New York Comic Con

Dark Horse Comics

While Dark Horse Comics' editor Carl Gustav Horn is a familiar face at anime conventions, his company is primarily a publisher of traditional comics, not manga. Accordingly, almost all of the time of their New York Comic Con panel was spent introducing various American projects.

Nonetheless, this year also marks the 20th anniversary of Dark Horse in the manga market. One of their big projects for the year is Hiroya Oku's psychological horror Gantz, which is set for a June 25 launch date. The license for Gantz, a manga that fans had consistently been suggested Dark Horse license, was announced at last year's San Diego Comic Con. At that same time, Dark Horse also unveiled a project that they commissioned the manga supergroup CLAMP to create. This is set to launch sometime in 2009, as a series of monthly 80-page "mangette" volumes which will also be be compiled into three-issue trade paperback volumes. Neither the title of this work nor any plot details have been finalized at this time.

This, however, will not be Dark Horse's only cooperation with CLAMP. Their four-volume CLOVER, which was left unfinished when the magazine it ran in, Amie, ceased publication in 1999 had previously been published in English by Tokyopop, but has been out of print since May 2005. Dark Horse has now acquired the rights to Clover, and will be packaging all four volumes together into a 512-page omnibus edited by Horn. A listing for this book, with a December 1 publication date, has been available on the Amazon.com website since earlier in the month.