Comics fans gathered for a convention just before COVID-19 struck, shutting down in-person events and sparking a burst of popularity for the format. Photo Courtsey by Brigid Alverson

In 2020, during the last weekend of February, 90,000 comics creators, industry figures, and fans flocked to McCormick Place in Chicago for the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo (C2E2). There was some public awareness of COVID-19 at the time—most people used hand sanitizer dispensers on the convention floor, and a few announced they wouldn’t be shaking hands. Despite this, none of the attendees knew it would be the last big comics convention for years. Many were already looking forward to the upcoming Emerald City Comic Con and, for the most part, C2E2 2020 was business as usual.

Less than a month later, McCormick Place was a field hospital for COVID-19 patients, and the comics community was headed into uncharted territory.

Gene Luen Yang canceled the book tour for his new graphic novel, Dragon Hoops, and shifted to a virtual tour on Instagram. With planned trips to Dubai, Beijing, and two ALA conferences off the table, Jerry Craft hunkered down and completed Class Act, his follow-up to Newbery winner New Kid, in record time. Dog Man creator Dav Pilkey made online videos for his fans. Creators and publishers offered free digital comics and downloadable activity sheets. While chain bookstores and mass marketers stayed open, comics shops in some areas were forced to close their doors for weeks.

Amazingly, comics didn’t just survive, they thrived. Despite the strains it placed on the industry, the pandemic boosted the audience for comics, graphic novels, and manga. Sales went up, numbers for manga and other Asian comics skyrocketed, and fundamental changes occurred in comics retailing—a niche sector that has a strong influence on the industry as a whole.

These changes seemed abrupt, but in hindsight, the pandemic was a catalyst, speeding up market forces that were already under way.

Overall, the pandemic era was a boom for comics. After staying flat in 2020, comics and graphic novel sales soared in 2021 and 2022. The comics business site ICv2 estimated that the total comics and graphic novel market was worth $1.1 billion in 2019 and 2020, then shot up 70 percent to $1.9 billion in 2021, and even further to $2 billion in 2022. While sales cooled in 2023, they were still up 67 percent from 2019. All of children’s publishing saw a sales bump in 2020 and 2021, but comics has had the largest increase and sustained growth. And, as with sales, so in libraries.

“Our students have been interested in manga and graphic novels for a while, but I have definitely seen an uptick in the last five years,” says Emily Johnson, library media specialist at Jenks Middle School, just south of Tulsa, OK. She has the statistics to back that up: 39 percent of her library’s total circulation is graphic novels and manga, compared to 25 percent five years ago.

Dav Pilkey was one of many children’s creators who went online to offer lessons and connect with young fans. © Dav Pilkey 2020 (screenshot)

Manga goes mainstream

The more dramatic success story was manga. Between 2019 and 2022, unit sales of manga increased by 270 percent, according to figures provided by Kristen McLean, senior executive director of Circana Entertainment Knowledge Group, which owns BookScan. Sales have slowed down somewhat since then, but manga sales in 2024 were still up 187 percent from 2019.

Conditions were already ripe for a manga boom in 2020, as the major streaming platforms started acquiring anime.

“In my opinion, when popular streaming services started carrying anime, manga became a mainstream format for all kids, not just the kids who were super into anime,” Johnson says. “Before, it was only the kids who had a subscription to Crunchyroll [who] loved our growing manga section. After mainstream services like Netflix picked up anime, I no longer had a niche group of students asking for me to purchase specific titles; anime, and therefore manga, became a popular choice for a majority of my readers.”

And readers wanted their manga in print. “We definitely saw a big sales increase on our ebooks,” says Sarah Anderson, director of publishing sales at VIZ Media. “We saw a big increase on our subscription services, but books—printed books—were by far surpassing all of that.”

Conversely, she notes, the Japanese manga industry made a major shift to digital during the same period. The difference, she believes, is that bookstores stayed open in the U.S., while the larger bookstores were closed in Japan. As a result, VIZ didn’t cut back its publishing schedule during the pandemic. “It was just a question of, where can we print?” she says. “That was the biggest challenge for two and a half years: not being able to print enough.”

Indeed, the combination of red-hot sales and supply chain disruptions led to a manga shortage by mid-2021, with many stores unable to restock popular series. Fortunately, readers were generally open to alternatives.

Robin Brenner, now the head of reference and programming at the Woburn (MA) Public Library, was the teen librarian at the nearby Public Library of Brookline (MA) during the pandemic.

“Once the library opened back up, we had a lot more people just coming in and grabbing everything they could off the shelves to read,” she says. “So the shelf where Demon Slayer should be [was] empty, because everyone had it checked out, but people were more willing to try other things.”

McLean thinks the rise in interest will continue. “We’re not going back,” she says. In fact, the category is expanding: Korean movies and television dramas also moved from niche to mainstream on streaming platforms, starting just before the pandemic, and that led to a surge in popularity in manhwa (Korean comics), such as Solo Leveling, many of which were available digitally on webtoon platforms.

Changes behind the scenes

The COVID-19 pandemic also brought a structural change to the comics retail market that is continuing to impact the business as a whole.

Comics stores, often called the direct market, operate on a different system from bookstores. From 1996 until 2020, the sole distributor to the direct market was Diamond Comic Distributors. Diamond puts out a monthly pre-order catalog, Previews, and is an important sponsor of events such as Free Comic Book Day. In an industry with no big-box stores, Diamond is an important organizing force.

During the early days of the pandemic, many comic shops were closed for browsing but offered curbside pickup, local delivery, and mail order, and most publishers continued to release new comics weekly. Then, on March 23, 2020, Diamond announced it would stop distribution to comic shops as of April 1st until further notice. Its distribution centers were closed down, and the pandemic was disrupting both supply chains and freight networks. In mid-April 2020, DC announced its departure from Diamond and revealed that it would begin distributing comics through Lunar Distribution, with deliveries to retailers starting on April 28. Lunar is now the sole DC single-issue distributor to comic shops, and it also handles Image, the third largest American comics publisher after Marvel and DC. Diamond did not resume shipping until May 20. Then, in March 2021, Penguin Random House announced that it had set up its own comics distributor, PRH Comics, and its first client was Marvel. More clients left Diamond after that.

In January 2025, Diamond filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Should Diamond go out of business, the comic world would lose not only one of its pillars, but also some of its variety of offerings, as Diamond serves many small publishers that would be hard-pressed to find other distributors.

As with manga, such distribution changes probably would have happened eventually. But the pandemic accelerated them, as retailers and publishers alike realized how vulnerable a single-distributor system made them.

“It displayed Diamond’s weaknesses in ways that another crisis could have done,” says Milton Griepp, chief executive officer of ICv2 and the former CEO of Capital City, a comics distributor that was acquired by Diamond in 1996. “Those weaknesses were always there, but they weren’t visible until there was a crisis. This happened to be the crisis. It could have been anything.”

Surviving and thriving

Comics is not a lucrative business. There’s a running joke among insiders that the way to make a small fortune in comics is to start with a large one. Yet, not only did comics survive the pandemic, the lockdown was actually a time of growth for many publishers.

“It was very stressful on the business, but it showed people that there were these great forms of entertainment out there that they hadn’t been aware of before,” Griepp says. “I also think it showed the value of community. When stores reopened, people flocked back to them because they missed going into the store and being able to talk about what was going on.”

They flocked back to libraries and to comics conventions, too. Eighty-five thousand attendees returned to McCormick Place for C2E2 in 2024—almost as many as attended the last pre-COVID-19 con in 2020. And while sales have cooled off since peaking in 2022, they are still higher than they were in 2019, setting a new baseline for the market. The pandemic may have shaken up the comics industry, but it has also vastly increased the audience for manga and for comics as a whole.