At AICN, Scott Green writes a lengthy eulogy for Dark Horse’s long-running edition of Hiroaki Samura’s Blade of the Immortal, which ends in its monthly, 32-page format with November’s Issue 131.
In an accompanying Q&A, editor Philip Simon confirms that Blade of the Immortal will go on at Dark Horse in trade format for “as long as Samura continues the series in Japan.”
The hyper-violent samurai epic, which debuted from the publisher in June 1996, is a holdover from an earlier time, when manga entered the direct market in the more familiar form of American serialized monthlies.
Green’s overview includes a look at how the North American manga market has changed in the past decade, and an examination of the title’s sales since 2001.
(Via Lisa Lopacinski)
