A comparison of the top 20 graphic novels sold in the direct market via ComicHub (see “Comics and Graphic Novel Rankings Based on Comic Store POS Data Index”) to the Circana BookScan best-seller list (see “Circana/NPD BookScan Top 20 GNs Index”), from August 2024 through July 2025, shows two sharply different audiences for horror.
Patrick Horvath’s cozy serial killer story Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees was in the ComicHub top 20 for nine out of the past 12 months, for instance, but it never made the BookScan Adult Top 20, although it did appear in the Author best-seller lists a few times. Similarly, James Tynion IV had multiple best-selling graphic novels in the direct market, including Vols. 1 and 8 of Something Is Killing the Children, which charted for multiple months, Vol. 5 of Department of Truth, The Deviant, Nice House by the Sea, and W0rldtr33, but not a single title in the BookScan Adult Top 20; Vol. 8 of SIKTC did make a single appearance on the Author chart.
The other graphic novels in the ComicHub best-seller list include Richard Corben’s Dimwood, Charles Burns’ Final Cut,the Eisner Award-winning The One Hand and the Six Fingers, Alien Vol. 1: Galaxy of Nightmares, Mike Mignola’s Bowling with Corpses, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ Houses of the Unholy, Universal Monsters: Frankenstein, and the DC Compact Comics edition of Vol. 1 of Scott Snyder and Rafael Albuquerque’s American Vampire, among others.
The BookScan Adult Top 20 included Vol. 1 of The Summer Hikaru Died and multiple volumes of Dadandan, both of which are driven by anime, Junji Ito’s Uzumaki, multiple volumes of Kentaro Miura’s Berserk, and just one non-manga title, MrBallen Presents.
The only titles that appeared on both sets of best-seller lists were Junji Ito’s Alley and Gou Tanabe’s HP Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu, both part of longstanding and reliably popular manga franchises.
For more from ICv2 Horror Week, see "ICv2 Horror Week 2025."