But ten years have passed and, as fondly as we may look back on those years, it's an undeniable truism in art and commerce that you're only as good as the last thing you did -- and in periodical publishing, the need to get the "latest thing" out the door and into the hands of your audience is always your primary concern (followed closely by the need to be looking ahead and planning the "next thing"). That's the nature of the business, like it or not. There's rarely an opportunity to rest on your laurels. Nor is your audience likely to let you.
Still, with ten years gone by, it's apparent that many of our current readers are unaware of what has gone before and, at the risk of sounding immodest, of the amazing variety of material Dark Horse has published. For those newer readers, this anniversary year will bring you new editions of some of the best work from the DH archives:
* The DHP Fifth Anniversary Special, out of stock these past five years, will see print once again. This hundred-and-some-page volume was crammed with as much great work as we could lay our hands on -- including the first appearance of a guy named Marv who lived in a place known as Sin City. Watch for this in July.
* Our long out-of-print first Predator series, by Mark Verheiden and the aforementioned Chris Warner, is available once again, now subtitled Concrete Jungle.
* The Best of Dark Horse Presents #1 will get a facelift for its second printing -- a sampling of the best stories from those hard-to-find first twenty issues of Dark Horse's flagship title.
* Aliens: Outbreak, re-mastered edition of our first Aliens series by Mark Verheiden and Mark A. Nelson, will present this popular story in color for the first time. This collection ships in August.
Of course, we'd never want to short-change our loyal, long-time readers who have been with us from the beginning. It's for them especially that we decided to pack our celebratory four-issue series A Decade of Dark Horse with all-new stories featuring the most popular creators and characters from Dark Horse's inception to the present. Among the baker's dozen of new stories you can look forward to are:
* a Sin City yarn, by Frank Miller,
* The Mask by John Arcudi and Doug Mahnke,
* Mike Baron and Steve Rude's Nexus,
* Aliens by Mark Verheiden and Mark A. Nelson,
* Grendel by Matt Wagner,
* new Concrete and Black Cross stories by Paul Chadwick and Chris Warner.
And, before you can say, "What have you done for me lately?" we'll be hitting you with lots of exciting new projects. But 525 words just isn't enough space to tell you all about them, so that news will have to wait until next month...