The French manga market, Q2 2026

A single figure says nothing. 861 releases is a lot or a little depending on what you compare it to, and the only comparison that means anything is the same quarter, year after year. Over five years, the peak is not where you'd expect: it sits in the second quarter of 2024, with 981 releases. The market has therefore lost 12% since its peak, over 2 consecutive years of decline.

But the slope is easing: after 6.1% last year, the decline is 6.5% this year, and the quarter even gains 3.9% on the Q1 2026. This is not a collapse: it's a normalisation after the 2023-2024 frenzy.

The right-hand column deserves a pause. In five years, only 2 publishers have topped a second quarter: Pika and Meian. Pika takes it back this year after ceding it in 2025, but it takes it back with 90 releases — fewer than the 94 that Meian had needed to take it last year. When the market contracts, first place costs less.

The quarter doesn't read as a single block. April concentrates 299 releases, May falls back to 267, June climbs again to 295. May's trough is nothing abnormal: it comes right before the summer wave.

Pika remains alone at the top with 90 releases, or 10.5% of the quarter. Behind it, the gap is tightening: Kana and Vega are within 1 release of each other.

A ranking by imprint tells an incomplete story, because an imprint is not a company. Delcourt, Tonkam, Kurokawa and Soleil are four catalogues, and a single group. So are Meian, Noeve and Hana. Rebuilt at the scale of the houses that actually decide acquisitions, the ranking changes at the top.

Editis becomes the quarter's leading player with 162 releases (18.8%), even though none of its imprints tops the previous ranking. Pika, France's top imprint, belongs to Hachette Livre, which weighs 137 releases, or 15.9% of the market. The gap between the two readings is not cosmetic: it decides who counts as the leading manga publisher in France.

289 series started this quarter, a third of all active series. But starting isn't the same as betting: the real measure of a publisher's commitment is how many volumes it stacks behind a first volume. Here are the launches that pushed hardest from their opening quarter.

This ranking looks nothing like the previous one. 5 of the publishers launching hardest, Black Box Editions, Kazé Manga, Clair de lune, Crunchyroll - Editions, Nazca, don't appear in the top 10 imprints: these are houses making up in cadence what they lack in catalogue. The majors aren't absent (Glénat are there), but their output is elsewhere: they publish the continuations of series they already have, in bulk. Launching costs, continuing pays.

A caveat on this table: One Piece - Saison 1 - Vivre Cards is not a series. It's a data-book (character profiles sold in binders) and it takes a "launch" slot because the dataset counts releases, not stories. It's typed Artbook so it can be seen rather than guessed.

Everything above is measured. What follows is not: three titles out this quarter that I'm reading, that I'll follow, and that no ranking will ever say are good. The specs are verifiable. The opinions are my own.

The series that publish the most volumes in a quarter are the ones that structure the shelf day to day. They don't make the headlines: they make the numbers.

Here is the breakdown by editorial type, and here, right away, is its limit: 38.4% of the quarter's releases don't have a type yet (331 releases). Manga-News tags its records with a lag of several months, and a quarter that has only just ended is always the least-documented in the dataset. The chart below therefore covers only the 518 typed releases.

Of the 737 series active this quarter, 5 have already changed publisher during their lifetime. That is very few, and it is precisely what makes the list readable: when a series changes houses, it's almost never an editorial choice, it's the trace of an acquisition or a bankruptcy.

One name keeps coming back: Panini picks up 2 of the 5 series concerned: City Hunter, Family Compo. These are heritage titles, originally published by houses that no longer carry them. While the groups consolidate around new releases, one publisher methodically gathers up the orphaned catalogues. It's a strategy, and it only shows in this column.

This review is the second edition of a quarterly series. The next one, covering the third quarter of 2026, will come out in mid-October, and the figures in this one will have shifted by then, because the data keeps coming in.