Manga Monday: Oh My Goddess! Omnibus Book Two

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Manga Monday: Oh My Goddess! Omnibus Book Two

11/30/2015 4:38pm

Defying gravity, the rules of Heaven, and good sense, the divine Urd graces the cover of Oh My Goddess! omnibus Book Two—available right now at your local comics shop, and coming next week to your book store and online retailer. Book Two, which collects volumes four through six of the regular series (chapters 24 through 42) actually introduces Belldandy’s younger sibling, Skuld, as well—but it’s big sister Urd without a doubt who drives events in Book Two, as she goes from trying to spike her Valentine’s Day chocolate with a love potion, to trying to destroy the Universe as the Great Lord of Terror prophesied by Nostradamus. Well, that escalated quickly.

As you know, Oh My Goddess! was the longest-running manga series ever published in English. We like to think of the omnibus books as the “Blu-ray edition” of OMG!, as their size and paper quality really shows Kosuke Fujishima’s art at its best, bringing out small details and color subtleties. But the stories you’ll see in these early omnibus editions were originally published by Dark Horse long ago in a different format—as individual manga chapters inside monthly comic books. Before the 2000s, this was the standard way companies such as Viz and Dark Horse released manga in English (even Tokyopop used the comics format in their early years). As part of our retrospective on Oh My Goddess!, I thought it might be interesting to go back and look at the time at which it all began—for Dark Horse, and for English-speaking anime and manga fans in general.

In the upper left of the picture is the first issue of Oh My Goddess! from Dark Horse, published in August 1994. In the lower right is the inside of the back cover of that same issue. On the inside back cover itself is the “Finish Line” editorial by Dark Horse founding editor (and current VP of publishing) Randy Stradley, talking about the first two Hollywood movies based off Dark Horse comics—The Mask and Timecop, both of which hit theaters that summer. On the facing page is an ad for the original Oh My Goddess! anime video series, released in English subtitled editions through AnimEigo. I’m happy to say that, like OMG!, AnimEigo is also still around in 2015 (I went to their panel at Otakon).

If you’re a fan of Gunsmith Cats creator Kenichi Sonoda—or if you’re a fan of GAINAX, or even just a fan of anime—you should check out the new edition of Otaku no Video that AnimEigo is releasing next February. GAINAX was using the term “otaku” long before it reached the bourgeois and rocked the boulevard, and Otaku no Video is the half-anime, half-live-action metaphorical mockumentary of how GAINAX got started. In addition to the many new extra features on the disc itself, Sonoda (the anime’s character designer), is doing new original art for the packaging, including a color mini-manga!

How was Dark Horse’s launch of Oh My Goddess! covered in the news back in August 1994? This is the issue of Animerica magazine from that same month. Published by Viz Media between 1992 and 2005, Animerica was one of the places I did my first professional work (and in fact I see I have a review in this issue, of the anime Toward the Terra). This was a fairly typical issue, but looking back it seems like buried treasure—the cover story is an interview with the recording director on the original soundtrack to AKIRA, Shiro Sasaki. This issue also contained two manga stories, including the chapter of Rumiko Takahashi’s Urusei Yatsura that would help inspire Mamoru Oshii’s Beautiful Dreamer film, and a chapter from Kaoru Shintani’s Area 88 later referenced by Kohta Hirano in the back of vol. 5 of Hellsing.

And here it is—Animerica’s news story covering the release of Oh My Goddess! issue #1 (in case you think there’s something suspicious about all this, I didn’t become the editor of OMG! until eleven years later ^_^). But there was something else in this same issue I was glad to see—a Q & A with Michael Pandolfo of Dr. Comics & Mr. Games. This was my local store when I lived in the Bay Area, and in the interview he’s talking about how well manga sell at his shop. Remember, this was in 1994! They were way ahead of the curve, and actually, they’ve always been the complete opposite of the kind of comics store Evan Dorkin portrays in The Eltingville Club—the kind where if you’re not already a hardcore fan, they don’t care about you. Dr. Comics has extensive stock and knowledge, but they’re also friendly and helpful to the newcomer and the passerby, a “neighborhood comics store” that truly is accessible to the whole neighborhood. I’m not surprised they were there from the beginning with Oh My Goddess!

—Carl Horn

Manga Editor

Dark Horse Comics

Manga Monday: Oh My Goddess! Omnibus Book Two

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