The French manga market, Q3 2026

A single figure says nothing. 896 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 high point remains the third quarter of 2024, with 1,020 releases. The market is still 12% below it, but it is climbing back: after the 2025 slump, it rebounds by 7.0% this year.

That is the whole point of the "change" column. The third quarter of 2025 had lost 17.9% in one go — the lowest summer in the series. 2026 does not erase it, but it climbs out: the quarter gains 7.0% year on year and 4.1% on the previous quarter. A rebound, not a record.

The right-hand column deserves a pause. In five years, only 2 publishers have topped a third quarter: Pika and Meian. Meian takes it back this year with 108 releases, where Pika had needed only 89 to hold it in last year's trough. When the market picks up, first place costs more.

The quarter doesn't read as a single block. July opens at 286 releases, August rises to 307, September holds at 303. The reflex would be to expect summer to be a desert; it no longer is. The summer lull now concentrates from mid-July to mid-August, and publishers load the end of August to prepare the back-to-school season — it is that season, not July, that carries the quarter.

Meian dominates the quarter with 108 releases, 12.1% of the market — far ahead of Pika (80) and Kana (56). But the real story of the quarter is in the right-hand column: Meian jumped 170% year on year (40 → 108 releases). That is no calendar fluke — it is a house in full expansion.

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, Hana and Noeve. Rebuilt at the scale of the houses that actually decide acquisitions, the ranking holds — and gets starker.

IDP / Anime Store is first on both readings: it owns the quarter's leading imprint (Meian) and weighs, all imprints combined, 198 releases — 22.1% of the market, more than one release in five. The second group, Editis, accounts for 16.2%. The gap between the top two groups is wider than anything the imprint ranking let you guess: the concentration only shows at this scale.

330 series started this quarter, 44% of active series. But starting isn't the same as committing: 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 resembles the previous one, and that is exactly what stands out: the quarter's biggest launcher, Meian, is also the market's leading imprint. IDP / Anime Store's expansion doesn't happen only through reissues and box sets — it also happens through new series launched at a tight cadence. Smaller houses are not absent (Doki Doki slip in), but the quarter belongs to those who can do everything at once: publish the next volume, reissue the classics, and open new series.

Everything above is measured. What follows is not. Every quarter, I record an episode with Freddy Harris — founder of Manga Kolak — about the releases I'm looking forward to, based on the wishlists readers keep on Manga Collec. Here are three titles out this quarter that I was waiting for, and why. These are not reviews: no ranking will ever say whether they're good. The bets 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. And this quarter, almost all of them carry the same name — 8 of the ten are published by Meian, already the market's leading imprint. The biggest of them, Veil (6 volumes), comes from another imprint in the same group, Noeve. When one house holds both the top of the imprint ranking and the top of the workhorses, it's no longer a trend, it's a grip.

Here is the breakdown by editorial type, and here, right away, is its limit: 50.4% of the quarter's releases don't have a type yet (452 releases). Manga-News tags its records with a lag of several months, and September, which has only just entered the dataset, is by far the least-tagged month. The chart below therefore covers only the 431 typed releases, and that share will shift at the next recompute.

One last ratio, measured across the whole dataset rather than this quarter alone. Yuri does exist in the reference set: it weighs 186 dated releases, against 2,956 for yaoi — a ratio of 1 to 16. Male BL is an industry; yuri remains a shelf. This quarter again, the hierarchy holds: the French market publishes 15 yaoi for every 6 yuri.

Of the 748 series active this quarter, 1 has already changed publisher during its 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.

The signal is weak this quarter, and that in itself is information: the consolidation at work in the groups doesn't happen by buying series one by one. It happens through the internal growth of imprints and through reissues — far quieter than a catalogue transfer, but far more massive.

This review is the third edition of a quarterly series. The next instalment will be the review of the full year 2026, in January, and the figures in this one will have shifted again by then, because the data keeps coming in.