Seeing the pics of all the Blood Blockade Battlefront cosplayers at Anime Expo this last weekend reminded us of how Dark Horse was an early adopter ^_^ Back in 2011, when we heard that one of our favorite artists, Yasuhiro Nightow (creator of Trigun and Gungrave), was drawing a new manga series called Blood Blockade Battlefront, we began to publish it in English; seven volumes are available now, and an eighth is on the way.
It’s often the case (even in Japan) that people don’t discover the original manga until an anime version of it comes out, and with Nightow’s Trigun things happened the other way around; the anime first came out in 1998 (there were no English-language simulcasts in those days) and Dark Horse began to release the manga five years later, in 2003; we put out the Trigun Multiple Bullets anthology as recently as 2013.
But we had every confidence that Nightow’s wild characters, creations, and storytelling energy would make for another great anime show sooner or later, and so it has: Hope Chapman of Anime News Network recently called it the best anime show of the spring. So if you haven’t picked it up yet, take it right back to the source and check out the Blood Blockade Battlefront manga from Dark Horse!