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There was a time when Dark Horse founder Mike Richardson was embarrassed to be seen reading comics.
Despite the fact that he has always been a voracious comic book reader—he learned to read by first grade—Richardson used to feel that there was a stigma around comics, particularly when he was a self-conscious college student.
Clearly, much has changed. In its 30 years of existence, Richardson has turned the comic book publishing company from a Milwaukie-based, local operation into a legendary national name. Dark Horse has unleashed pop-culture behemoths like Sin City and Hellboy and continues to develop comics based on films, including Avatar and Aliens. Two Dark Horse releases—Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo and Bryan Talbot's The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia—have been nominated for the National Cartoonists Society's annual Reuben Awards, which will be hosted in Portland this weekend.
Related: An oral history of Dark Horse
WW spoke with Richardson, who is giving a talk at the awards, about the two Dark Horse works nominated and his stealthy strategy for buying comics as an embarrassed college student.
WW: One of Dark Horse's Reuben-nominated works is about a sword-fighting rabbit (Usagi Yojimbo) and the other is about a revolutionary French feminist (The Red Virgin). Is that a microcosm of Dark Horse's diverse content?
Richardson: The idea I had when I started Dark Horse was that comics had the same ability to entertain and had the same broad reach of subject matter as other forms of entertainment. I think generally, we got pigeonholed in what some people considered to be some literary ghetto that featured men in tights and capes, and I just had a different idea of what comics could be.
Could you talk about what the phrase "creator rights" means and how Dark Horse supports those rights?
I learned that some comics creators, when they signed the backs of their checks, signed away the rights to everything they created. Being that my own background was in art, I was upset by that. So when I got the idea of starting a publishing company, I thought it would be a good business practice and the moral thing to do to let people who create characters and projects actually own them and have a say in what happened to them.
If, hypothetically, Frank Miller wanted to take Sin City somewhere else, could he do that?
We wouldn't force him to stay here if he didn't want to be here.
At the Reuben Awards, you're going to be talking about "a personal approach to comics history." What does that mean?
When I was in college, if you were into comics, it was embarrassing to let anybody know. I'd go to the 7-Eleven—a particular one that was over on Holgate Street—and sit across the street until midnight when no customers were there, run in, grab comics off the rack and get them in a brown paper bag as fast as I could. My big surprise was that it wasn't just kids that came into my first retail store…it was lawyers and doctors and every kind of professional…dropping two, three hundred dollars and liking the fact that they could come into someplace and share their love of this particular art form without being embarrassed. That taught me the lesson that comics are for everyone. They have every bit as much literary value these days as any other form of literature.
What kind of comics did you read as a kid?
There was DC Comics for a long time, probably some Archie comics, obviously MAD Magazine. When Spider-Man #1 came out and suddenly became a Marvel fan and then during the '70s, I discovered the undergrounds. So it's been a constant evolution and it's all led up to my philosophy of what Dark Horse is. It's always been my opinion, which has turned out to be true, that if we can distribute a broad range of material over different distribution channels that we can reach a broader range of readers.
What's it like to have gone from being a kid reading comics to running a company as influential as Dark Horse?
I'm doing what I love to do. I don't really take time to stop and think about it that way. I was once asked by a person when we got our film cut and I was not happy with the quality, "What are you worried about? It's just comics." And so that's the last job he ever got and I brought it in house. We've continued to advocate for creators to own their work. I think that the shape of the comic market with the opportunities in distribution will continue to change. The technology is moving faster and faster, so who knows what's going to be here five years from now.
SEE IT: The Reuben Awards is closed to the public, but there's a cartoonist meet-and-greet at the Hilton Atrium Ballroom, 921 SW 6th Ave., reuben.org. 1-4 pm Sunday, May 28. Free.
