Carl Horn just rescued the panel attendees from VIZ who wanted to stick around for Dark Horse– they were going to have to clear out and wait in line again. Awww! We shoulda given him a group hug. (Well, the press was allowed to stay, natch.)

Right then, panelists include Carl Horn, Michael Gombos, Samantha Robertson, and Jeremy Atkiss. Upcoming releases are first up, and I’m going to not type that one up all the way because it’s long and it’s all available on their website anyway. Here are some titles, though: Blood+, Style School…

Interestingly, there’s a Vampire Hunter D PVC set due out sometime in the not-too-distant futue (August, sounds like). I’m sure I heard about it and just forgot, but just in case, here it is.

MPD Psycho, Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service (woot and wootwoot, respectively)– the new Kurosagi volume is going to feature “robot zombie otaku” or something. Awesome! Carl Horn says Dark Horse has “the only Tezuka title that Japanese people actually read” (joking, of course), Astro Boy.

Apparently Adam Warren’s latest Dark Horse title involves a group of wannabe superheroes who, among other things, have a fandom that creates doujinshi about them. That’d be Empowered, whose fourth vlume is due out in September.

Hellsing volume 9 on October 22nd, “and there will be blood.” We knew that already but it bears repeating.

Announcement time! A new manga release, the Evangelion “Ikari Shinji Raising Project” manga, because the regular manga just comes out too slow and Carl got bored. Don’t worry, even though the rest of the manga is more about the Eva pilots’ potential real lives, Gendo is still Gendo, Horn assures. He hopes to make this a very fan-friendly series, and they’re encouraging people to send in Eva fanart so that we can all have fun with the series. It should start in late spring or early summer of 2009.

And apparently Michael Gombos is engaged! Congratulations!

Now onto Q&A: I opened up with a question about the CLAMP mangettes, of course. No title, no genre, but there should be some art available to the public in the near future, but more details probably won’t be out until sometime after Comic Con.

Someone’s asking about Kodansha, and will it affect Dark Horse? It will affect certain titles, but they won’t say anything about which ones yet, even if there are names (*cough Akira*) being passed around. There will be more specifics soon.

The usual question about why Hellsing is slow (i.e. Kouta Hirano is slow and they’ve already caught up with the entire series). I was busy plugging my computer in but I think I just heard Gombos say that Hellsing was going to be 10 volumes? He talked about the spinoffs which I think they can’t put out until Hellsing finishes (weird since they’re simultaneous in Japan, as it were). But I’m not entirely sure I caught that right, so don’t take it as gospel.

There are no new plans for light novels although they hope to do more someday in the future. A question about the Star Wars comics that I can’t really pick up because I know squat about those comics…a Trigun fan wants Trigun Maximum’s last two volumes; like Hellsing, they’re already up to date.

These internets are starting to fail again…someone just asked how soon they’ll be caught up on Berserk and if they’ll pick up the pace; they’re not planning to speed up but they might consider it. The same guy wants to ask about the Buffy comics (he’s whining about Buffy sleeping with a chick, oddly). And he wants to know “how they do a season,” and they talk about how awesome Joss Whedon is.

Why do they sometimes have problems with deadlines, like the Shirow Masamune stuff that was supposed to come out last year. Issues with print runs and other mechanical production problems, and they were really trying to make sure that the quality on the Shirow stuff was perfect.

Deb Aoki is asking about the Astro Boy omnibus, and they’re just putting together volumes 1 and 2 for now but they want to see how it goes before they move further. It’s going to be the same trim size as normal manga, just fatter. No color pages, though– it never had any, it sounds like.

They say they’re about done; I wonder if they realize they’re scheduled to continue through 2:30pm? Not that I’d mind a bit of a break.

And yes, I missed a few of the questions because I got distracted, oops! Dale has some of them.

If they could license any manga at all, what would they do? They’re working on getting those, I guess. No plans for 3×3 Eyes, which was very popular in Japan but couldn’t find an audience in the US.

Took a question fresh from you guys: the Blade of the Immortal novel and artbook. Those are Kodansha, so there’s no telling exactly what’ll happen, but they’re trying to get ‘em.

They’re recollecting the previews and Japanese manga that were passed around earlier, so I assume they’re closing up shop. Funny, an hour panel sometimes seems like not enough time, but an hour and a half feels soooo long! Even with the legendary Carl Horn presiding.

Someone asked about a western creator just now but I didn’t catch the name, and Robertson says that there are a lot of creators they’d love to work with but it’s hard to put together logistically. Carl Horn has just noted that there are, in fact, doujinshi of Hellboy– apparently Mike Mignola has a big following in Japan among mangaka.

Looks like we’re closing down. I won’t be at Right Stuf (or if I am, I’ll be late), so hit up Dale and Tim over at Japanator for that news, where you should also go for the ADV panel– since I’ll be at Bandai Entertainment’s during ADV (poor scheduling for the lose!). I’ll get back to you with whatever info I get from Gen ASAP, and I’ll also be covering the DMP panel after Bandai.

Tags: ax08, Dark-Horse, liveblogging

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