Dandadan is the most recommended manga by bookstore employees in Japan for the year 2022
On Thursday, January 27, 2022, the official site of "Nationwide Bookstore Employees' Recommended Comics" stated that DANDADAN had been picked as the most recommended comic of 2022. In the spin-off project "Manga Editors Manga Recommendation" ranking for 2022, the series was also ranked first.
Tatsu Yukinobu, the creator of Dandadan, released an original illustration card of Okarun and Momo Ayase to commemorate Dandadan's victory. From January 28, 2022, until stocks last, the illustration will be part of a nationwide purchasing privilege distribution campaign involving around 1,300 bookstores.
The following is the ranking list of the Nationwide Bookstore Employees' Recommended Comics for 2022:
Dandadan by Tatsu Yukinobu
Kaiju No. 8 by Naoya Matsumoto
Wind Breaker by Satoru Nii
Blue Box by Miura Kouji
Chi-Chikyuu no Undou ni Tsuite by Uoto
SAKAMOTO DAYS by Yuto Suzuki
Uma Musume: Cinderella Gray by Junnosuke Itou, Masafumi Sugiura & Taiyo Kazumi
The Elusive Samurai by Yusei Matsui
Onna no Sono no Hoshi by Yama Wayama
Kujou no Taizai by Shohei Manabe
Me & Robocco by Miyazaki Shuhei
Medalist by Ikada Tsuruma
Goukon ni Ittara Onna ga Inakatta Hanashi by Nana Aokawa
TSUGUMI PROJECT by ippatu
Brutal: Satsujin Kansatsukan no Kokuhaku by Kei Koga and Ryou Izawa
The National Bookstore Employees' Recommended Comics is a comic award in which bookstore employees around the country request "mangas that many people want to recommend" and "mangas that everyone wants to read" and rank them. "Works that have been published in 5 volumes or less" were the categories' target works.
From October 7 to November 8, 2021, a total of 1000 bookstore employees took part in a survey to select the top 15 works. This is the first time that the top three mangas chosen were all digital.
Yukinobu Tatsu's Dandadan is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by him. Since April 2021, it has been serialized in Shueisha's Shōnen Jump+ service, with chapters compiled into three tankōbon volumes as of December 3, 2021.
The series features Momo Ayase, a high school student who believes in ghosts but not aliens, and her classmate Ken Takakura (Okarun) who believes aliens but not ghosts. In a bet to see who is right, they plan to visit places linked with both the occult and the supernatural, with Ayase going to the former and Okarun going to the latter. However, when they get to their separate locations, they discover that neither of them was mistaken, as both aliens and ghosts do exist.
Dandadan was nominated for the seventh Next Manga Award in the Best Web Manga category in June 2021, and came in second place out of 50 nominations. Takarajimasha's Kono Manga ga Sugoi! 2022 list of top manga for male readers ranked it fourth.
The manga got over 22 million views on the Shōnen Jump+ platform as of July 2021, and was nominated for the fifteenth Manga Taishō in January 2022.