The first two Walking Dead Compendium volumes have sold a combined 100,000 copies this year in bookstores, towering above the other titles on Nielsen BookScan's list of the Top 10 bestselling adult graphic novels for the first half of 2013. With a suggested price of $59.99, Image Comics' 1,088-page Compendium One is "by far" the most expensive book on BookScan's Top 200 chart for adult fiction.

Graphic novel sales have increased 10 percent year over year, which the company seems to attribute in no small part to the performance of the collections of the long-running comic by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, Charlie Adlard and Cliff Rathburn, and the popularity of the AMC television series.

Volumes of The Walking Dead accounted for four of the top five spots on the BookScan chart, a streak only interrupted by Masashi Kishimoto's Naruto, Vol. 60, at No. 4. In fact, six of the Top 10 graphic novels were held by Image books, with another volume of The Walking Dead claiming the No. 7 spot, and Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples' Saga, Vol. 1, slipping into the final slot with 15,000 copies; the remaining books are manga.

According to BookScan, The Walking Dead books have sold more than 1 million unites in the past 18 months, with Compendium One seeing "a 47 percent week-to-week sales lift" that coincided with the Season 3 finale of the AMC series in March.