While the manga phenomenon in the U.S. may still seem relatively new, Dark Horse Comics has been publishing manga for over 20 years. From classics such as Lone Wolf and Cub to a brand new series from manga superstars CLAMP that will be released simultaneously in both Japan and the U.S. for the first time ever, Dark Horse has remained dedicated to manga through an individual approach to properties for audiences of all tastes. We spoke to Editor Carl Horn about the history of Dark Horse Manga and upcoming projects to watch out for.

BookShelf: What’s the story behind Dark Horse Manga? When did it get started?

Carl Horn: It goes back a long way, almost to the very beginning of Dark Horse. In fact, company President Mike Richardson, a manga fan since the early 1970s (he discovered them through an international bookstore in Portland that would sometimes get in Japanese magazines) wanted to publish Lone Wolf and Cub when Dark Horse started releasing comics in 1986. As you may know, it was acquired by First Comics instead, but by the time First shut down in 1991 they had only gotten about a third of the way through the series. The happy ending to that story, of course, is that Dark Horse picked up Lone Wolf and Cub in 2000 and published it in its entirety to great success—28 monthly graphic novels for $9.95 each. That was also, by the way, the first time anyone had ever released an entire manga series in the U.S. straight to graphic novel in a low-priced pocketbook format—the approach that is now the industry standard.

But instead of publishing manga for 23 years, we've only been doing it for 21. Two years after Dark Horse got started, in May of 1988, we published our first manga, Kazuhisa Iwata's adaptation of the Gojira (aka Godzilla) movie. After that, we hooked up with Toren Smith of Studio Proteus in San Francisco. Toren probably did more to help bring manga to the United States than any other individual (as opposed to company or organization). He had already done a lot to promote anime on the West Coast (he helped organize the event that was an ancestor of Anime Expo) but also had a drive to get manga here as well. He famously sold all his earthly belongings and staked everything on a 1986 trip to Japan in order to make the contacts necessary. The people in the industry he met there could see he truly appreciated their work and had confidence Toren could adapt it skillfully into English.

For 14 years, Dark Horse had a relationship with Studio Proteus whereby Toren would license the manga and adapt it into English, and then Dark Horse would handle its publishing and marketing. Appleseed, Ghost in the Shell, Blade of the Immortal, Oh My Goddess!, Gunsmith Cats and many more were Studio Proteus titles published by Dark Horse during those years, although Dark Horse also went after some titles on its own and Studio Proteus worked with other publishers. Toren retired in 2003 and Dark Horse acquired most of Studio Proteus's catalog. Since then Dark Horse Comics has continued to strike forward in manga, developing relationships with many new Japanese publishers and creators.

BookShelf: How do you select material to publish?

Carl Horn: Various ways; to keep up with new manga as it happens, we get several boxes' worth of manga magazines shipped over every month from Japan. Likewise we receive shipments of tankobon (what the Japanese call their graphic novel collections). And of course we check stuff out at our local Japanese bookstore, too. But being in the industry, often it begins just in the course of regular conversation with Japanese publishers asking us to look into doing this or that. We published Who Fighter—sort of a Japanese version of Weird War—based on the artist's sister approaching us at a con! It's by a very talented artist named Seiho Takizawa, but no one in the English-speaking world seemed to know about him; I mean, at the time, you could Google the dude and get zip.  And of course, as you can see from the story of Lone Wolf and Cub, we go after many manga based on the personal interests of the people who work here. I was the one who wanted to do Evangelion, which is contemporary, but I was also the one who pushed Satsuma Gishiden, which is a samurai classic from 1977. Mike Richardson, of course, has the final say on doing any book and he has been supportive even knowing they may not all work out—as indeed, Satsuma Gishiden didn't.

BookShelf: What current trends do you see in manga publishing?

Carl Horn: As mentioned above, at the start of this decade it was a radical move to publish manga straight to graphic novel. When that later took off as a standard—pushed forward by Stuart Levy at Tokyopop, and supported by Kurt Hassler (who was manga buyer for Borders at the time, and is now one of the people behind Yen Press)—it was basically responsible for creating the bookstore market for manga that we know today.

But books are not computers, as Roy Batty would say, but physical. We publish physical books for people who like to buy them (and Amazon, maker of the Kindle, is one of our most important markets), but in exchange we have to try and meet the challenges that entails—which include having to ship, store, and shelve those books. When hundreds of different series are getting released, series that consist of multiple volumes that stores may order multiple copies of, it puts great stress on the system. That's why the trend in recent years is the omnibus—several volumes manga at once, bound in one cover and offered at a bargain price.

To show how this works with a recent example, the English version of CLAMP's Clover was originally released in 2001 by Tokyopop in four flopped [pages have been reversed from the original to read left to right] volumes at $14.99 each.  But in April, Dark Horse is releasing an unflopped [pages read right to left] English edition of all four volumes of Clover combined inside one omnibus book, now costing $19.95. A little quick math will show this means a fan can now get the entire Clover story for only 1/3 of what it would have cost them to buy the four volumes of the old version.

BookShelf: What can you tell us about upcoming projects?

Carl Horn: As a comics publisher used to working directly with creators, it's always been Mike Richardson's ambition to do so with Japanese creators as well. He took the initiative to reach out to CLAMP, the four-person team responsible not only for Clover as mentioned above, but the character designs for the Code Geass anime, the manga Chobits, xXxHolic, Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, Card Captor Sakura...in fact, for any manga fan, I won't need to go on, since CLAMP have had 21 different titles published in English, more than any other Japanese creator.

We are proud to say that CLAMP is doing their next series directly with Dark Horse. That in itself is a breakthrough, because almost every manga you see on the shelves here didn't come from a U.S. publisher working with the manga artists directly, but through those artists' Japanese publishers, or through a licensing agency.

The second breakthrough, however, is that we will be publishing CLAMP's new work in the Mangettes format, a 72-page graphic novel designed to enable simultaneous publication with the Japanese version. Every manga you see on the shelves here is also typically months or even years behind its first appearance in Japan. How it works in Japan is every new manga first comes out chapter by chapter in a magazine; then later those chapters get collected in a graphic novel, then later that graphic novel gets licensed and translated into English.

That's why English-speaking manga fans have always had to wait—until now! Each new chapter of CLAMP's story will come out here in Mangette format the same week that the same chapter comes out in Japan. Japanese and English-speaking fans will be able to read a new manga at the exact same time. It's a statement from CLAMP and Dark Horse that the time has come for manga fans around the world to be equal—to let their new story reach their readers directly, and all at once.

BookShelf: What series would you recommend to someone who is new to manga?

Carl Horn: Of course, that depends on what kind of story they're looking for. Car chases and shootouts? You can't go wrong with Gunsmith Cats, the saga of a gorgeous bounty hunter mixing it up with hit men and drug lords in present-day Chicago. Hellsing is a manga that manages to take incredible clichés like Nazis, vampires, and sinister secrets of the Church, and succeed by stomping the pedal to the floor, with an English adaptation that fully conveys the energy and madness of the original. Gantz is ultrasleek ultraviolence, about a group of seemingly random people gathered together in an apartment, given high-tech weapons by a mysterious black orb, and forced to go out in a live-action role-playing game...where they have to kill people for real! Eden is a much more serious kind of science fiction story, about the survivors of an apocalyptic plague trying to rebuild and finding, as always, that mankind is its own worst enemy (Wizard called it the best manga of 2007, by the way). The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is modern horror with a mood of black comedy: its heroes aren't grim avengers or members of some mysterious order, but a bunch of poor college students who try and help the dead find peace because they can't get any other kind of job!

BookShelf: What do you take into account in terms of age ratings?

Carl Horn: Since part of my job as editor will involve reading a book several times over during its production, I try to get a sense of the work as a whole in order to consider what age it might be appropriate for. We're publishers, and we have certain duties to the work we voluntarily decide to publish—the first of which is, once having chosen to publish it, to stand up for it and support it as something the individual artist wanted to get across (even if that something is "only" entertainment), not something to be graded on an arbitrary checklist, or worse, treated as a potentially hazardous object.

I'm not just talking about manga with sex, blood, and foul language—our longest-running manga series, Oh My Goddess!, has none of those things. But it would be insulting to Oh My Goddess! for us to promote it in terms of how relatively "clean" or "safe" it is. Checklists like that only tell you what you think—or fear—people are against, and such lists are drawn up without reference to any particular creator or work. But after all, you are publishing a particular creator and a particular work. Do you know what that work you're publishing is for? And if you don't, why are you bothering to publish it? I can tell you that Oh My Goddess!, for example, is about love and empathy; it's not about its "occult references" or "occasional depictions of alcohol use."

BookShelf: What would you like librarians and teachers to know about Dark Horse Manga?

Carl Horn: First of all I want to say, in the words of Ali G., "respect." My first job out of school was as a librarian, and the whole reason I'm able to work as an editor today is because I had an excellent English and journalism teacher in high school, Marty Schimbor, who taught me how the English can be used, not just studied. Needless to say, I used to read manga in her class during the '80s—but only hidden behind my copy of The Sun Also Rises, because you got no class credit for manga back then!

I would like to say that if librarians and teachers feel they need more information about a manga than is included in our tip sheets, they can always feel free to contact Dark Horse directly*. Editors here are very busy, of course, but they frequently make time to answer educators' questions; some of them talk at libraries or schools on occasion or even teach classes themselves. I would also like to say that if one of our manga comes to you with a shrinkwrap and a warning sticker on the cover, that means we consider it to be adult fiction; I say that because even though it's wonderful that so many libraries have strong manga collections, I sometimes see libraries where all the manga are shelved together, whereas they wouldn't shelve the youth fiction with the adult fiction.

For teachers, I'm sure they're aware that whereas twenty years ago most people were studying Japanese because they wanted to go into international trade or diplomacy, today many do it simply because they like Japanese pop culture. A number of our manga, such as Lone Wolf and Cub and The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, contain cultural notes in back regarding everything from Japanese systems of coinage in the 18th century to current slang on the streets of Shibuya. Most manga are meant as entertainment first, but part of the reason people seek out foreign entertainment is to get a sense of different ways. As Bill Cosby (who has a doctorate in education, so he should know) says, “if you're not careful, you might learn something before it's done!”

Librarians and Teachers seeking additional info on Dark Horse Manga may contact:

*Aaron Colter
Marketing Coordinator
Dark Horse Comics, Inc
(503) 905-2326
acolter@darkhorse.com