One of the most remarkable trends of the past few years was strikingly evident on the chart of the top 20 manga sold through ComicHub in 2024 (see “
Top 20 Manga – Full Year 2024”): Deluxe hardcover editions of new and classic manga. With higher page counts and trim size, loads of extras, and hefty price tags ranging from $25 to $50 in most cases, these books dominated the top 20 in dollar sales and also made a strong showing on the unit sales chart.
Dark Horse is the leader of the pack here, with their hardcover deluxe editions of Berserk. Each hefty tome, priced at $49.99, includes three volumes of the original. Dark Horse also publishes the series as single-volume paperbacks with an MSRP of $14.99, so the deluxe editions are a more expensive way to read the series, but with a 7” x 10” trim size, they also allow the art to really shine. Sales of this edition have been phenomenal, especially considering the high cover price; it was in the BookScan Adult Top 20 for 11 out of the 12 months of 2024 as well as the BookScan and ComicHub charts for full year 2023 (see “
Full Year 2023 Circana BookScan,” “
Top 20 Manga in Comic Stores”). (It’s worth noting that the series itself still has a lot of juice, as the first volume of the paperback version also made the 2024 top manga chart.)
Success breeds success, and Dark Horse is also offering deluxe hardcover editions of Yasuhiro Nightow’s
Trigun and
Trigun Maximum, Hiroaki Samura’s
Blade of the Immortal, and Gou Tanabe’s
H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (see “
Deluxe Edition”) in the same format as
Berserk. A deluxe two-volume edition of Makoto Yukumura’s sci-fi saga
Planetes is scheduled for July 2025 (see “
Dark Horse to Release ‘Planetes’”).
Kodansha originally published
Vinland Saga (also by Makoto Yukimura) as two-in-one hardcover omnibi, with decorated endpapers and extra material, priced at $19.99. That seemed pretty deluxe when the series launched in 2013, but last year they started releasing Vinland Saga Deluxe, three-in-one omnibus editions with similar features to Dark Horse’s: 7” x 10” trim size, dark red faux leather covers, and bonus content, including endpapers depicting the Vikings’ travels. The price point is a little higher, at $54.99, but that didn’t stop the first volume from selling enough copies to make the 2024 full-year ComicHub chart.
Kodansha also has packaged its classic older series, including
Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and
Battle Angel Alita, as hardcover boxed sets. Their 35th anniversary boxed set of Akira, priced at $199.99, was a top seller when it was released in 2017 (see “
Top Manga Franchises – Fall 2017”), and the paperback of Vol. 1 is was a top seller through ComicHub in 2023 and 2024, so the upcoming hardcover editions (see “
‘Akira’ in Hardcover”) will likely be well received, especially as the hardcover features an updated translation and restores the original right-to-left reading order. This edition is slated for Fall 2025; no further date or price information has been released.
VIZ, not to be outdone, is re-releasing Takehiko Inoue’s classic samurai manga Vagabond as what they call a Definitive Edition, similar to the other big books: three-in-one hardcovers with a 7” x 10” trim size and a slightly higher price of $55.00. The first volume was released in January 2025 and sold well enough to make the BookScan Top 20 (see “
January 2025 Circana BookScan”).
Yen Press released the first volume of a deluxe hardcover of
Übel Blatt in December 2024, just ahead of the anime premiere in January 2025 (see “
‘Ubel Blatt’”). The rest of the series will follow. Like the others, this is a three-in-one omnibus with the larger trim size. MSRP is $55.00. And in 2022 they took an already high-end series,
Thermae Romae, which was originally released as three 7” x 10” hardcovers, and combined it into
Thermae Romae: The Complete Omnibus, with 1,140 pages and an MSRP of $75.00.
For some titles, deluxe is the default: VIZ has been publishing
JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure in slightly oversized hardcover editions, with a 250-400 page count and bonuses such as color pages, since 2015 (see “
New ‘JoJo’s Bizarre Adventures’”). Prior to that, VIZ had released a single arc,
Stardust Crusaders, as standard-sized, 192-page paperbacks. Similarly, Viz publishes all of Junji Ito’s horror manga as hardcovers, and they have combined the shorter series such as Uzumaki into single-volume omnibi.
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