Best Comics News in Months

To my way of seeing, at least. For about a year now I’ve been wondering when someone was going to bring more adult horror manga to the US, especially in the form of the works of masters like Junji Ito, Kazuo Umezu, and others.

Well, Dark Horse Comics is going to be getting a lot of my money in the coming months and years as they’ve stepped up to the plate.

Dark Horse (here’s what they have to say about the news), according to ICV2’s article linked above, has acquired licenses to Junji Ito’s Museum of Terror, which seems likely to be an umbrella title for a line of unconnected works, Umezu’s Scary Books, ditto, as well as new (to English-language readers) work from Hideshi Hino, and manga related to Ju-On, rereleased as the American film The Grudge, amonng others.

Really exciting news. The other manga companies have been doing a good job with the little adult-skewed horror they’ve released, but given that so much of the domestic manga market is made up of teenagers, they’ve quite rightly been releasing horror mostly aimed at teens. And that, of course, can lack some bite and intellectual or emotional complexity.

Thanks to Dark Horse for filling a much-needed role in the market. Can’t wait to see the schedule for these books.