So last night I attended a Dark Horse manga presentation hosted by the Center for Japanese Studies at Portland State University (where I’ve been taking Japanese). The event’s speaker was long-time translator Carl Horn, who mostly talked about the same things he mentioned at another recent Dark Horse event, such as all the recent movie adaptations and Dark Horse’s new “mangettes” project with CLAMP.

But this time he did mention a few things I thought were potentially significant, the first being that Dark Horse wants to expand its manga offerings. This came up in response to a question from Professor Kominz, one of the teachers in PSU’s Japanese program, who wanted to know who to send students who want to translate to. Carl also expressed dismay once again that people tend to write Dark Horse off as only publishing dark, violent, “manly” manga (when, in fact, their longest-running manga series is Ah! My Goddess).

There were a few interesting questions during the Q&A, including several about China– from whether Dark Horse is looking at licensing any Chinese man hua to whether China imports Dark Horse titles illicitly. Carl mentioned that a lot of their stuff is printed in China, but probably couldn’t legally be sold there, which I thought was kind of interesting.

I also enjoyed him answering the question about his favorite manga: he brought up Kohta Hirano’s Hellsing, pointing out that if you’re going to deal in clichés like vampires, Nazis, and the Vatican’s secret organizations, you really ought to “put the petal to the medal.” He notes that everyone in the series is nuts– just like Hirano.

Good times had by all! After the speech and Q&A there was a mini-cosplay competition (by which I mean four cosplayers got up and introduced themselves and got prizes), then food and hang-outs. Some Dark Horse people were also selling books, so I (finally) picked up Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service #2 (but they didn’t bring MPD Psycho, wah!).

Hit the jump for more photos.

The attendees.

Carl’s recent reading list.

There were only four full cosplays, but they were all pretty good.

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