Blade of the Immortal - Manga Month :: Blog

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Blade of the Immortal - Manga Month

03/22/2013 12:00pm

It’s rare to receive praise from our licensors. Ultimately, we’re a licensee that makes a contract for something that people love here, but generally, the breadth of distribution and the amount of sales in the US aren’t comparable to those in Japan. The processes involved are fairly routine—we have contract templates with most of the publishers we work with—and all too often, it seems as if it’s a very “assembly line” process, in terms of acquiring the rights, creating the book, sending approvals, selling the book, and sending the royalty check. Simply put, it’s rare to hear praise from the licensor or creator of a series, but one Dark Horse series that constantly gets praise from the licensor and creator side is Blade of the Immortal.

Hiroaki Samura has always been very involved in the English-language version of Blade of the Immortal, oftentimes even redrawing panels so that they’ll look nice when the book is flopped for publication in English. It’s no surprise, too, that we often hear praise from both him and his publisher, Kodansha, about how skillfully the book is handled in English.

It was a rare treat, a few years back, to get an order from the creator for more copies of our beautiful The Art of Blade of the Immortal art book. Without fail, every creator and publisher are entitled to comps (free copies of the book), and generally get between ten and twenty of any book. The stipulated copies were sent along, and a few weeks later, we heard from Samura-sensei, saying that this was the most beautiful Blade-related item ever put to paper, and could he please order some more copies, because he liked them so much (and we even sent some copies along to get signed—a rarity from most creators, and especially in Blade of the Immortal’s case).

Kodansha, Dark Horse’s longest partner in Japan, also constantly issues praise about the work we do on the book; the series is a mainstay of not only manga culture but comics culture in general. Many of the people who read manga back in the ’90s were introduced to it—at their local comics shops—through Blade of the Immortal.

All good things do come to an end, and Blade—currently the second-longest-running series in English—is wrapping up with volume 30 (the volume will be Dark Horse’s volume 31). Last month, there was a party in Tokyo, to which I was invited, to celebrate the series. The party featured Samura-sensei himself speaking about the book (and he rarely makes public appearances). A large portion of the program discussed not only how well the book has performed in English, but also the exquisite handling of the series in English, and how the creator couldn’t be happier.

Oftentimes, there are snags in getting series to print and maintaining something special, and when these snags occur, you’re definitely going to hear from the licensor. This is why it’s so beautiful to hear from the creator about something great, like how much they love our book!

—Michael Gombos, Director of Asian Licensing

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Blade of the Immortal - Manga Month

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