Portland State Magazine Fall 2008

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 mon ters, 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 culwre," says Richardson, who earned a bachelor's degree in art in 1977 and played basketball with Viking legend Free– man Willian1s. "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 rides and creators into that collective cultural awareness. 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 # l, was a commercial and creative success, selling 50,000 copies-five rimes 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. 16 PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE FALL 2008 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 typi– cal, 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 pic– tures: 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 proper– ties, 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 com– pany 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 dona– tion at around $500,000. he ees 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 swdies, sociology, art, cultural anthropology, and of course, literature. Inclusion of Dark Horse's many foreign-language editions