One of the biggest advantages of an anime adaptation is that it reaches those who don’t read the manga. Most anime run for a limited time, covering a part of the manga, and teasing the later events. The popularity of the anime has the potential to bring more manga readers.
‘Blue Lock’ appears to be in a similar phase where the first anime season did enough to spark the curiosity of what happens next.
Oricon released its list of top 25 bestselling manga volumes in the first half of 2023 on Tuesday. The list covers sales of physical copies from November 21, 2022, to May 21, 2023. ‘Blue Lock’ topped the list with a total of 8,046,032 copies.
Muneyuki Kaneshiro’s ‘Blue Lock’ just released its 24th volume on May 17. The volumes that made to the list are 21-23 and 12-14, grabbing six places.
Other manga also bagged multiple spots, with more than one volume being sold the most. Here is the list of all of them, along with their volumes:
| Title | Volumes | Total Estimated Sales |
| Chainsaw Man | 12, 13, 14 | 4,492,906 |
| Slam Dunk | Completed Series, THE FIRST SLAM DUNK re:SOURCE | 4,199,966 |
| Jujutsu Kaisen | 21, 22, | 3,757,215 |
| One Piece | 104, 105 | 3,550,097 |
| Tokyo Revengers | 30, 31 | 2,622,078 |
| Kingdom | 67, 68 | 1,569,434 |
Apart from the above, ‘Oshi no Ko’, ‘Spy x Family’, and ‘My Hero Academia’ are also among the bestselling manga in the first half, with no specifically popular volume. However, Volume 37 of ‘My Hero Academia’ ranks sixth in the list, with 726,883 copies.
Notice how all the titles above have at least one anime adaptation. As for Slam Dunk, it is quite possible that the movie ‘THE FIRST SLAM DUNK’ will prove instrumental in its revival. Regardless of getting an anime, which ones do you think should have been more popular?
About Blue Lock
Blue Lock is a Japanese manga series written by Muneyuki Kaneshiro and illustrated by Yusuke Nomura. It has been serialized in Kodansha’s Weekly Shōnen Magazine since August 2018. Blue Lock won the 45th Kodansha Manga Award in the shōnen category in 2021.
The story begins with Japan’s elimination from the 2018 FIFA World Cup, which prompts the Japanese Football Union to start a program scouting high school players who will begin training in preparation for the 2022 Cup.
Isagi Youichi, a forward, receives an invitation to this program soon after his team loses the chance to go to Nationals because he passed to his less-skilled teammate.
Their coach will be Ego Jinpachi, who intends to “destroy Japanese loser football” by introducing a radical new training regimen: isolate 300 young strikers in a prison-like institution called “Blue Lock”.
Source: Oricon
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