News: Pow! Zowie! Comics in the library

HELLBOY, BUFFY the Vampire Slayer, The Mask, Emily the Strange—it's a motley cast of characters hanging around the Branford P. Millar Library these days.

What these and many other monsters, misanthropes, and antiheroes share is a publisher, Dark Horse Comics, the complete catalog of which can now be found at Portland State, courtesy of a pair of PSU alumni.

Dark Horse Comics, Inc., founder and president Mike Richardson and executive vice president Neil Hankerson pulled from their personal collections to assemble the gift, which includes a complete set designated for safekeeping in the archives, and another set designated for general circulation.

Comics at a university library? "Comics have a real place in our culture," says Richardson, who earned a bachelor's degree in art in 1977 and played basketball with Viking legend Freeman Williams. "They're probably more accepted by the general population than they ever have been."

That's due in no small part to the Milwaukie, Oregon-based Dark Horse, which has helped propel a new generation of comic titles and creators into that collective cultural awareness.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer@2000 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation; Planet of the Apes©2001 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation; Aliens: Earth War #2©1990 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation; Emily the Strange: Lost, Dark, and Bored©Cosmic Debris Etc., Inc.; Frank Miller’s Sin City©Volume 1: The Hard Goodbye; StarWars©2005 Lucasfilm Ltd.; Concrete: The Human Dilemma #1©2004 Paul Chadwick; Michael Mignola.Wierd Tales©Victor Dricks, Inc.

ESTABLISHED IN 1986, the diminutive comics company put the industry giants on notice almost immediately when it offered its writers something that DC and Marvel did not: the rights to their creations.

Its debut, Dark Horse Presents #1, was a commercial and creative success, selling 50,000 copies--five times what Richardson expected. In it, readers were introduced to "Concrete," the Paul Chadwick character that would go on to win a number of awards. Afterwards, five other companies tried to hire away Chadwick with more money. "He stayed," says Richardson, signaling the allure of creative control.

When the fast-growing company secured rights to a line of comics based on the Aliens movies, Richardson saw a chance to produce "the sequel we'd like to see" rather than the typical, lackluster movie tie-in. "Turns out lots of other people felt the same way," he says.

One such sequel struck a new chord, and spawned its own host of comic book imitators as well as major motion pictures: Aliens Versus Predator. Launched in 1989, the monster mash-up series went on to sell over 400,000 copies of the first issue alone.

Since then, Dark Horse has explored the fictional universes of its own creations as well as other well-established properties, most notably Star Wars and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, while writing for older audiences more 20-something than preteen.

But the watershed moment came with Frank Miller, an artist and writer who had redefined characters like Daredevil and Batman, and left publishers DC and Marvel to work with Dark Horse on projects like the seminal Sin City series. "It signaled to mainstream superstars that Dark Horse was a good place to be," says Richardson, "and it changed the company forever," instilling it with an "instant credibility" that would have taken years to establish otherwise.

"Dark Horse is a very important Portland success story," says Helen Spalding, who heads up Portland State's library services, and who estimates the value of the company's donation at around $500,000. She sees the Dark Horse archives becoming a "destination research collection" for students and faculty in a number of academic disciplines-American studies, pop culture, ethnic and gender studies, sociology, art, cultural anthropology, and of course, literature.

Inclusion of Dark Horse's many foreign-language editions is an added bonus, says Spalding, particularly for PSU's growing international student presence; the company licenses and distributes in more than 50 countries.

DARK HORSE is an economic as well as creative success story. And it's the job of Neil Hankerson, BS '72, to worry about the bottom line rather than the storyline. When the self-described "business guy" joined up with Dark Horse in January 1987, his responsibilities included "everything—there were three of us."

Today, the work force hovers at around 125, with 10 times that many independent contractors contributing everything from storylines to lettering. As Dark Horse has expanded into merchandise and entertainment (the movies Hellboy, Hellboy II, Timecop, and The Mask, to name a few), so too has Hankerson's role, overseeing business development, licensing, publishing, legal issues, information technology-anything having to do with the business side.

"The comic fanatic among us is Mike," says Hankerson, when asked to pick a favorite Dark Horse publication, though he admits he's partial to the Star Wars stories.  Several figurines from that "galaxy far, far away" line his office, which serve both as décor and to "remind folks we do more than publish comics."

Indeed, merchandising has proven to be a lucrative sideline for Dark Horse-no surprise for a company that evolved out of Richardson's chain of Things From Another World comic book retail shops. Today, Dark Horse Deluxe produces tie-in product for its own characters and for other companies', ranging from Peanuts and Popeye to Dilbert and Domo, a Japanese public television network's popular mascot. The PSU collection will include many of these items as well.

Meanwhile, Dark Horse has moved aggressively to capture a stake in Web 2.0, and now has over 63,000 "friends" on MySpace, more than DC (22,000+) or Marvel (61,000+), says Hankerson. Its Dark Horse Presents appears as an exclusive online feature, www.myspace.com/darkhorsepresents.

NEARLY 3,000 PIECES have been catalogued so far, and University Librarian Helen Spalding hopes that the Dark Horse collection will begin to attract donations of related materials, positioning PSU as a research hub for graphic novels, comics, sequential art, and other works.

Logistics have proved challenging, from space requirements to the time—intensive assessment and categorizing of each title. In addition to cataloging information like author and publication date, library staff logs names of illustrators, engravers, and colorists—artisans whose contributions might otherwise be lost. There have been plenty of volunteers for the task, says Spalding, adding that the collection is "more fun to work with than some other things."

Assembling the archives has been "a long and arduous process," says Richardson, but one that he and Hankerson agree is worthwhile, from an academic perspective, as well as the practical matter of having a backup set of the collection. For Richardson in particular, archiving the comic form, both in library collections and through Dark Horse's own reprints of forgotten classics, serves as a step toward saving a "great history being lost."

"It's one of the few original American art forms-like jazz," says Richardson. If its impact remains undervalued, then "education needs to take place." And what better place to begin than the Dark Horse alma mater?

J. David Santen, Jr., is a Portland freelance writer.

Mike Richardson will discuss the Dark Horse collection at a reception that kicks off PSU Weekend, October 16.