Great news! Lone Wolf and Cub creator Kazuo Koike announced at New York Comic Con that he plans to write more Lone Wolf and Cub stories, furthering the original saga’s sequel, New Lone Wolf and Cub (Shin Kozure Okami), which starts its North American publication at Dark Horse this June. Any new LW&C material is cause for raised glasses and lit fireworks, but for you lost souls who may not have read the original, there’s no better time than now to catch up. Lone Wolf and Cub Omnibus Volume 3 hits comics shops Wednesday (and bookstores not long after), featuring over seven hundred story pages of what some consider the greatest work of graphic fiction ever created—and at the ridiculously low cost of less than three cents a page. (Who says comics are too expensive?) LW&C is a staggering, sprawling epic, over eight thousand pages in full, and a tour de force of storytelling, both in the complex, emotional narrative of writer/creator Kazuo Koike and the explosive kineticism and subtle expressiveness of artist Goseki Kojima. Whether you’re a manga reader or not, Lone Wolf and Cub is simply too good to pass up, and Lone Wolf and Cub Omnibus is the best way to keep from passing it.
—Chris Warner, Senior Editor
2013 is Dark Horse’s twenty-fifth year of publishing manga, but it’s not the only manga anniversary we have to mark. One of the most important milestones in our history with Japan came a decade ago this fall, when, in association with Digital Manga Publishing, we began three of our best-selling series, Berserk, Trigun, and Hellsing.
The first volumes of Berserk and Trigun each hit stores in October 2003, whereas Hellsing Volume 1 came out that December—we decided to write about all three in November, so as to split the difference. ^_^ The titles themselves probably don’t need any introduction to you; they’re all fan favorites and, as featured in last week’s gallery, you still see people cosplaying them (although, despite huge sales, Berserk cosplay seems the least common of the three).
But when these titles began at the end of 2003, they represented two big changes for Dark Horse. First, Berserk, Trigun, and Hellsing were our very first manga to be published Japanese style, that is, right-to-left reading. Ever since manga started being released on a regular basis in English in the late 1980s, the industry standard had been to “flop” the artwork so that it could be read Western style, left to right. Left-to-right manga are still seen even today, but Berserk, Trigun, and Hellsing rolled out in the era of the “manga boom” of the 2000s, the identity of which was defined in part by actively asserting the differences of the Japanese format, often including not only the reading direction, but the unretouched (and even untranslated) Japanese sound FX on the page.
Second, Berserk, Trigun, and Hellsing were Dark Horse’s first manga to be published in what’s now another standard for the industry: tankobon size. Take a look below at how they compare to other size formats DH has published manga in:
The first three sizes, going from the right side of this picture to the center, represent much of the history of manga in North America. The Caravan Kidd manga collection on the right has the same page size as a comic book—and that’s not surprising, as prior to the manga boom it was common not only to publish manga left to right, but also, before collecting it as a graphic novel, to serialize it first as a monthly or biweekly comic book.
This approach actually wasn’t so different from that of the Japanese; in Japan, manga are also serialized before being collected, and the magazines in which the serials run have a page size that’s closer to that of US comic books than to tankobon. In other words, tankobon size is considerably smaller than the size most manga are first published at in Japan. By comparison, it’s remained the standard in American comics to make the graphic novel collection of a comic book series the same size as the monthly comics.
In the mid-1990s, a change in the paper industry prompted a new, smaller standard for manga graphic novels, one adopted by both Dark Horse and Viz. The comics-size GNs were about 10 3/8 x 6 5/8 inches (264 x 168 mm), but these new smaller ones were closer to 8 1/4 x 5 3/4 inches (210 x 146 mm). But the fact that these are the dimensions of a recent volume of Blade of the Immortal illustrates a point about continuity in change—just as there are still manga published left to right (as Blade is), some manga are still published in these earlier page sizes. It’s the same size, for example, used in our Tokyo Babylon omnibus series, or our current editions of works by Masamune Shirow.
Tankobon are about 7 1/4 x 5 1/8 inches (184 x 130 mm), and for the last ten years they’ve represented the most common size you’ll find for manga in North American bookstores. But Dark Horse has published a good amount of manga in editions with smaller page sizes than that. To the left of the tankobon is the special size used for our Osamu Tezuka books, about 6 13/16 x 4 3/8 inches (173 x 111 mm).
Finally, our best-selling manga of all time, the original 28-volume release of Lone Wolf and Cub, is also our smallest. This is the format known in Japan as bunko (pronounced “boon-ko”), about 6 x 4 1/8 inches (152 x 105 mm), and was used for Kazuo Koike’s other works with artist Goseki Kojima as well. Note the current omnibus edition of Lone Wolf and Cub Chris talked about above is tankobon size—except unlike most tankobon, it’s two inches thick, and the same is true for the new omnibus edition of Trigun.
Well, where does all this end? Hopefully, it doesn’t! The story of the different sizes and formats of manga in English is also the story of the survival, growth, and diversification of manga in English. And these five sizes are hardly even the whole story, as you’ll realize next time you check out the manga section of your bookstore or comics shop.
—Carl Horn, manga editor