Dark Horse Panel at Portland's Kumoricon Focuses on Future Releases

Portland's annual Kumoricon event is a fan-supported anime convention, but is well-supported and attended by Dark Horse and its staff. (Dark Horse's hometown is Milwaukie, a suburb across the Willamette River from downtown Portland, and an area that certainly thrives from Dark Horse's long-extended roots).

This year's Dark Horse Panel was hosted by walking J-pop-culture encyclopedia and manga-editor extraordinaire Carl Horn. He was joined by the quick-witted Samantha Robertson, who edits several of Dark Horse's most popular manga, including Old Boy and Blade of the Immortal.

Kumoricon is definitely a fan-focused convention and oftentimes the panels are second-fiddle to the the cosplay-focused events.

For that very reason I was very excited to see this 130-seater panel turned into a standing-room only event that extended past the one-hour set time. Both Carl and Samantha were more than happy to answer questions and sign autographs after the event was over.

We did hear some news from Carl and Samantha:

Dark Horse President and Owner, Mike Richardson is pursuing a Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service live-action vehicle. This may be a movie or may be a TV-series. Nothing is concrete yet, but we know Mike Richardson's successful track record.

An Osamu Tezuka omnibus of Astroboy will be released. It will be a one-shot combination of two volumes. Carl talked about how Osamu Tezuka was regarded as a children's writer, but some of his most amazing titles have already been released by Vertical, including MW, Ode to Kirihito, and Apollo's Song.

The CLAMP monthly 80-page "mangettes" will are set to be published in starting in August 2009. A title has been decided and art-work has been seen, but both are still secret.

CLAMP's four-volume Clover will be released as a single volume.

We heard about the Yoshitaka "Vampire Hunter D" Amano original Shinjuku project earlier this year, but Carl and Samantha were not ready to give any more details. However, we should hear more about this and other projects from the New York Anime Festival later this September.

Carl and Samantha talked about Dark Horse's no-censorship policy and a couple cases where, in the past, Dark Horse was forced to edit the age of Minnie-May so that she wasn't underage when she was a prostitute in the monthly floppy version of Gunsmith Cats (with creator approval). The nice thing about TPBs is shrink-wrap and [removable] labels is they allow DH to release Japanese titles without having to censor pesky nipples. The panel was very clear despite the difference in cultural standards (a bare breast warrants a warning label in the US, where blood and violence do not) they stand behind every book they publish for no better reason than they are fans of the material. When asked about which manga were DH's favorites, Samantha said all had fans in the company, but Eden and Blade of the Immortal were two of the most passionately published titles.