Oh My Goddess! didn’t become the longest-running English-language manga in the history of—well, English-language manga, simply because Dark Horse has published it for over two decades. Dark Horse couldn’t have published it for over two decades if you, the readers, hadn’t supported it all that time. That might seem obvious, but how about if we make it even more obvious? How about if we put every single Oh My Goddess! release we’ve ever published on a conference table, and show all the things that you made possible?
As you can see by the way items are stacked and fanned in the back, the table wasn’t quite big enough ^_^ And this is just everything with Oh My Goddess! in the actual title. Philip Simon reminded me that (in addition to what you see here) we also published some OMG! stories as a feature in our former manga magazine, Super Manga Blast!. But you begin to get the idea, and we know there must be people reading this who bought every single item on this table—and we want to thank them.
To arrange this display, I had to reach into the closet for that container comics fans know well, but which you rarely hear about today when discussing manga—the longbox! (Actually, I had to reach for two longboxes). Here’s a diagram of everything you’re seeing here that shows just how large a role the Oh My Goddess! monthly comic played in the English-language history of the manga.
To break it down, the blue area represents the 112 monthly issues of the comic. These contained most of what’s in Oh My Goddess! vols. 1-20. The comics read western-style, of course (as was the industry norm for manga published in English before the early 2000s), and were collected into 21 western-reading graphic novels (the red area). Why 21? There were several reasons: one is that it also used to be an industry standard here to arrange manga graphic novels by story arc (as opposed to Japanese tankobon, which often end in the middle of a story arc). 19 of the 21 western-style graphic novels collected the contents of the comics in the order the stories had appeared in Japan. Of the remaining two books, one, Adventures of the Mini-Goddesses (which you can see just to the right of the purple area), was a separate collection of the Mini-Goddess strips, whereas the other book, 1-555-Goddess (which you can see just to the left of the pink area), was the very first OMG! collection, in November 1996. It contained not a straight run of chapters, but different short stories taken from the first three volumes.
The brave pioneers of the first decade of Dark Horse’s Oh My Goddess! made it easier on the readers of its second decade—represented appropriately enough by the green area. The 48 Japanese-reading tankobon of Oh My Goddess! contain every single OMG! story (and Mini-Goddess strip) that was in the original Japanese series, and in their original order. The future of Oh My Goddess! is represented by the area in gold—starting this summer, we’ve begun to collect the 48 volumes into 15 oversize OMG! omnibus books. By the way, did you spot Book Two, with Urd on the cover? Don’t worry, you haven’t missed it—it’s not actually in stores until November. We just happen to have an advance copy ^_^
We’re not done celebrating the history of Oh My Goddess!. Next week, we’ll take a closer look at the early years of the manga in English.
—Carl Horn
Manga Editor