Which of our series have Dark Horse readers been following longer than any other? It depends in part on how you put the question-Hellboy premiered as a character in 1993, and DH has been doing Star Wars comics since 1991-but one good candidate for the answer is Oh My Goddess!, with a storyline published more or less continuously by Dark Horse since issue #1 in August of 1994. The vast majority of its history has been as a monthly comic book, in a ten year run that ended with issue #112 in September of 2004. That same readership has been loyal enough to follow us as the story continues into the OMG! graphic novels, despite the change in format and even reading direction.
Longtime Dark Horse fans know that all manga in the U.S. were once published in the form of monthly comic books, printed to read left-to-right just like any American comic. Thirteen of Dark Horse's Eisner Award nominations for excellence in comics have been for manga, of which four have won (and in three different categories). Three of the four manga artists admitted to the Eisner Hall of Fame have been published by Dark Horse. I respect-as I believe everyone should-the legacy of the comics format, which for a decade and as half did so much to spread awareness of some of Japan's greatest artists and writers in the West. In fact Dark Horse is the only company in America to still publish manga in this style, with the appropriately-named Blade of the Immortal, which began its run in May of 1996, and whose 123rd issue, out this month, proves it also to be one of Dark Horse's most enduring series ever.
The transition from reading one direction to another, from reading one chapter a month to a graphic novel every two or three months, has sometimes been awkward, no less on the editors here, all of whom, including myself, came out of the old tradition. I sometimes felt I could do with a big "L/R" toggle switch mounted in my cerebellum. We mustn't forget there's a very good reason for it-bookstores throughout the U.S. have embraced comics (Japanese and Western alike) in graphic novel form, greatly expanding their readership. There's another way to look at this issue as well. Just as we publish Japanese and other foreign artists, Dark Horse's own original comics have been translated in many different nations, including Japan, where Mike Mignola and Frank Miller's strong chiaroscuro styles are admired by artists trained to express themselves in black and white. But consider that the Japanese editions of Hellboy and Sin City aren't flopped to read "the Japanese way;" they're left in their American layout, so they can be read the way their artists originally drew them.
Now Dark Horse is doing the same for the Japanese artists it publishes. Dark Horse was the first to publish an English edition of Katsuhiro Otomo's epic Akira in its original black-and-white; be on the lookout soon for the long-awaited Akira Club, a translation of a Japanese retrospective on the phenomenal manga, including dozens of images never seen here before. And the latest Dark Horse manga to make the leap from one era to the next premieres this month: Gunsmith Cats: Burst, the sequel to Kenichi Sonoda's Gunsmith Cats (itself now being re-issued in unflopped graphic novel form). GSC is a special manga for U.S. readers, as its Chicago setting represents Sonoda's tribute to the American crime and action films he loves. And after all, flopping Gunsmith Cats in the old days had the ironic effect of messing up the creator's research-Dark Horse is now proud to present GSC's signature car chases and shootouts with Americans who drive on the right-you know, the way Sonoda originally drew them!