Love and wonder are two words we believe in at Dark Horse Manga—you might say we believed in them long before it was fashionable. Back in 1994, there was this home-video commercial that expressed the image of "manga" in the early nineties, for it featured a mascot named "Manga Man." Manga Man wasn't, as you might assume, big eyed and tousle haired. He looked more like a Judge Dredd villain—bald, scarred, teeth clenched, one eye covered by a monocle with cross hairs—and he screamed "MAIN-GAH!!!"—shifting his vowels and striking terror.

So now you can understand that when, sixteen years ago, Dark Horse premiered what is to this day our longest-running series, Kosuke Fujishima's Oh My Goddess!—with its saga of a nice-guy college student, and his beautiful and literally divine girlfriend—well, its content would have been shocking to some. I mean, there was no disembowelment. People were sipping tea, not coughing bile, and hunting for nice apartments instead of killer cyborgs.

This kind of paradigm shift, from blood and terror to love and wonder, can be seen at work in one of our most recent ongoing manga series, Osamu Takahashi's Neon Genesis Evangelion: The Shinji Ikari Raising Project. As the original Evangelion anime of the nineties ended in a literal apocalypse, it is sometimes forgotten today that the series also featured romantic comedy and gag humor, and that the final episode imagined what its characters might be like if they had been allowed to live happier lives—exactly the scenario The Shinji Ikari Raising Project plays out.

Clover, Chobits, and Cardcaptor Sakura are recent and upcoming Dark Horse titles by CLAMP, a partnership between four manga creators—Satsuki Igarashi, Mokona, Tsubaki Nekoi, and Nanase Ohkawa. CLAMP have brought their sensibilities developed in shojo manga—with its emphasis on turning emotion into action—to an international crossover readership of men and women alike.

We see this in Clover, set in a lush, baroque world of retro technology, where CLAMP uses the personal life of a special-forces agent to examine what love means when one partner (but not the other) knows that they are facing death. CLAMP's Chobits, about future love between people and the artificial humanoids called "persocoms," departs from the abstract SF debate about the humanity of robots to suggest the relevant question would be not what both sides truly are, but what they really feel about each other. Cardcaptor Sakura, a magical girl classic (and one might also say, a shojo take on how to do superheroes), is an action-packed saga that is also, in the words of The Complete Manga Guide, "about love in all its many forms: sibling love, childhood crushes, unrequited love, true love."

Few Dark Horse creators express love and wonder together so sumptuously as Mi-Kyung Yun, in her ongoing manhwa series Bride of the Water God. Its heroine

Soah's struggle for love amidst the intrigues of the divine realm contains touches of modern humor and irony, but also references the classic romantic poetry of East Asia that contemplates the wonders of the earth and sky. In reading such scenes in Bride, you realize how much of the roots of fantasy are to be found in the fascinations of the real world, and that this wonder is open to anyone who will go halfway to meet it.

Love and wonder is that strange kind of adventure where the quest is for a midpoint, and the hope is finding someone who came there with the same desire. There are no guarantees; that is exactly what makes these Dark Horse stories—and this life—adventures, and not mere fairy tales.

-- Carl Horn