Comics News
30 Years of Dark Horse Comics: Chris Warner Speaks
Dark Horse’s Senior Editor on Three Decades in Business
♦2016 marks the 30th anniversary of Portland-based Dark Horse Comics. When it was founded back in 1986, apart from a few hardy independents like Eclipse and PC, the market was dominated by Marvel and DC. To celebrate this milestone, here is the first in a series of Tripwire features, kicking off with a chat with Dark Horse Senior Editor Chris Warner, who has been there from the start. Interview by Joel Meadows…
TW: When Dark Horse was set up back in 1986, it was a comic market dominated by Marvel and DC. What was the initial impetus to create Dark Horse?
CHRIS WARNER: 1986 was the perfect time to start a small comics publisher. The success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles opened the door for small outfits to create new books: black-anbd-white printing became kind of a desirable novelty, which kept costs low, and readers were looking for new characters and creative voices. Since Mike Richardson and Randy Stradley knew several comics professionals, myself among them, who were eager to try new things and create their own original stories, the planets aligned.
TW: Mike Richardson had retail experience before setting Dark Horse up. It seemed to be a very bold move to shift from retail to publishing. What did Richardson have that made you feel confident that he could create and maintain a publishing company?
CW: Actually, I saw the retail background as a plus—a connection to readers on the front lines and in real time. Mike’s a very confident and capable guy. He’d built a chain of retail stores from the ground up with very few initial resources. We weren’t thinking that the company would become what it is today, but the idea seemed like a right-place, right-time proposition that had a good chance to succeed. The project seemed like a fairly safe bet in a market that was supporting books of a far lower caliber than what we were capable of producing. But while luck is always a factor, eventually you have to make changes and find new avenues to continue moving forward, and that’s why so many publishers have come and gone. Luck only takes you so far.
TW: How did you get involved with Dark Horse?
CW: I’d known Mike for a few years—I was a customer at his comics shop—and he’d been very supportive of my work and had a hand in helping me get my foot in the door at Marvel. He invited me to be a part of the first Dark Horse Presents, which gave me the opportunity to work on my own project, Black Cross.
TW: How do you think Dark Horse has evolved and changed in its 30 year history?
CW: It’s gotten much bigger and far more diverse, a natural evolutions in the face of the changes in the industry itself. The basic operating philosophy hasn’t changed: try to create books that we would want to read.
TW: Prior to Dark Horse, comic companies were predominantly based in New York. How important do you think it was that Dark Horse was based out of Portland, Oregon?
CW: I don’t know how important that was—express mail and later the internet rapidly made location a non-issue—but being in Portland helped make the city a destination point for a lot of comics creators. Portland probably has the highest per capita population of comics creators of any city in the country. This is a real comics town, and that’s due in no small part to the success of Dark Horse (and the fact that Portland is a great place to live).
TW: On a related question, do you think the fact that it wasn’t based in New York has given it a unique attitude and tone separate from the New York publishers like Marvel and DC?
CW: While there’s undoubtedly some differences due to the difference in location, I think the real difference is that Dark Horse functions more as a traditional publishing company. I’m not sure how exactly to classify Marvel and DC’s business, but they’re not truly publishers. They publish stuff, but it’s all pretty much stuff they own. They have 100% control over the content they publish, and publishing is just part of an overall corporate strategy to exploit their properties across all media. Dark Horse, like any publishing house, gathers materials from a variety of sources and functions far more as a partner than a commander. I’ve been saying for many years that while we compete in some of the same markets as do Marvel and DC, we’re really not in the same business.
TW: Did you ever imagine that the company would be celebrating its 30th anniversary?
CW: I don’t think we ever looked that far ahead, and it would have been a mistake to do so. You have to be forward looking, but in a constantly changing environment, you can’t really predict the future, so you can’t afford to burn fuel thinking too far down the road. That said, I think we were probably cocky and dumb enough to believe we’d be in the game for the long run, especiailly after we had so much early success. “Hey, this is easy!” Had we only known!
TW: It seems that Dark Horse has always managed to balance creator owned books like Hellboy and The Goon with licensed properties like Aliens and Predator. Do you think this is one of the reasons that it has continued to survive over thirty years?
CW: It’s all about good books—doesn’t matter where they come from. A lot of industry folk make too big a deal about the ownership of the material. Readers, by and large, don’t care who owns the rights–they just want to enjoy the experience. Our survival over thirty years shows that we’ve published enough good books, regardless of source, to warrant the support of readers. And we’re grateful for that support.
TW: How has the comics industry changed since Dark Horse was set up back in 1986?
CW: How hasn’t it changed? Other than the brightly comic-book colored pamphlets we produce, practically everything else is different than when we started. Collecting dominated the landscape in 1986, now it’s just a sliver of the business. There were dozens of Direct Market distributors, now there is only one. Self-publishing was almost impossible, now it’s commonplace. Bookstores and libraries weren’t part of the picture at all in 1986, now graphic novels are ubiquitous in those venues. The Internet wasn’t a factor at all and computers were just beginning to be used as business and creative tools, now one can’t imagine the industry (or any industry) without them. Comic-book properties weren’t tentpoles for film companies and television networks. Very few women and girls bought or read comics, now they’re heading toward parity with the male audience, radically changing the content of books and the type of books being published. Comic conventions were mostly small affairs, now they’re an industry unto themselves, drawing massive crowds: our first San Diego Comic-Con had an attendance of 6500!
TW: A question I have to ask (and it may be more appropriate for Mike Richardson). How detrimental do you think the loss of Star Wars to Marvel has been for Dark Horse?
CW: Luckily for us, our business is very diverse, so while losing Star Wars certainly didn’t help Dark Horse, we’ve managed to offset the loss with other sectors of our business. The comics business is tough, and has been for a long time, so we’ve survived a variety of biblical plagues over the years and always come back strong. Very few comics companies can make that claim.
TW: You used to be well known as a writer and an artist but that seems to taken a back seat in recent years. Is writing and art something that you would like to return to at some point?
CW: I’m writing pretty regularly these days. I wrote a couple of arcs of Barb Wire and am currently writing another series for Dark Horse. Drawing for a living is something I’d prefer not to revisit. I’m very slow as an artist—hell, I’m slow at everything—and I’m not keen on the all-nighters and the convention circuit that are necessities for most comics artists to make ends meet. These days, I’d rather draw for my own amusement. But if a project were to get me charged up, I might yet give it a another whirl.
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