Meanwhile, there was a sweet shonen series about friendship that managed to become of the best-selling manga series of the year.
Seriously, look it up on the Bookscan charts. It's doing amazingly for a non-Weekly Shonen Jump series without an anime to support it.
KOMI CAN'T COMMUNICATE (Komi-san wa, Komyusho desu), by Tomohito Oda. First published in 2016 and first published in North America in 2019.
PLOT:
Tadano hopes that entering an elite high school will be a chance to distance himself from his junior-high dorkiness and coast through high school largely unnoticed. That changes when he discovers that his classmate Komi isn't the stately, distant princess their class presumes her to be, but instead suffering from social anxiety so great that even the most innocuous comment is too daunting. Tadano sympathizes and promises to help her achieve her goal of making 100 friends, even if sometimes it comes at the cost of his dignity and often thanks to the misinterpretations of others.