NY Times Manga Bestsellers: New Naruto, Fruits Basket Battle for #1

After four straight weeks in the #1 spot, two blockbuster books finally pushed Bleach Volume 27 by Tite Kubo off the top of the heap of New York Times Graphic Books / Manga bestseller list. The two newcomers that duked it out for first? The lastest volume of Naruto and the final volume of Fruits Basket in what must have been a very tight race.

Naruto Volume 45 marks the last part of the big Naruto Generation Ninja accelerated release blast of the last few months. Now after this release, new volumes of Naruto will be out on its regular quarterly release schedule, with Volume 46 due in the stores in October.

While its no surprise that Naruto continues to rule the charts, it was a little surprising that the highly anticipated final volume of mega-popular shojo series Fruits Basket wasn't able to claim the top spot in the week of its debut. But this won't be the last you'll see of this volume -- Furuba fans will likely generate strong sales for this volume for weeks to come. You can also check out a free online preview of the first 21 pages of this fabulous finale.

The other notable newcomer to this week's list is the first volume of Lucky Star, the latest manga adaptation of a popular Bandai anime franchise from Bandai's small but growing manga imprint.

Here's the rest of the NY Times Manga Bestseller list for the week of July 4, 2009:

Image credit: © 2002 MASASHI KISHIMOTO