PARIS, 1 January 2007.
"2006 has been a new record year for the production of comic books, with 4,130 different titles published in France and in Francophone Europe. It's 14.7% more than in 2005, according to the yearly report of the Comic Books' Reviewers' Association (ACBD).
The market is in growth for the eleventh consecutive year. The number of comics published in 2006 is nearly three times the 1,563 titles published in 2000", the ACBD notes (...)
Among those 4,130 publications, 3,195 are novelties, 612 are reprints, 222 are illustration or humour books, 101 are books analysing comics.
In its report, published today, the ACBD, which gathers several dozens of specialized journalists notices a "relative drop" of the manga phenomenon, which nevertheless represented 44% of the published books (+2%, compared to 2005). Mangas represent 1,418 (1,142 in 2005, +24.2%) of the 1,799 foreign titles published in 2006. 1,110 of these 1,418 mangas are Japanese. American comics [like Usagi Yojimbo] represent 239 titles (207 in 2005, +15.4%)
2006 has been "a year of maturation", confirming the evolution of the past years : growth not only in the number of published titles, but also growth in diversity, growth of the public interest (...)
The most popular title was the eleventh volume of Titeuf by the French-Swiss author Zep*. Released in early October, it has a print run of 1.8 million books [:shock: impressive, especially for a 60-million people country] (...) The biggest manga was Naruto, by Masashi Kishimoto, who had an average print run of 130,000 books per volume (...)
In spite of a recent and considerable growth, mangas don't cannibalize other genres, especially Franco-Belgian comics who, according to the Association profit from this concurrence."
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Paquet, Usagi's editor in France, has published 76 different titles in 2006 (53 in 2005)
Note that the average sales for a comic series are around 7,000 books per volume. The French edition of Usagi, with 9,000 books (if my informations are correct), seems to have a growing success, thanks to a favourable word of mouth and a very affordable price (€3.95, $5,24). There seems to be a lot of room for samurai rabbits here.
A summary here (in French).
The complete report is there.
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titeuf
