Tatsuki Fujimoto's Chainsaw Man Volume 20 debuted at number one on Circana BookScan's March 2026 US adult graphic novel chart, with manga claiming 19 of the top 20 slots.
Tatsuki Fujimoto's Chainsaw Man Volume 20 has debuted at the top of Circana BookScan's March 2026 US Top 20 Adult Graphic Novels chart. The latest Viz Media release unseated a crowded field of returning manga bestsellers, and the broader list underscored just how thoroughly Japanese titles now dominate the American adult graphic novel market, with manga occupying 19 of the 20 ranked positions.
BookScan, operated by Circana, aggregates point-of-sale data from most major US book retailers and is the standard reference for print sales in the American trade market. March's adult graphic novel chart reads almost entirely as a manga bestseller list. Alongside Chainsaw Man Volume 20's debut at number one, long-running Shueisha hits such as Jujutsu Kaisen, One Piece, Spy x Family and Dandadan continued to log multiple charting volumes, reflecting both backlist depth and steady new-release cadence from Viz Media.
The single non-manga title on the Top 20 was a Western graphic novel release, leaving the remaining 19 slots to Japanese-origin books. That ratio is consistent with a multi-year trend: manga has been the growth engine of the US graphic novel category since 2020, and monthly BookScan snapshots have increasingly shown manga crowding out domestic superhero and literary comics from the adult chart.
Chainsaw Man's second arc, the Academy Saga, has been serialised in Shueisha's Shonen Jump+ digital platform since 2022, and Viz Media's English print volumes have tracked a roughly quarterly release cadence. Volume 20 collects the latest run of chapters from that ongoing arc and arrived during a window when anticipation for the franchise remains elevated following MAPPA's theatrical film Chainsaw Man The Movie: Reze Arc, which expanded the property's mainstream visibility over the past year.
First-week performance for a new Chainsaw Man volume has consistently placed it near the top of monthly charts since the series' anime adaptation premiered, and Volume 20's outright number-one finish continues that pattern rather than breaking new ground. What is notable is the margin: the title cleared a month that also featured fresh volumes of several other top-tier shonen and seinen franchises.
The BookScan ranking lined up with a similarly manga-heavy April New York Times Graphic Books and Manga bestseller list, which also featured Chainsaw Man alongside Jujutsu Kaisen and other Shueisha titles. The two charts use different methodologies NYT samples a curated panel of retailers while BookScan is a near-census of the market so alignment between them is a reasonably strong signal that the sales pattern is real rather than a quirk of any one data source.
Viz Media's English editions of Chainsaw Man are distributed in India through major online retailers and bookstore chains, typically arriving within a few weeks of the US street date. Indian readers who follow the series digitally can also access new chapters of the Academy Saga through the MANGA Plus by Shueisha app, which offers the most recent and earliest chapters free in English.
The March chart is the latest data point in a story that has defined the US graphic novel trade for several years: manga is no longer a sub-segment of the adult comics market on a month-by-month basis, it effectively is the adult comics market.
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