Mangapedia: Dark Horse's 30th Manga Anniversary

This year marks Dark Horse’s 30th anniversary in manga — one of the two remaining regular North American manga publishers who pioneered the field in the 1980s.

Manga in the 1980s and ’90s were published here just like most English-language comics are still today: they were serialized, usually one chapter a month, in a stapled, monthly pamphlet, and only later collected as a perfect-bound graphic novel.

In the 2000s, the North American manga industry left the pamphlet behind and adopted a straight-to-GN format… and soon after moving from the Western Left-to-Right-reading format, to the Japanese format of reading the manga Right-to-Left. American readers were far more flexible and open-minded to this more traditional format.

Dark Horse saw it all happen in real time with its longest (48 volumes!) and longest-running manga series, Oh My Goddess! It’s the ultimate case study: they published the first chapter in 1994 as a flopped, stapled comic book; they published the final chapter in 2015 inside a straight-to-GN, Japanese-reading format.

How did the same manga survive in a competitive market for so long, and through such big changes? It was thanks to the readers, who must never be stereotyped, assumed about, or underestimated. If they weren’t truly adventurous, would they really be reading manga… or comics?