…And I’m going to join them in pimping Powells, because it’s the coolest bookstore chain ever. Doubly so because it’s a local chain.

So, 6:48pm and I wander into the bookstore. I see a crowd of mostly teenagers wearing Sweeney Todd t-shirts, sporting punky hair colors, and making geeky jokes. If I was in any city but my hometown of Portland, it’d be obvious that they were attending a manga event, but since this is Portland, it had to be the stacks of manga and the cosplaying bookstore staffer (seriously! pics under the jump!) that gave it away.

At 6:58 the Dark Horse guys, licensing director Michael Gombos and editor Carl Horn, appeared and the event began.

I won’t give a minute-by-minute account since much of it is stuff that they no doubt go over at every con (i.e. yes, we take submissions, no, it’s not our fault Kouta Hirano takes so long with Hellsing, etc). But there were a few interesting tidbits:

• April will be Dark Horse’s 20th anniversary of publishing manga. Carl brought in a copy of the first manga they’d ever put out, which was an issue of the 1985 manga of Godzilla, which they published in English in 1987 in a traditional comic book format (as pretty much all manga would be published for the next ~15-ish years). I thought this was pretty spiffy and they’re shaping up to have a banner year for that anniversary with titles like Blood+ and Gantz, not to mention…
• Their CLAMP project is on schedule to be released in spring of ‘09, hopefully. For those who missed the summer announcement, Dark Horse is part of a multinational project to release a brand new CLAMP manga simultaneously in Japan, the US, the UK, Taiwan, and Korea (and possibly others, those were the countries they named). No word on what the new manga will be about, but it will be released in a format they’re calling “mangettes,” a monthly 80 page volume. They know but can’t say what anthology it will be serialized in Japan, and they’re going to do their best to make sure all the releases are concurrent– which means that the bookstores who like to put manga out as soon as they get them rather than waiting for a street date will hopefully play along, since the idea is to allow fans all around the world to read and discover the series together.
• They’re hinting at some kind of movie project in the works, assuming I interpeted the hints correctly. One attendee asked if they were ever going to get into anime, and they started talking about how they had had a hand behind the scenes in some movie works (like, say, Hellboy), they don’t have anything that they can announce right now, but they’ll have some bigger announcements, hopefully soon. I kind of got the feeling that they were trying to finagle a live-action adaptation of one of their manga properties, but that’s just my instinct, so we’ll see.

I also asked after the show if, considering the failure of Mohiro Kitoh’s Shadow Star (a.k.a. Narutaru), they might consider picking up Kitoh’s Bokurano, which was on my Underrated Manga list. (For those unaware: Narutaru was picked up by Dark Horse, released initially as a kids’ manga, took a very dark turn, and on top of that didn’t sell very well and was therefore cancelled.) Carl Horn expressed interest in picking it up, especially if someone licensed the anime and they could do some kind of joint release deal…and he also noted that they’re not opposed to releasing the rest of Narutaru, if they could figure out a good way to do it.

Other than that the rest was all pretty general questions about the state of the industry, the licensing and translation process, etc. A fun evening was definitely had by all, though, especially me ’cause I picked up a big fat stack of books I’ve been meaning to get to. ♥

Photos after the jump!

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