Over the past 21 years, Dark Horse Comics has become one of the industry's biggest success stories, publishing such bestselling comics series as Frank Miller's Sin City and 300 and Mike Mignola's Hellboy, as well as licensed titles including Star Wars and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So it's a little surprising to recall that the Milwaukie, Oregon independent publishing house started as something like a self-publishing operation.
"Randy Stradley and I started the company so that we could do our own comics," Dark Horse publisher/cofounder Mike Richardson said during an interview at Dark Horse's Milwaukie, Oregon offices. (One of the earliest Dark Horse titles was Richardson and Stradley's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles parody Boris the Bear. "We've worked with a lot of writers, and come up with a lot of ideas that other people have fleshed out. Recently, I decided that I was going to start writing some of those stories sitting inside my computer myself, and some of 'em turned out pretty good."
One of those stories was Richardson and Jason Shawn Alexander's recent horror miniseries The Secret; it's been followed on Dark Horse's publishing schedule by Richardson and Ben Stenbeck's zombie comedy Living with the Dead, a miniseries featuring cover art by underground comix legend Richard Corben. Richardson explains: "You see all these zombie movies where people are hanging on for survival. It occurred to me that if you're the last people alive, you can drive whatever car you want, go into shopping malls and dress however you want. How do you survive so you enjoy all the stuff? It's simple: walk around and look like zombies. Each issue you get your own zombie survival kit, just in case, although we make no guarantees, and since one of the characters fancies himself a chef, we include a recipe in every issue."
Next year, the company will publish its long-awaited 20-year retrospective, a coffee-table hardcover. Richardson is writing an anecdote about each of the original creators Dark Horse worked with, which will be accompanied by the first story they did for the company. The book is running a bit late—the company was launched in 1986—but Richardson noted that "it's called 20 Years of Comics—not 'celebrating 20 years,' just the first 20 years of Dark Horse." Another long-in-the-works project due to appear soon is the Richardson-written sequel to Roald Dahl's Gremlins—a book the company recently reprinted that had been out of print since 1943, when it appeared as a teaser for a Disney film that was never completed.
Dark Horse is also preparing some big projects for bookstores for 2008, Richardson said. "We'll be working with Neil Gaiman—I can't talk about it yet, but we have a project with Neil. We have a Leonard Maltin book coming out and another prose book by Bruce Campbell.” He also pointed to a number of forthcoming Dark Horse manga projects. “Manga is big in the bookstores, and we are now partnered with [bestselling all-female Japanese manga collective] CLAMP, so we'll have original manga coming out. We also have a book I've been chasing for years and years called Gantz [a manga about a teenager who dies but returns from the dead to fight aliens].”
The wildly popular Joss Whedon-written Buffy theVampire Slayer collection will be followed by related volumes for bookstores, according to Richardson, and the company is continuing its Hellboy line—the sequel to the first Hellboy movie is currently filming in Budapest. Richardson is also working on another comics project of his own, "about a boy who finds a refuge for heroes underneath the polar ice caps." With everything Dark Horse is publishing, how does he find the time to write? "Well," he laughed, "you just don't sleep."—Douglas Wolk
