I went to Dark Horse Comics the other day for a chat and tour. It's sort of easy to forget that cute lil' business in Milwaukie is actually the largest cartoon company in the country owed by an individual. (As opposed to Marvel and DC, the two larger co.s which are owned by other companies or conglomerates or something like that)

Not sure why I have such a hard time connecting Dark Horse with their big projects, but I think I sort of re-remembered that Dark Horse was the origin for "The Mask", "Hellboy", that new film "My name is Bruce" plus iconic comics Sin City, Predator, the continuation of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", and "Star Wars". Phhewww. That's a lotta shit.

And that list doesn't close to touch the variety Dark Horse turns out. They do about a million other comics, graphic novels (which isn't much of a surprise), and also a few books of an incredibly eclectic nature. Not sure I got the gist of the book press: Narrative history? In partnership with cartoons, sounds like a bitch of a marketing pitch. (Imma poet. I know it.)

Speaking of marketing, I was really interested that I don't see much evidence of Dark Horse using interactive or buzz strategies in their marketing. It's not exactly like that's impossibly weird, but it's occurred to me lately that if there are three echelons of business (this is simplistic but bear with me) small businesses (who are ready to put it out on the line and are thus creating some of the most original campaigns around), big businesses (who have the money to follow all the little campaigns and copy cool looking shit even if it doesn't work), and mid-level businesses who used to kind of run things in the 90's when it came to branding and marketing, but now seem sort of hesitant.

Dunno. It's just that Dark Horse is such a ringer for an interactive campaign with all their die hard fans.

I'll keep ya updated...