Oh,
New York Times. You try so hard, and I admire that. Starting a best-seller list for sequential art titles is a fabulous idea (though I wonder if it was prompted by that crazy
Watchmen thing sitting on regular best-seller lists for so long.) The brief article accompanying
the inaugural list is succinct and pretty clearly aimed at the people who are new(er) to the format, which is good. But "graphic books"? Numerous commenters to the first list and
last week's list have noted that "graphic novels" is the common term, even when the work in question isn't necessarily a "novel" but it seems they are determined to keep their interesting terminology. "Graphic books" still sounds like the sort of thing that is wrapped in plastic and shelved in its own special section away from children.
The biggest problem, however, is with the manga list. It's pretty hard to miss that one title is holding the list hostage with multiple volumes. It's the nature of some types of manga series, like some tv series, to run on as long as logically possible (and sometimes beyond that) when they have any kind of success. It's a massive revenue machine - serialize each chapter in a weekly or monthly magazine, compile them into
tankobon with a few "extras" such as short comedy stories and notes from the author, and license an animated version which can also run on for ages. This is why
Naruto is at 45 volumes and counting, and
Dragonball almost has too many variations to count: whether or not they are (or at least started out as) good stories becomes less relevant than the fact that people are still buying them like mad. It's hard to argue with that tactic, considering the state of publishing and the economy in general. The biggies bring in the money that lets a publisher also put out things that might not sell as well but also have value and an interested readership. I'm not a James Patterson fan, but if the profits from his books give someone the wiggle room to take a chance on the next Audrey Niffenegger or Neil Gaiman, I won't begrudge him the shelf space.
But this is where the usual method of list-making begins to fail. As noted
at School Library Journal (both the Roundtable and in comments), there are a number of other high-selling series that are being ignored by the list and its lazy summary-writers. The NYT Manga Best-Sellers may give a picture of the huge, crushing
numbers involved when something becomes a runaway hit, but by considering each volume as a separate entity it does a terrible job of giving any information about what
titles are currently popular.
The easy solution would be to rank by the cumulative weekly sales of each title, but that would quickly short-change newer series, shorter series, and single-volume titles. Yes, even Naruto will have to end some day (though I'm sure that has been said about Batman, X-Men, and many others) and most consumers will move on to a new favorite, but there needs to be some way to give a more accurate picture of the range of manga that is currently popular. Too many people still consider manga (and comics in general) a genre rather than a format, and NYT is in danger of confirming to them that it's all about magic-wielding ninjas and action sequences.
Disclaimer: I have tried to read
Naruto twice and not gotten past page 6 because I wanted to throttle the child. In the interest of fairness in future writing, I will make another attempt, but after that I'm done. Life is too short to read bad books, especially when another
Fullmetal Alchemist is due out in May.