Vampire Hunter D Comics from Devil’s Due
Posted by bob in Comics, News on June 30th, 2008
Also at WizardWorld Chicago, Devil’s Due announced it has picked up the rights to create a new Vampire Hunter D miniseries, American Wasteland. DDP president Josh Blaylock will cowrite the event and he spoke with ComicMix (http://www.comicmix.com/) about the project.
“I think there’s something cool about him that transcends,” Blaylock said of the character created by Hideyuki Kikuchi.. “It has a very hardcore fan following who are very faithful to the Manga and the anime. In the ’80s there were only a few anime you could get a hold of, especially edgy animation. As a comic book fan, you craved that type of content but there was only so much you could get. There was Vampire Hunter D, Fist of the North Star… and D was this crazy, short cut-and-dry story that I got into way back when. It just seemed like it would be a lot of fun to do a Westernized take on him. I’m not talking about changing the look of the character drastically or anything like that, though.”
He said the presentation will be more in keeping with American comic books versus Japanese Manga but went on to say, “The ink is just dry on this deal, but it’s along the lines of a typical D story: Lone wanderer winds up having to help some people, and so on. It’s very Conan the Barbarian… that sort of thing.”
The Japanese series has been around since 1983 and focuses on D, a loner wandering a post-holocaust Earth circa 12,090 A.D.. The stories use the western, science fiction, horror and fantasy tropes to tell stories about D and his encounters. The planet was once ruled, after humans, by the vampiric Nobles along with demons, mutants, and other creatures. Humans are once more reclaiming their world and D is one of the people in the forefront of the struggle.
The premise has been rich and fertile territory allowing for multimedia incarnations such as the 17 novels that boast illustrations by Yoshitaka Amano (Sandman: Dream Hunters). There have also been several anime feature films to tell D stories along with video games (available in America for the PS system) and a ton of memorabilia. There have even been audio dramas based on the novels, recently collected in a CD box set that contains an original tale.
The first anime incarnation was released in 1985 and was immediately embraced by Americans. There has only been one sequel, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, although a film adapting the seventh and eighth novels, Demon Journey to the North Sea, has been promised.
Despite the popularity of the anima and Manga incarnations, the novels were slow to be translated to English. Those finally started showing up in 2005 courtesy of DH Books with ten of the books now available with translations by Kevin Leahy.
Digital Manga Publishing issued an English Manga based on the first book with the second release due this summer.
