Happy New Year! This is the first Manga Monday post of 2015, and what better way to begin it than with vol. 1 of a new series from CLAMP: as the Beastie Boys might say, Drug & mmmmmmmmDROP!
Drug & Drop is the direct sequel to Legal Drug, the early 2000s series by CLAMP that Dark Horse collected as an omnibus last year. Although it’s common in American comics to build universes that different series fit into, CLAMP is somewhat unusual among manga creators in that they also do this, and reviving older stories is related to the process—sometimes stories from a decade or more ago (CLAMP has even said they’d still like to do more Clover, the very first manga by them that Dark Horse released).
We’re very fortunate to have Drug & Drop be translated by CLAMP expert William Flanagan. In the 1990s at Viz he was editor of Animerica Extra, one of the first English-language manga magazines, which ran titles such as Video Girl Ai, Fushigi Yugi, Short Program…and also, CLAMP’s X/1999—which I believe was the first CLAMP manga published in English. Later, he was the translator of xxxHOLiC and Tsubasa, which is good, because these are at least two (I’ve counted three or four) among CLAMP’s other manga that cross over with the story of Drug & Drop ^_^
Many of the Dark Horse CLAMP manga are omnibus collections of their classic works, but Drug & Drop is also exciting because it’s something they’re doing now—it represents one of their current styles (in fact Drug & Drop runs in Japan’s Young Ace magazine, where it’s a next-door neighbor to another DH supernatural mystery manga, The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, which is returning this June with vol. 14).
By the way, if you’re going to be in Southern California next weekend, Dark Horse will be doing a manga panel on Saturday at Anime Los Angeles. We’ll be giving away prizes, and we’d love to say hello to you!
—Carl Horn
Manga Editor
Happy New Year! This is the first Manga Monday post of 2015, and what better way to begin it than with vol. 1 of a new series from CLAMP: as the Beastie Boys might say, Drug & mmmmmmmmDROP!
Drug & Drop is the direct sequel to Legal Drug, the early 2000s series by CLAMP that Dark Horse collected as an omnibus last year. Although it’s common in American comics to build universes that different series fit into, CLAMP is somewhat unusual among manga creators in that they also do this, and reviving older stories is related to the process—sometimes stories from a decade or more ago (CLAMP has even said they’d still like to do more Clover, the very first manga by them that Dark Horse released).
We’re very fortunate to have Drug & Drop be translated by CLAMP expert William Flanagan. In the 1990s at Viz he was editor of Animerica Extra, one of the first English-language manga magazines, which ran titles such as Video Girl Ai, Fushigi Yugi, Short Program…and also, CLAMP’s X/1999—which I believe was the first CLAMP manga published in English. Later, he was the translator of xxxHOLiC and Tsubasa, which is good, because these are at least two (I’ve counted three or four) among CLAMP’s other manga that cross over with the story of Drug & Drop ^_^
Many of the Dark Horse CLAMP manga are omnibus collections of their classic works, but Drug & Drop is also exciting because it’s something they’re doing now—it represents one of their current styles (in fact Drug & Drop runs in Japan’s Young Ace magazine, where it’s a next-door neighbor to another DH supernatural mystery manga, The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, which is returning this June with vol. 14).
By the way, if you’re going to be in Southern California next weekend, Dark Horse will be doing a manga panel on Saturday at Anime Los Angeles. We’ll be giving away prizes, and we’d love to say hello to you!
—Carl Horn
Manga Editor