DARK HORSE COMICS

$125.00

Well-known as a publisher of award-winning comic books, Dark Horse is fast gaining a reputation for high-quality products. Dark Horse merchandise includes everything from statues to t-shirts to lunch boxes to Zippo® lighters. Make sure to check out our line of shirts, PVC sets, stickers and more from Tim Burton's Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy!

Dark Horse Comics was founded in 1986 by Mike Richardson as an offshoot of his Oregon comic-book retail chain, Things From Another World. Richardson pursued the idea of establishing an ideal atmosphere for creative professionals, and thirty years later the company has grown to become the third-largest comics publisher in the United States. In 1980, Mike Richardson used a credit card with a two-thousand-dollar credit limit to open a comic-book store, Pegasus Books, in the small resort town of Bend, Oregon. His intention was to write and illustrate a children’s book himself while working in the store, but the business expanded, and his project was put on hold. He still plans to finish that book. As business grew, Richardson opened new retail locations in Oregon and Washington State. He soon became frustrated, however, by the lack of quality in the products he was selling, and so, using funds from his retail operation, he began his own publishing company. From the very start Dark Horse Comics was a different kind of publishing house. Writers and artists were treated as partners, an unheard-of generosity in the comic-publishing field at that time. Soon the industry’s top creators were flocking to Dark Horse, where they became involved in the publishing and marketing of their creations. Dark Horse Comics launched with two initial titles in 1986, Dark Horse Presents and Boris the Bear. Paul Chadwick’s Concrete, about a congressional speechwriter who transforms into a two-thousand-pound cement creature, was a runaway hit and has received twenty-six industry awards and nominations to date. Within one year of its first publication, Dark Horse Comics added nine new titles to its roster, including The American, The Mark, Trekker, and Black Cross. In 1988, Dark Horse revolutionized comics based on popular films with the release of its hit series Aliens, with Predator following soon after. The launch of Star Wars in 1990 solidified Dark Horse’s domination of movie-based comics series. While licensed projects had been around for decades, most publishers devoted few resources to titles they did not own. Dark Horse took a different tack by plotting stories and using top talent to create comics series that were essentially sequels to popular films. This fresh approach met with enormous success, and sales on these popular titles sailed into the millions. Today, Dark Horse is the acknowledged industry leader in this profitable publishing niche. Current publications include Star Wars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Mass Effect, Aliens, Predator, Conan, Serenity, Dollhouse, and many others. Richardson had a strong interest in manga and jumped ahead of market trends by publishing Dark Horse’s first manga series, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, in 1987. More manga series followed, and by the early nineties, he was traveling regularly to Japan, where he cultivated strong relationships with top creative talent there. As a result, Dark Horse built a powerhouse manga program, including titles such as Koike’s Lone Wolf and Cub, Tezuka’s Astro Boy, Otomo’s Akira, Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell, Samura’s Blade of the Immortal, Sonoda’s Gunsmith Cats, and Nightow’s Trigun, as well as America’s longest-running manga series, Oh My Goddess!, by Fujishima. In 2010, Dark Horse began a new partnership with superstar Japanese manga creators CLAMP, collecting such best-selling titles as Clover, Chobits, and Magic Knight Rayearth. 2011 will see the release of Gate 7, CLAMP’s brand-new manga series. In 1990, Dark Horse startled the entire industry by teaming up its two hot Fox movie franchises in one comic.