Last week, we shared some pics from Sakura-Con 2014 of those dressed as characters from books published by Dark Horse—thanks once again to all the cosplayers! But maybe at a future con we'll be asking even more people to pose, because another thing we did at Sakura-Con was announce some of the new manga titles we'll be publishing over the next year! Let's recap our announcements...
The name Satoshi Kon already means a lot to many of you—he was the brilliant anime director who made the films Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, and Paprika, as well as the TV show Paranoia Agent. He died in 2010 at age 46 of pancreatic cancer, a sudden passing that shocked fans around the world, even as they were moved once more by his last testament, posted on his blog and translated by Makiko Itoh. 
Before Satoshi Kon became an anime director, he was an extremely skilled manga artist, having been one of Katsuhiro Otomo's chief assistants on AKIRA. 
We're very honored to say that Dark Horse will be releasing two of Kon's manga previously unpublished in English. The first is Satoshi Kon's OPUS.
[insert image Satoshi Kon's OPUS.JPG here]
Satoshi Kon's OPUS was originally published in Japan in 1996, on the eve of his directorial debut, and it perhaps exemplifies his transition from the world of manga to the themes of Perfect Blue. OPUS's protagonist is Nagai, a manga artist who has just decided to surprise his readers by killing off both the hero and the villain of his current story. But during the all-nighter Nagai pulls to finish drawing the manga, he finds himself pulled into it—literally, and now he himself has to confront the situations he created for his characters. 
The ironic relationship between the artist and the fictions they portray, and a skill so sharp it cuts through both real life and fake with the same brutality—the making and unmaking and selling and stealing of illusions—all the elements Kon would become known for as an anime director are on full display in Satoshi Kon's OPUS. Originally released as a two-volume story, Dark Horse will collect both together as a one-volume omnibus. 
[insert image Seraphim 266613336 WINGS.JPG here]
The second manga by Satoshi Kon announced by Dark Horse is extraordinary in its own way—as it's actually a collaboration between him and another one of anime's great directors, Mamoru Oshii, whose novel Blood the Last Vampire: Night of the Beasts has been previously published by Dark Horse. Seraphim: 266613336 Wings is a manga that ran originally in Animage magazine, the home of Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. It's not surprising, then, that in 1994 the magazine was able to bring together Oshii and Kon to create Seraphim—Oshii was about to direct the movie that would bring him international fame, Ghost in the Shell, whereas Kon had been a layout artist for Oshii's previous film, Patlabor 2, an eerie and beautiful vision of terror and security made eight years before 9/11. 
The Seraphim manga is a post-apocalyptic adventure on an Earth ravaged by a pandemic called the "Angel Plague," for the appearance of its victims. A heavily armed relief expedition with cultic overtones (I see parallels between Seraphim and Evangelion, which was in pre-production at the time) travels into a ravaged China escorting Sera, a young girl whom the plague victims embrace as a savior. Mamoru Oshii writes Seraphim with an awareness of both end-times belief and modern East Asian history, and Satoshi Kon illustrates with precision and excitement. And yes, this being an Oshii story, there is a basset hound involved ^_^  By the way, I'm happy to say that both OPUS and Seraphim will be translated by Zack Davisson, whose most recent project, Shigeru Mizuki's manga Showa: A History of Japan, has just been nominated for an Eisner Award.
[insert image Legal Drug.JPG here]
Dark Horse is known for its omnibus collections of CLAMP's work, and we're happy to say that we will be releasing a much-requested title of theirs, Legal Drug (it's probably just coincidence that we announced it in Washington State) in one volume. 
Legal Drug's protagonist is Kudo Kazehaya, whose very name evokes the wind— a name given to warn him that he, too, might disappear. At the story's beginning, he almost thought his time had come, lying half-conscious in the snow—until he was rescued by the dark, handsome and equally mysterious Himura Rikuo. Now they both reside near where Rikuo works, the Green Drugstore, a place that dispenses not only medicine but the secret powers of both Rikuo and Kazehaya, as the pair embark on missions into the paranormal at the bidding of its strange proprietor, Kakei...
[insert image Drug & Drop.JPG here]
And if we're doing Legal Drug, you know we have to make like the Beastie Boys and mmmmmDROP—Drug & Drop that is...the sequel to Legal Drug. Our CLAMP titles date all the way back to Tokyo Babylon from 1990, but Drug & Drop is a currently running manga in Japan, and reflects CLAMP's contemporary style. We're proud to say in fact that Drug & Drop will be our tenth release from CLAMP, after Clover, Chobits, Cardcaptor Sakura, Okimono Kimono, Angelic Layer, Gate 7, Tokyo Babylon, Magic Knight Rayearth, and of course, Legal Drug! 
Vol. 1 of Drug & Drop features a special guest character CLAMP fans know from xxxHolic and Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle—Kimihiro Watanuki. And you'll be pleased to hear that the translator for Drug & Drop will be the same person who translates xxxHolic and Tsubasa (and Gate 7)—William Flanagan. We asked him not only because of his long experience in the manga industry, but because for years it's literally been his job to discern the ins and outs of the CLAMP universe, where (in a situation much more common to American comics than manga) characters cross over from one story to another. 
[insert image Oreimo Kuroneko.JPG here]
This brings us to a manga that, like Drug & Drop, is both a sequel to a previous book and a story that's still ongoing in Japan: Oreimo: Kuroneko. As the title suggests, it picks up where the Oreimo manga left off, and has the same creative team as the first: story by the author of the original Oreimo light novel series, Tsukasa Fushimi, art by Sakura Ikeda, and character design by Hiro Kanzaki.  
Kuroneko—real name Ruri Gokou—is many people's favorite character in Oreimo, and thus it's not surprising this spinoff series focuses on her enrolling into Kyousuke's high school as an underclassman. But is Kyousuke's homeroom prepared to have the Queen of Nightmare among them—and is the manga industry prepared when Kuroneko makes her first professional pitch to them? One thing's for sure: Kyousuke will be by her side, no matter what. But how close is "by her side" going to be...?
[insert image CLAMP Digital.JPG here]
The above announcements are all print books, but we continue to expand our Dark Horse Digital manga offerings, and starting in just a few weeks our CLAMP books will become available in digital format, starting with Clover, followed by Cardcaptor Sakura and Chobits, with more to come. 
We hope you won't mind waiting for these. That's the way it sometimes goes with announcements, that often happen at an early stage of the game—for example, some of the Dark Horse books hitting stores this summer are ones we announced at Sakura-Con in 2013. And this next phrase may be a total cliché, but I'm afraid we're going to double down soon--because in just two months we've got more Japanese titles to announce at Anime Expo! 
—Carl Horn
Manga Editor
Last month, we shared some pics from Sakura-Con 2014 of those dressed as characters from books published by Dark Horse—thanks once again to all the cosplayers! But maybe at a future con we'll be asking even more people to pose, because another thing we did at Sakura-Con was announce some of the new manga titles we'll be publishing over the next year! Let's recap our announcements...

The name Satoshi Kon already means a lot to many of you—he was the brilliant anime director who made the films Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, and Paprika, as well as the TV show Paranoia Agent. He died in 2010 at age 46 of pancreatic cancer, a sudden passing that shocked fans around the world, even as they were moved once more by his last testament, posted on his blog and translated by Makiko Itoh. 

Before Satoshi Kon became an anime director, he was an extremely skilled manga artist, having been one of Katsuhiro Otomo's chief assistants on AKIRA. We're very honored to say that Dark Horse will be releasing two of Kon's manga previously unpublished in English. The first is Satoshi Kon's OPUS.


Satoshi Kon's OPUS was originally published in Japan in 1996, on the eve of his directorial debut, and it perhaps exemplifies his transition from the world of manga to the themes of Perfect Blue. OPUS's protagonist is Nagai, a manga artist who has just decided to surprise his readers by killing off both the hero and the villain of his current story. But during the all-nighter Nagai pulls to finish drawing the manga, he finds himself pulled into it—literally, and now he himself has to confront the situations he created for his characters. 

The ironic relationship between the artist and the fictions they portray, and a skill so sharp it cuts through both real life and fake with the same brutality—the making and unmaking and selling and stealing of illusions—all the elements Kon would become known for as an anime director are on full display in Satoshi Kon's OPUS. Originally released as a two-volume story, Dark Horse will collect both together as a one-volume omnibus. 


The second manga by Satoshi Kon announced by Dark Horse is extraordinary in its own way—as it's actually a collaboration between him and another one of anime's great directors, Mamoru Oshii, whose novel Blood the Last Vampire: Night of the Beasts has been previously published by Dark Horse. Seraphim: 266613336 Wings is a manga that ran originally in Animage magazine, the home of Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. It's not surprising, then, that in 1994 the magazine was able to bring together Oshii and Kon to create Seraphim—Oshii was about to direct the movie that would bring him international fame, Ghost in the Shell, whereas Kon had been a layout artist for Oshii's previous film, Patlabor 2, an eerie and beautiful vision of terror and security made eight years before 9/11. 

The Seraphim manga is a post-apocalyptic adventure on an Earth ravaged by a pandemic called the "Angel Plague," for the appearance of its victims. A heavily armed relief expedition with cultic overtones (I see parallels between Seraphim and Evangelion, which was in pre-production at the time) travels into a ravaged China escorting Sera, a young girl whom the plague victims embrace as a savior. Mamoru Oshii writes Seraphim with an awareness of both end-times belief and modern East Asian history, and Satoshi Kon illustrates with precision and excitement. And yes, this being an Oshii story, there is a basset hound involved ^_^  By the way, I'm happy to say that both OPUS and Seraphim will be translated by Zack Davisson, whose most recent project, Shigeru Mizuki's manga Showa: A History of Japan, has just been nominated for an Eisner Award.



Dark Horse is known for its omnibus collections of CLAMP's work, and we're happy to say that we will be releasing a much-requested title of theirs, Legal Drug (it's probably just coincidence that we announced it in Washington State) in one volume. 

Legal Drug's protagonist is Kudo Kazehaya, whose very name evokes the wind— a name given to warn him that he, too, might disappear. At the story's beginning, he almost thought his time had come, lying half-conscious in the snow—until he was rescued by the dark, handsome and equally mysterious Himura Rikuo. Now they both reside near where Rikuo works, the Green Drugstore, a place that dispenses not only medicine but the secret powers of both Rikuo and Kazehaya, as the pair embark on missions into the paranormal at the bidding of its strange proprietor, Kakei...

And if we're doing Legal Drug, you know we have to make like the Beastie Boys and mmmmmDROP—Drug & Drop that is...the sequel to Legal Drug. Our CLAMP titles date all the way back to Tokyo Babylon from 1990, but Drug & Drop is a currently running manga in Japan, and reflects CLAMP's contemporary style. We're proud to say in fact that Drug & Drop will be our tenth release from CLAMP, after Clover, Chobits, Cardcaptor Sakura, Okimono Kimono, Angelic Layer, Gate 7, Tokyo Babylon, Magic Knight Rayearth, and of course, Legal Drug! 

Vol. 1 of Drug & Drop features a special guest character CLAMP fans know from xxxHolic and Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle—Kimihiro Watanuki. And you'll be pleased to hear that the translator for Drug & Drop will be the same person who translates xxxHolic and Tsubasa (and Gate 7)—William Flanagan. We asked him not only because of his long experience in the manga industry, but because for years it's literally been his job to discern the ins and outs of the CLAMP universe, where (in a situation much more common to American comics than manga) characters cross over from one story to another. 

This brings us to a manga that, like Drug & Drop, is both a sequel to a previous book and a story that's still ongoing in Japan: Oreimo: Kuroneko. As the title suggests, it picks up where the Oreimo manga left off, and has the same creative team as the first: story by the author of the original Oreimo light novel series, Tsukasa Fushimi, art by Sakura Ikeda, and character design by Hiro Kanzaki.  

Kuroneko—real name Ruri Gokou—is many people's favorite character in Oreimo, and thus it's not surprising this spinoff series focuses on her enrolling into Kyousuke's high school as an underclassman. But is Kyousuke's homeroom prepared to have the Queen of Nightmare among them—and is the manga industry prepared when Kuroneko makes her first professional pitch to them? One thing's for sure: Kyousuke will be by her side, no matter what. But how close is "by her side" going to be...?


The above announcements are all print books, but we continue to expand our Dark Horse Digital manga offerings, and starting in just a few weeks our CLAMP books will become available in digital format, starting with Clover, followed by Cardcaptor Sakura and Chobits, with more to come. 

We hope you won't mind waiting for these. That's the way it sometimes goes with announcements, that often happen at an early stage of the game—for example, some of the Dark Horse books hitting stores this summer are ones we announced at Sakura-Con in 2013. And this next phrase may be a total cliché, but I'm afraid we're going to double down soon--because in just two months we've got more Japanese titles to announce at Anime Expo! 

—Carl Horn
Manga Editor