five figures on the place of comics in France

The Angoulême International Comics Festival is celebrating its 50th edition from Thursday January 26. 2022 was the second-best year in comics industry history, following a record-breaking 2021 fiscal year.

► 921 million euros in turnover

Comic book sales in 2022 stabilized at 921 million euros, compared to nearly 925 million in 2021, a record year. Between 2019 and 2022, the sector jumped by 65%, details the annual report produced by GfK Market in partnership with the Angoulême Festival. The manga sector alone accounted for 381 million euros in sales.

► 84 million copies sold

In 2022, 84.6 million new comic books were sold, compared to 87 million in 2021. The average price of an album is €10.90, slightly up on the previous year.

Up 2%, manga represents 57% of total copies sold. As in 2021, more than one in two comic books sold in France is therefore a manga. Better still, of the 100 best-selling books in 2022 (comics, literature, guides, etc.), a quarter were Japanese comics.

On the other hand, children’s comics saw their sales in volume fall by 13% compared to 2021.

► Comics, first reading station for 55% of young people

In 2021, one in four books (24%) sold in France was a comic book according to a GfK study published in January 2022. The figure is constantly increasing.

Among 7-19 year olds, reading comics now exceeds novels (55% of them say they read them most often, compared to 46% for novels). This is reversed from the age of 20, explains the study “Young French people and reading”, published in March 2022 (1).

► 514,000 copies

The book Le Monde sans end by Christophe Blain and Jean-Marc Jancovici published by Dargaud at the end of 2021 is the best sale of the year 2022 of all genres, according to the annual GfK-Livres Hebdo barometer. It sold 514,000 copies. In 2021, another comic strip Asterix and the Griffon (Éd. Albert René) came out on top, with more than 1.5 million sales.

► Between 1,500 and 3,000 comic strip authors

According to the last states general of comics published in 2016, 71% of comic strip authors have another job at the same time. More than a third (36%) live below the poverty line and more than half (53%) earn less than the annual minimum wage. France has 3,000 comic book authors, half of whom declare themselves as full-time professionals.

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