which 150.000 people voted for their top 100 manga series, Hunter × Hunter ranked 11th. Sales The Hunter × Hunter manga has been largely commercially successful; having sold over 60.6 million collected volumes in Japan by February 2012, making it Shueisha's eighth best-selling manga series. This number had grown to 66.3 million copies by 2014. The manga had over 72 million copies in circulation by December 2018; over 79 million copies in circulation by November 2021; and over 84 million copies in circulation by July 2022. Several individual volumes have topped Oricon's list of the best-selling manga in Japan during their release week; such as volumes 30 through 36. Volumes 24, 27, and 30 through 34 were some of the top-selling volumes for their respective years. Hunter × Hunter was the eighth best-selling manga series of both 2012 and 2013, with 3.4 and 4.6 million copies sold those years respectively. In North America, volumes 23 through 27 have ranked within the top 300 best-selling graphics novels list of sales estimates by Diamond Comic Distributors. Critical reception The Hunter × Hunter manga has received much praise for its plot and characters. In his 2007 book Manga: The Complete Guide, Jason Thompson described its storyline as "an almost random collection of psych-outs, battles, puzzles, and trickery" that works on both a chapter-by-chapter basis and a larger scale. Thompson elaborated that with all the goals and subplots of each of the main characters, the story could seemingly go on forever and is unpredictable enough to hold reader interest. In a different review for Anime News Network in 2012, Thompson wrote that it was hard to summarize the story because "it is every shōnen manga in one, with training sequences, tournament battles, a crime-mystery story arc, and a virtual-reality, RPG-style story arc". But unlike most shōnen manga, he called Hunter × Hunter "incredibly dense." Examples being its fictional nen ability, which is explained "so thoroughly that you almost think it could exist," and the little challenges and games the characters face; "Over and over Togashi invents some little closed system or rules just so the heroes can break them; if he ever wants to change careers, I'd suggest game designer." Thompson praised the character art as great, pointing out how instead of alternating between realistic and chibi like other artists, Togashi has cartoony and realistic characters interacting in the same panels. Thompson did note