more popular with each passing year. With Attack on Titan never being as popular as it is now with the arrival of its final season via Studio MAPPA, as the second part of this last season has just concluded. With the third part of the final season set to arrive next year in 2023, the dark anime franchise has released some major news that the printed story from Hajime Isayama was the highest selling manga in North America last year.
In a recent article, we wrote about how the sales of manga and graphic novels had nearly doubled last year in 2021, with the likes of My Hero Academia, Chainsaw Man, and of course Attack on Titan, leading the pack. While Attack on Titan as a series didn’t sell the most units, with it actually coming in third place, the first volume of the series that introduced the conflict between the Eldians of Paradis and the nation of Marley, was able to take the spot as the highest-selling spot. In the report, Attack on Titan’s first volume sold around 170,000 units, marking a four-hundred and thirty percent increase from the year prior. As for the entirety of the manga series, it sold around one million, three hundred thousand units in North America total.
This isn’t to say that the anime adaptation is a slouch on its own, as the series’ final season was marked as the “most in-demand television series” as stated by Parrot Analytics, surpassing some other major heavy hitters such as The Witcher, Walking Dead, Spongebob Squarepants, and American Horror Story to name a few.
While a release date has yet to be confirmed for the third part of this final season of the anime, it will apparently arrive in the form of four one-hour specials, seemingly finally bringing the story of Eren Jaeger and his friends to a close.
There are no current plans for Attack on Titan to return with a sequel, though the director’s cut of the final manga chapter certainly left open the possibility that the Titans are not finished with the world spawned from Hajime Isayama.
What do you think of this big score for Attack on Titan in the West? Feel free to let us know in the comments or hit me up directly on Twitter @EVComedy to talk all things comics, anime, and the world of the Titans.
