Comics dominated France’s bestselling books of 2024

Although a new Asterix album is still a year off, comics (locally called bande dessinée, BD) remain firmly among France’s top selling books with a total of eleven titles breaking the 2024 bestselling Top 50 list. According to trade publication Livres Hebdo and analytics firm GfK’s annual tally, the highest selling comic of the year – the manfra title Instinct by Inoxtag, Basile Monnot & Charles Compain (Michel Lafon) – managed to crack the general top 10, reaching number 7 on the book chart. In the separate BD and manga lists, Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece and Mr Tan’s runaway smash hit kids title Mortelle Adele remained strongly represented for another year with multiple places filled in each.

France is one of the biggest markets for comics in the world – with BD and manga breaking the bestselling book charts regularly. Compared to recent years however, comics seemingly performed less strongly. For a three-year stretch between 2021 and 2023, a comic placed at #1 on the all-book Top 50, with 2023 being a particularly stellar year as two comics, the latest Asterix and the first new continuation album in André Franquin’s beloved Gaston Legaffe series snapped up the #1 and #2 spots. While that streak has ended, a total of 11 books were still in France ‘s Bestselling Top 50 (matching 2023).

TOP 10 BESTSELLING COMICS (Bande Dessinée + Manga combined)

The highest selling comic of the year was the French-originated manga (manfra) Instinct, by Inoxtag, Basile Monnot & Charles Compain. Selling 320,000 copies by year end, it was reportedly the strongest manga debut in France – with 67,000 copies shifting in its first four days.  The success of this title, which released November 21, was largely down to it being the comics debut of French YouTuber Inoxtag (real name Inès Benazzouz) who has a following of over 8.8 million on the platform.

Although it did not break France’s bestselling Top 50 books list, the most recent Asterix album – 2023’s L’Iris Blanc (Asterix and the White Lotus in English) by Fabcaro and Didier Conrad, the #1 bestselling comic in France of that year, remained a solid seller into 2024 – managing to squeeze a spot in the top 10 best-selling bande dessinée subcategory. The hugely popular Asterix series remains widely available in France with copies still obtainable from supermarkets and newsstands.

FRANCE TEN BESTSELLING BANDE DESSINÉE, 2024 [excluding Manga]

Mortelle Adèle has been a huge-selling hit series for a number of years, and it once more demonstrated that status by filling four places in the Top 10 Bande Dessinée list – including the top spot with it’s latest volume Mortelle Adèle vol 21 RecréAction Générale!. Other places the series filled on the BD Top 10 include #5 (Mortelle Adèle sur les traces du croquepote!/‘Mortelle Adèle on the trail of the Bogeyman’); #8 (Mortelle Adèle vol 20: J’apocalypse grave!/‘Seriously Apocalyptic’) and #9 (Mortelle Adèle et les reliques du chat-lune/‘Mortelle Adèle and the relics of the Moon-Cat’). Debuting in 2012, the gag series by Antoine Dole (alias Mr Tan) and artists Miss Prickly and Diane Le Feyer about a mischievous and sardonic schoolgirl have so far reached 21 volumes with spinoffs galore – including extended standalone extended adventures, novels and a branded newsstand puzzle magazine. An animated series is in development. Two of these spinoff adventures (Les Grande Aventures) – …Bogeyman and …Moon-Cat – broke the BD Top 10 alongside the most recent two volumes in the series. Ablaze will be publishing the series in English as Rebel Adèle, beginning with the Grande Aventures spinoff’s first volume Rebel Adèle in the Land of Unwritten Tales this year (the 21-book main series are page gag strips rather than complete adventures, so this may be a fair place to start).

The first volume in Riad Sattouf’s Arab of the Future new spinoff series Moi, Fadi made the #2 spot on the BD list. It is a biography about his younger brother who stayed with their Syrian father after their parents separated. Based on interviews with his brother, the first book retraces the events of Sattouf’s series from his brother’s perspective. The original six-book Arab of the Future series was a hit in France, winning many prizes including garnering the author the esteemed Grand Prix at Angoulême 2023. The spinoff’s full title is Moi, Fadi: le frère volé [‘I, Fadi: The Stolen Brother’]. In English only the first four volumes of Sattouf’s series have been made available in English by Metropolitan Books between 2015 and 2019 with no sign of them seeing completion anytime soon.

Third place in the BD list was Manu Larcenet’s critically acclaimed adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel The Road (La Route) which has been enjoyed on both sides of the Atlantic (published in the US by Abrams ComicArts).

New entries in popular long-running Franco-Belgian series Blake & Mortimer and Lucky Luke cracked the France ‘s ten bestselling BD. While each new volume of Edgar P. Jacobs beloved speculative adventure series Blake & Mortimer regularly makes the Top 10 list, this new volume was notable for being the last work drawn by renowned French artist André Juillard before his death in summer 2024. The book, Blake & Mortimer vol 30: Signé Olrik [‘Signed Olrik’], written by Yves Senté, was – in the case of the artist – posthumously released October 2024 and placed at #4. The Blake & Mortimer series is available in English from Cinebook with this latest volume expected in English sometime later this year. The other familiar title (at #6) was the newest volume in the rebooted mainline Lucky Luke series, Les Aventures de Lucky Luke vol 11 by Achdé & Jul. The comedic western adventures of Morris’ signature character Lucky Luke are entirely available in English from Cinebook with this one now available as Lucky Luke vol 83: Trouble Brewing.

There was one other consistent seller still in the BD Top 10, two years after release: Vincent Lemire & Christophe Gaultier’s History of Jerusalem (Histoire de Jerusalem), published by Les Arenes. It placed #7. First published in October 2022, its continued steady sales success can be attributed to strong public marketing campaigns – including large posters on the Paris metro – and the regular presence of Israel and its war in Gaza on the global news cycle. It was only in the Top 10 BD chart in 2023 but last year it made both the Top 10 comics and Top 50 books charts (coming in at #49). It was the eleventh highest selling comic in the book charts and so didn’t make the Top 10 combined.  An English translation is slated for May 2025 from Abrams ComicArts.

FRANCE TEN BESTSELLING MANGA, 2024

Half of the 2024 Top Ten manga list for France was carried by Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece. The Glénat-published French edition’s most recent two volumes and the first three volumes were among the bestselling manga in France last year, filling the #2, #4,#5,#6, #8, and #10 spots. It – perhaps controversially to manga purists – placed second after Inoxtag et al’s manfra Instinct. Other manga in the top 10 were the most recent volumes of shonen usual suspects Tatsuya Endo‘s Spy x Family vol 12 (#3), Kohei Horikoshi‘s My Hero Academia vol 38 (#7) alongside Akira Toriyama & Toyotaro‘s Dragon Ball Super vol 21 (#9) –  the last volume with Toriyama’s involvement prior to his death in March 2024.