News

Dark Horse to Release Gallery Edition for Lone Wolf and Cub Manga

Dark Horse Comics announced at Emerald City Comicon on Friday that it will publish a Lone Wolf and Cub Gallery Edition. The company has not yet announced a release date, but confirmed that it will be a single volume.

The gallery edition will reprint select pages at the size at which they were originally drawn. These pages will include any corrections or margin notes that the late artist Goseki Kojima created when he first drew the manga in the early 1970s. The pages will be selected from the archive of Lone Wolf and Cub writer Kazuo Koike.

First Comics premiered Lone Wolf and Cub in English in May 1987. The series was one of the first manga published in North America, and the first manga to be released in North America on a monthly schedule. Dark Horse began releasing the series in 2000 as the first manga series to be published in North America straight to graphic novels that corresponded with the Japanese releases. In 2013, Dark Horse began releasing the series in omnibus format. Dark Horses' Lone Wolf and Cub editions have around 1.3 million copies in print.

Dark Horse also licensed the New Lone Wolf & Cub sequel manga, and released an English-language mini-series titled Lone Wolf and Cub 2100. The original manga has inspired six feature movies starring Tomisaburō Wakayama, four stage plays, and a television series. Media Blasters licensed the Japanese live-action television series, while AnimEigo licensed the Japanese 1972 live-action film version and its five sequels. An English-language live-action film has been greenlit.

Dark Horse Comics has published gallery editions of Western comics — such as Elfquest, Sin City, and Usagi Yojimbo — but has not previously published gallery editions for manga.