The final volume of Myspace Dark Horse Presents is on sale, and it features a little bit of all the stuff that makes Dark Horse great. We’ve got a new Mass Effect story written by Mac Walters, writer of the video game, and LeVar Burton of Star Trek: Next Gen fame makes his funny-book debut—two sci-fi superstars that Dark Horse brought to comics. Dark Horse Originals, our line of comics-lit graphic novels, is represented by Jaime Hernandez and Gabriel Ba. Dark Horse’s commitment to the horror genre is on display with occult-romance novelist Jackie Kessler making her comics debut with a vampire tale set in Buffy’s world, and the new Criminal Macabre artist Chris Mitten makes his Dark Horse debut. While we’re not normally thought of as a home to kids comics, anthologies are all about variety—and we’ve got light-hearted adventure by Stan Sakai, Scott Morse, and Art Balthazar. And it’s all wrapped up by Evan Dorkin and Hilary Barta’s brutal skewering of Inglourious Basterds, by way of Mike Richardson’s best-known original character, The Mask.Anthologies are often considered bad business in publishing, but they’re an essential part of the Dark Horse story. We launched with the original print-version of Dark Horse Presents twenty-five years ago. An anthology can uniquely reflect a readers’ habits. Few of us read only one genre, only one type of story. A lot of the same moviegoers who saw True Grit this winter probably also went out to see Black Swan and The Social Network—films about mercenary cowboys, one hot, crazy dancer, and a friendless entrepreneur. (Take that, Facebook. Although our readers are about a thousand times more likely to have found their way to this blog from Facebook than Myspace. But hey, if you want to get your demo heard, Mayspace is still there for you!) My point is, very few movie fans only saw Iron Man 2 last year. That’s why Dark Horse publishes such a wide range of material, more than any other American comics publisher.
I’m a big believer of the idea that all stories need to end in order for them to really work as stories. The anthology Myspace Dark Horse Presents allowed me to see a lot of stories start and end, usually in little eight-page doses. But if every story needs to end, what about an anthology …?
Well, if said anthology is founded on the idea of being on the cusp of new media, first thing you know, new media has left you in the dust, so RIP MDHP. Dark Horse Presents goes back to print this April!
--Scott Allie
Myspace Dark Horse Presents Volume 6 is in stores now!