Oct
15
2013
0

Sitting down with Dark Horse Comics

 

 

I had the pleasure to sit down a couple weeks ago with Patrick Thorpe. Who is Patrick Thorpe you ask? He is an editor for Dark Horse Comics. He has worked on books like Conan, Dark Matter, Orchid, and MPD-Psycho. Most recently, he has been working as an editor on the popular book, Dream Thief. I met Patrick by accident while doing a podcast with Geeks with Wives and he was on as well. I was able to geek out for a few moments about Dream Thief and my enjoyment of it. Tweets and emails were sent and that brought us to my interview. Here we go …

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1)    For those that don’t know, what is an editor’s role in producing comics?

An editor is basically a project manager. We see the project from concept to completion. A lot of times we’re the ones who hire particular teams for a book. Other times, teams will approach us and we’ll take them on. We see and route every stage of a comic–script, pencils, inks, colors, and letters. We pore over every detail at every stage, and are constantly working with the creative team to create the best comic possible.

2)    What made you want to become an editor of comics?

Well, I actually originally wanted to teach comics in an academic setting. I finished up a master’s degree in English literature and wrote my thesis on Superman. When it came time to move on to my PhD and a possible job, I found that there were not a lot of programs that offered what I wanted and there were even less jobs related to comics in academia. At that point, I made the decision to be part of the creative force behind comics. With my skill set, editorial seemed like the perfect fit.

3)    Why Dark Horse? What drew you in to them?

There were a number of reasons I chose Dark Horse. When I started looking for a job, there were only a few places I could move that would give me a good chance of working with an amazing publisher, and it basically boiled down to moving to New York or Portland. I had gone to school at the University of Oregon for my bachelor’s degree, and already loved the Pacific Northwest. Once I decided on the area, Dark Horse was a no brainer. At other companies, you have to work on either company-owned or licensed comics that have a very specific direction. While those comics can be extremely good and very fun, there is a limited amount of freedom working on them. Dark Horse has such a wide variety of books in every genre. There’s almost an endless amount of freedom to do any kind of comic or graphic novel here. We do these wonderful creator-owned projects that have a purity of vision. We do licensed comics better than anyone else, and we just relaunched a number of our own characters with some incredible creators.

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4)    What is the greatest part of your job?

Every day, I get to open up my e-mail and know that there will be something in there from some of the most creative minds in the world. This job has also allowed me the opportunity to travel around the world and meet some of the most amazing fans from all over the globe. There is nothing more rewarding than talking with someone in Frankfurt about a book you worked on.

5)    For those that don’t know, what is different from Dark Horse and the other two entities in comics?

Ha! Well, there are a lot more than two other entities, but Dark Horse differs from the Big 2 pretty significantly. First of all, we’re independent. Marvel is owned by Disney and DC is owned by Warner Brothers. Secondly, we are very creator focused. We love doing books that are owned by the creator, and make sure they retain the rights to their characters so that they can not only publish them as comic books, but take them to Hollywood, television, merchandise them, etc. At the Big 2, most of the comics they do are owned by the company. Spider-man is the property of Marvel. Batman is owned by DC, etc. So a creator doesn’t own any of the rights and, as far as I know, don’t get any back end, though I’m sure there are exceptions to that rule. We’re also set up to do licensed books in ways that those two are not. Dark Horse tries to focus on the best possible deal for creators and puts out the highest quality books we can.

6)    What do you think of the prevalence of line-wide Event books, and the big 2’s reliance on them for sales, while Dark Horse really doesn’t have any and does just fine?

When I first started reading comics, huge events were my favorite! It was a chance to see your favorite characters interacting in ways that seemed large and important. However, since those were so successful, they got larger and far more frequent. I think, like a lot of people I’ve talked to, I’m suffering from event fatigue. It’s just too much. Not only do you have to follow the main series, but all the offshoots etc. I don’t have the time nor the money to do that. It seems to me that having them all the time devalues them as well. It’s not a special event. Dark Horse focuses on really tight storytelling. We want to make sure that if you are buying a title, you don’t have to read other titles just to get the full story. If Dark Horse does an event, we want to make sure that it’s unique and special.

7)    I spoke with you before about DH and you mentioned that you guys had steered away from “superheroes” for awhile. Any specific reason?

Yes! There was a pretty specific reason! It was called the 90s! Back when Dark Horse launched Comics Greatest World, which was Dark Horse’s superhero universe, comics experienced a huge boom. All of a sudden, you had Image Comics, Valiant, and a host of other companies popping up, and every one was doing superhero comics. Even though Dark Horse had a unique and interesting take on their superheroes, people eventually were just tired of the sheer amount of superheroes that were on the market. So Dark Horse steered away from them for a while and instead focused on our non-superhero titles. Though, through a certain lens, we never really stopped. Hellboy can be seen as a supernatural superhero. The Jedi’s in Star Wars have super powers. We just put a pause on doing what would be considered mainstream superheroes for a while. But, boy howdy, we are back and doing some amazing superhero books right now. Check out Ghost, X, Captain Midnight, Buzzkill, Dream Thief, and the host of other stuff we’re doing. There is absolutely something for everyone.

8)    With The rights of Star Wars going back to Marvel/Disney, are there any properties that Dark Horse is looking to pursue in the future?

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I’m glad that you asked this question. This is a very common misconception. The rights to Star Wars are not going to Marvel. Disney owns Marvel and Lucasfilm, but they have not made any moves to have Marvel publish Star Wars. In fact, they just gave Dark Horse an extension on our license and we’re doing some incredible books at the moment. The Star Wars is a book we’re doing based on George Lucas’ original Star Wars screen play. That comes out this week!

As far as other properties that Dark Horse is looking to pursue, you’ll just have to stay tuned. We’ve got a ton of new licenses rolling out in the next year, and a bunch of stuff that we’re very excited about.

9)    In twenty years how do you see comics changing. Will the content of them become more mature or anything to that nature?
You know, that’s a good question. Comics is already a very mature media because the majority of readers are adults. What I’m hoping happens is that we can get kids back into comic books, and we start seeing a diversity of genres again. There was a time when you could pick up any genre of comic, and because of Dr. Frederic Wertham’s crusade, superheroes were one of the only surviving genres. Now, they are ubiquitous with comics. I would love to see more crime, drama, romance, sci-fi, horror, etc. in comics. What I’m also hoping is that we get more equal representation of women to men in comics, and really diversify the content.

10) What does he think of distributing digitally through comixology?

Dark Horse doesn’t distribute through Comixology. We have our own digital distribution called Dark Horse Digital. I think that digital is a great boon to the industry. It’s convenient and helps attract new readers. Print publishing will never go away. There is something about owning a physical copy of something, being able to hold it and smell it, being able to lend it out or put it on your coffee table. But like anything, publishing needs to evolve. Digital is just the next frontier in which to forge the best possible means of distribution!

11) Do you feel that cinema, while building up an interest for comics, could also end up overloading the canon and fizzing out?

I don’t think we have to worry about overloading the canon. If anything, Hollywood helps streamline canon into its simplest form and creates an excellent jumping on point for new readers. Comics doesn’t need help creating confusing continuity, that’s for sure. Do I think that Hollywood will be able to maintain the amount of superhero movies indefinitely? No. But all of that stuff goes in waves. They’ll go away and come back. Also, Hollywood mines comics for a lot more than superhero comics. Many, many of the movies people see each year are based on comics, but since they aren’t superheroes, people don’t know that. As long as there are extremely creative people doing fantastic comics, Hollywood will tell their stories.

12) Last question, why should people pick up a book from Dark Horse instead of the other brands?

You know, people should pick up Dark Horse because they like what we’re doing. We do things that are so much different than other companies, and have a lot to offer in each genre. I would never say not to pick up a book from another company though, because there are so many good comics out there. The people at Dark Horse work on comics because we love comics. All kinds of comics. I think that shows through in the books that we do. You can see that we care about the art form just by the quality of the books. Check us out at DarkHorse.com if you’d like to see the stuff we are currently publishing. We don’t just publish comic books, either. We’ve been doing a ton of video-game art books that you might want to check out! I hear that the editor of The Legend of Zelda: Hyrule Historia is a particularly handsome and well-spoken gentleman.

Guys if you get a chance go pick up some of the books mentioned above. Follow me on twitter @spiderdude64