The German comic market before the Leipzig Book Fair: Is the manga boom over?

But now one of the largest German manga publishers is surprising with a message that sounds like a trend reversal: Manga sales in the German-speaking manga market have currently “decreased significantly,” reported last week the Hamburg-based Tokyopop publishing house, which is known for successful series such as “Death Note”. The prices for paperbacks, which are bought primarily by younger readers, must therefore be increased.

Is this perhaps an end to the manga boom?

For Benedict Reichelt, head of marketing at Tokyopop GmbH, the answer is clear: “The manga boom has actually been over for a while!” A key reason for this is the now too large range of new titles that are delivered to retailers every month by a growing number of publishers, he explains when asked by the Tagesspiegel. That doesn’t fit with the constant sales space or the readers’ budget. The latter did not grow with the supply, but rather shrank in doubt.

However, Tokyopop’s statement provokes clear opposition from other German publishers.

“We don’t see an end to the manga boom,” says Cécile Béran, marketing director at the Ludwigsburg publisher Cross Cult. Since 2018, he has also had comics from Japan in his program under the Manga Cult label, including best-selling series such as “Demon Slayer” or “My School Spirit Hanako”. “It is still possible to attract readers to new titles to a similar extent as in the years during and after the pandemic.”

In the years from 2020 onwards, sales figures for manga in Germany increased particularly sharply. “The minimum sales volume that we manga publishers can expect across all lines has, however, fallen somewhat,” adds Béran in a qualifying manner. This is mainly due to the rapidly growing range of products available: While 1,234 new titles in the manga and manhwa product group were published in this country in the pandemic year of 2020, in 2025 there were already 2,204 titles. This has meant that “manga fans can no longer read everything that interests them”.

“At least for our program, we currently see no end to the manga boom,” says Steffen Volkmer, press spokesman and senior editor at Panini Comics. The Stuttgart-based publisher, which has long been known primarily for American superhero comics, has expanded its manga segment in recent years and publishes, among other things, the successful “Berserk” series.

“At Panini Manga, sales are increasing and the market share of our program is continuously growing,” says Volkmer. “Compared to 2023, we have doubled it.” Other Western comic titles, on the other hand, are “currently having a difficult time trading,” adds Volkmer – “although this is not a new development.”

Kai-Steffen Schwarz from the Hamburg-based Carlsen-Verlag also answers the question of whether the manga boom in this country is over with a clear no. “For me, it’s a question of perspective and expectations,” says Schwarz, who, as editorial director for comics, manga and webtoons, is also responsible for South Korean digital comics, whose printed editions are increasingly popular in this country.

Carlsen is considered the market leader in the German-language manga sector and has, among other things, the classic series “One Piece” and “Naruto” as well as numerous current bestsellers such as “Tokyo Revengers” in its program. The publisher is also known for western comic classics such as “Tintin” and “Gaston” as well as current graphic novels.

The Manga and Manhwa product group – this is what printed manga from South Korea are called – “according to the data available to us, achieved sales of over 100 million euros in German-speaking countries in 2025,” says Schwarz. “The market is therefore around 150 percent above the level of 2019.” Just seven to eight years ago “today’s market levels were not thought possible”.

However, Carlsen also experienced slight declines last year, as Schwarz adds – which were, however, offset by increases in other areas: “In our manga and webtoon labels Carlsen Manga!, Hayabusa and C Lines, we closed 2025 overall below the previous year – at Carlsen Comics, however, we were able to increase annual sales compared to 2024.” The overall picture is therefore mixed, with individual top titles being the deciding factor depending on the area.

“We are looking back on the most successful year in our comic history,” says Sonja Lesch, manga program manager at Egmont Ehapa. In addition to the German licenses for Disney comics and European classics such as Asterix, the Berlin publisher also has a constantly growing manga section, which includes the “Chainsaw Man” and “Sailor Moon” series, among others. In the manga sector, “we achieved double-digit growth and were able to secure further market share, despite constantly growing competition,” says Lesch.

However, the greatest commercial comic success of the past year at Egmont and across all publishers is thanks to a bestseller from France: “The 41st Asterix album ‘Asterix in Lusitanien’ has once again broken all records,” says Lesch.

According to Till Reischl, press spokesman for Egmont Ehapa Media GmbH, the German edition of the new adventure of the powerful Gauls, which was published last autumn, has now sold a total of 1.5 million copies. “And it continues to be in high demand in both soft and hardcover.”

“I think it’s a pretty bold thesis to make a general claim that sales of manga and webtoon are declining in Germany,” explains Joachim Kaps, founder and managing director of the Hamburg-based Altraverse publishing house. “We are actually quite satisfied with our results for 2025 at the moment.”

Before founding Altraverse, Kaps, who was born in 1964, had accompanied the triumph of manga in Germany since the 1990s as publishing director at Carlsen and managing director at Tokyopop. In recent years, Altraverse has made a name for itself in addition to import titles from Japan with publications such as the webtoon hit “Solo Leveling” as well as German and European in-house productions such as the non-fiction book “Simply Japanese”.

Kaps analyzes that the hype during the pandemic built up a bubble from 2020 onwards, “which is now letting out a little air because people are allowed to leave the house again and are no longer reading 24 hours a day.” Overall, the level of manga sales figures in German-speaking countries is still significantly higher than before the boom.

“I haven’t been making manga since yesterday and I’m amazed that some people are now trying to bring about the end of the boom,” says Kaps. “The manga market as a whole has basically grown quite steadily for 30 years now, sometimes a little faster and sometimes slower.” In general, it can be expected that this time too, things will not look as negative in the long term as a publisher’s snapshot suggests.