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Studio Proteus: American Manga Awards Hall of Fame Spotlight




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LoopyChew
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Joined: 13 Sep 2002
Posts: 112
PostPosted: Wed Aug 27, 2025 10:28 pm Reply with quote
Studio Proteus was the original GOAT. Toren Smith was gone way too soon; his translations worked so well because they felt like actual dialogue. And Saitō’s lettering was my gold standard for legibility and tone—it worked across everything I read from them.

I might also be biased because Oh My Goddess! and GitS were two of the works that got me into manga.

Also I know Adam Warren worked with Smith but I didn’t realize he was part of Proteus; I mostly remember him for his original Dirty Pair works and his contributions to Gen13.
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merr



Joined: 11 Dec 2004
Posts: 515
PostPosted: Thu Aug 28, 2025 7:05 am Reply with quote
Too bad Dark Horse keeps so many of Studio Proteus’s titles OOP. The sun will burn out before we get all of Oh My Goddess! back in print.
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JustMonika



Joined: 17 Jan 2022
Posts: 1567
PostPosted: Thu Aug 28, 2025 9:03 pm Reply with quote
merr wrote:
Too bad Dark Horse keeps so many of Studio Proteus’s titles OOP. The sun will burn out before we get all of Oh My Goddess! back in print.


Too bad Dark Horse doesn't have enough respect towards fans to release all volumes of Eromanga Sensei. They should just give the IP to someone who will.
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akiraaoshi



Joined: 01 Sep 2025
Posts: 2
PostPosted: Mon Sep 01, 2025 9:18 pm Reply with quote
It would be difficult to underestimate the influence that Studio Proteus had on my youth and subsequent taste in art. The SP logo was like a stamp of quality, a guarantee that, whatever the book was about, you wanted to get into those pages.

3x3 Eyes, AKIRA, Appleseed, Blade Of The Immortal, Dominion, Domu, Ghost In The Shell, Gunsmith Cats, The Legend Of Kamui, Lone Wolf And Cub, Mai The Psychic Girl, Nausicaä, Oh My Goddess!, Patlabor, You're Under Arrest... Had there been an Eisner Award at the time for 'best Japanese-translated work', SP would've steamrolled the competition for a decade straight.

I occasionally come across Eclipse Comics editions of SP work and make a point of always getting them. Reading the letters and commentary is a fascinating window into that time, and more often than not the print quality is better than current printings. Analog print methods certainly had their drawbacks, and I'll admit that a very well done digital edition can result in a superior print (the remastered volumes of Cerebus are a great example of this), but more often than not, newer digitally sourced prints have terrible moire effects in all of the tone (which there is a lot of in manga), are printed on paper that is too thin so chunky blacks are easily visible on the opposite side of the page, etc. My Eclipse copies of Appleseed look significantly better than the volumes currently printed by Dark Horse. For a more accessible example, compare a late 90's Dark Horse copy of any AKIRA volume to the currently produced Kodansha copies (the English ones, not the remasters that are soon to come out in Japan).

But I digress.

Often, at least a few times a year, I will think to myself 'thank you Studio Proteus, thank you Toren Smith' because I am truly, truly grateful for all of the hard work, and frankly, sense of adventure it took for a small group of people to invest so much of their lives into bringing art across the Pacific and into the imaginations of millions of us. Thank you Studio Proteus. You've made my life more beautiful.
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