March is Manga Month for Dark Horse Comics. The comic book publisher is celebrating 25 years of publishing Manga. The comic publisher has partnered with Manga greats like Amano, CLAMP, Hiroya Oku, Yasuhiro Nightow, Kohta Hirano and so many more!

Dark Horse has hooked us up with a nice history of their connection to the popular comics, written by editor Carl Horn!

It began as it usually does—with Godzilla rising from the sea. Dark Horse’s first manga, published twenty-five years ago this May, was Kazuhisa Iwata’s adaptation of the 1984 Godzilla movie. It was edited and adapted into English by the founder and president of Dark Horse, Mike Richardson, and its vice president of publishing, Randy Stradley. Looking back, the choice seems to pay tribute to the original generation of Japanese pop culture fans in North America, whom they represent. After all, anime’s been on TV here in the United States since 1963, but as far back as the 1950s young Americans were thrilling to Japanese kaiju (giant monster) films that were dubbed in English for US theaters, such as Godzilla and Rodan. The tremendous success of the Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise (from which Dark Horse’s latest release, Evangelion: Comic Tribute, is out in March) has encouraged some of today’s fans to rediscover the kaiju tradition, which remains an important influence on the work of Evangelion director Hideaki Anno.

Dark Horses earliest roots paid tribute to the Japanese creations. A year before that Godzilla comic, Dark Horse released Mecha, promising a story “in the tradition of Mobile Suit Gundam.” This was ten years before Gundam had its first US home video release, and twelve years before any Gundam would be broadcast on TV in the US. But Mecha’s writer (Randy Stradley once more, with pencils and mecha designs by Harrison Fong) was already building Gundam models back then, and he was confident the kind of fans who read Dark Horse would know what he meant; Randy’s editorial on the inside front cover of Mecha #1 felt free to mention not only Gundam, but Macross, Dunbine, and Orguss as influences. Mecha, in fact, was Dark Horse’s very first comic book to be published in color.

Dark Horse is unusual among North American manga companies for its strong tradition of comic book publishing. But that’s the very tradition that launched manga here—all through the 1980s and ’90s, the standard industry format for manga publishing in English involved putting one or two new chapters out each month as a comic book, and the company still publishes series such as Oh My Goddess! and Blade of the Immortal that began that way. It may seem a strange way to publish manga now, and yet, it had a certain authenticity to the way manga are published in Japan, where they aren’t released straight to tankobon (graphic novel) format, but are instead serialized chapter by chapter in magazines that have page sizes more similar to American comics than tankobon.

To this day manga remains at the core of Dark Horse’s identity as a publisher.