Jamie Smart’s Bunny vs Monkey took home the Audiobook: Fiction Nibbie at Monday’s awards


Alice Oseman’s hotly anticipated final Heartstopper volume may send her soaring to the top of the charts


last year – putting it on course for more than £26m for the calendar year if it carries on at this rate.


D


In the Spotlight


Sheena Dempsey Pablo and Splash Bloomsbury Children’s, £9.99, 9781526662606


Dempsey – perhaps most famous for illustrating Swapna Haddow’s Dave Pigeon series – debuted the Pablo and Splash graphic novel series in January 2024. By the end of April, it had gone on to sell 6,988 copies, giving the author a revenue of £51,343. So far in 2025, the first two instalments of the series have notched up £64,605, a 25.8% increase. The third book in the series is due for release in July of this year.


3,752 TCM copies sold


av Pilkey can claim credit for nearly 50% of 2025 ’s number so far, with £4.1m of his £4.4m


sales figure coming from his Dog Man series alone. In total, Pilkey has seen a 92.2% rise in his year- on-year sales. That equates to an extra £2.1m for the author-illus- trator, the exact number that the category has seen its sales rise by so far this year. The other behemoth of the


category – Jamie Smart and his Bunny vs Monkey series – has experienced sales of £2m in the first 18 weeks of 2025, up a modest 2.9% against the same period in 2024. Smart and Pilkey account for 71.6% of the category’s sales – a much bigger proportion than Tintin and Asterix managed a decade ago. But even without them, the category has earned £2.5m so far in 2025, exceeding the entire 2014 total by £500,000, with eight months of the year still to go. John Patrick Green is the third


biggest author in the category, with his InvestiGators series – and its spin-off, Agents of S.U.I.T., with co-creators Christopher Hastings


and Pat Lewis – earning £538,164, an increase of 24.2% against the same period in 2024. That increase is impressive enough on its own, but if you strip out InvestiGators: High-Rise Hijinks, which contrib- uted £121,066 as part of the World Book Day promotion in March 2024, then the series has seen a 58% year-on-year rise. In fourth place on the author ranking is Alice Oseman; her YA Heartstopper series has delivered £171,076 in the beginning part of this year, a 73.9% decline on the same period in 2024. Unsurprising since the last new instalment, Heartstopper Volume 5, was released at the tail end of 2023. If the much-anticipated sixth and final volume comes this autumn, expect that number to skyrocket. The only other author to break


the six-figure sales barrier so far this year is the aforementioned Hergé, whose Tintin series remains almost flat, down just 0.6%. But it is sixth-placed Jim Smith who may be the one to keep an eye on over the remainder of 2025. Smith’s latest two new releases,


My Big Fat Smelly Poo Diary and its follow-up, have earned £67,469 between them so far this year, send- ing the author shooting up the rankings from the £7,894 the Barry Loser series earned last year. With the third volume due in July and a fourth scheduled for December, Smith could find himself troubling Alice Oseman and Tintin in the top five.


REPORTING Alex Call


Data source Date range 2025 Weeks 1-18


Children’s comics & graphic novels*


* Excluding Dav Pilkey, Jamie Smart and John Patrick Green 1


Meet the Mubbles Liz Pichon


2


Macmillan Children’s, 9781035041695 Pablo and Splash: Frozen...


Sheena Dempsey Bloomsbury Children’s, 9781526662804 3


My Big Fat Smelly Poo Diary 2 6,171 Jim Smith


Scholastic, 9780702334481 4


Rune: The Tale of a Thousand... 6,059 Carlos Sanchez Flying Eye, 9781838741211


5


My Big Fat Smelly Poo Diary Jim Smith


Scholastic, 9780702334474 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20


Pablo and Splash Sheena Dempsey Bloomsbury Children’s, 9781526662606


Heartstopper Volume 5 Alice Oseman Hodder Children’s, 9781444957655


Escaping Peril Tui T Sutherland Scholastic, 9781339001234


3,752 3,130 2,500


Nina Peanut: Mega Mystery Solver Sarah Bowie Scholastic, 9780702329883


Warriors Erin Hunter; Riess & Goetter Harperalley, 9780063203877


Heartstopper Volume 2 Alice Oseman Hodder Children’s, 9781444951400


Heartstopper Volume 1 Alice Oseman Hodder Children’s, 9781444951387


Nina Peanut Sarah Bowie Scholastic, 9780702329876


Heartstopper Volume 4 Alice Oseman Hodder Children’s, 9781444952797


Hooky Volume 1 Míriam Bonastre Tur Clarion, 9780358468295


Heartstopper Volume 3 Alice Oseman Hodder Children’s, 9781444952773


2,419 2,409 2,328 2,314 2,148 1,997 1,980 1,928


The Boy Who Didn’t Want to... Lantos; Stebleva Scholastic, 9780702334467


The Awakening Storm Jaimal Yogis; Truong Scholastic, 9781338660425


1,777 1,634


Attack of the Giant Danger Kittens Sophy Henn Simon & Schuster, 9781398524606


The Sad Ghost Club Lize Meddings Wren & Rook, 9781526367303


1,374 1,353 27 5,348 7,700 6,966


DAVID MONTEITH-HODGE


Charts Market Spotlight


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