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Dark Horse Adds Giganto Maxia, RG Veda, Danganronpa, I Am a Hero Manga

North American manga and comics publisher Dark Horse Comics revealed at its panel at Anime Central on Saturday that it has licensed Kentarō Miura's Giganto Maxia, CLAMP's RG Veda, Spike Chunsoft and Takashi Tsukimi's Danganronpa: The Animation, and Kengo Hanazawa's I am a Hero manga.

Kentarō Miura (Berserk) published the Giganto Maxia mini-series in Hakusensha's Young Animal magazine in 2013-2014. The series is set in a world 100 million years in the future. Dark Horse will release the one-volume series in February 2016.

Hakusensha published the 37th compiled book volume of Berserk in Japan in March 2013. Dark Horse Comics published the same volume in North America in December 2013.

Dark Horse's release of RG Veda will be based on the current five-volume omnibus version from Kadokawa. Dark Horse will be releasing the series in three volumes, so each volume will be about 600 pages long. The release will be the same size and format as Dark Horse's editions of Cardcaptor Sakura and Tokyo Babylon. The publisher will release the first volume in August 2016.

Shinshokan originally published the 10-volume series in Japan from 1989-1996 in its Wings magazine as CLAMP's debut work. Kadokawa Shoten then took over publication in 2011.

Tokyopop originally published the series in North America in 2005-2007. The series inspired a two-episode OVA series in 1991.

Takashi Tsukimi launched the Danganronpa: The Animation (Danganronpa - Kibō no Gakuen to Zetsubō no Kōkōsei The Animation) manga based on Spike Chunsoft's story in Kadokawa's Shōnen Ace magazine in March 2013, and the manga ended in the same magazine in July 2014. Dark Horse will publish the first of four volumes in March 2016.

The story follows a group of high school students, each with a different exceptional talent, who are locked inside a school and told that the only way to escape is to kill another student without getting caught. After a murder, the remaining students must hold a trial with their lives on the line to find out who the killer is.

Funimation streamed the Danganronpa television anime series as it aired in Japan in 2013. NIS America released the original Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc PlayStation Vita game in February 2014, and shipped the Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair game last September.

Dark Horse describes I am a Hero:

I am a Hero is the saga of Hideo Suzuki, a struggling, mentally unstable manga artist who isn't sure he can believe what he sees one night—a pedestrian, leg twisted and neck broken by an auto collision, gets up and keeps on walking. It might snap the sanity of most people. But when the dead are beginning to rise all over Tokyo, there are two things that might allow even a crazy man like Hideo to survive…the fact he feels destined to be a hero, and a certain possession of his that's quite rare in Japan—a gun...

Philip Simon, who worked for more than 10 years on Blade of the Immortal, will edit the manga. Kumar Sivasubramanian (Eden, MPD-Psycho) will translate the series, and Steve Dutro (Vagabond) will handle the lettering.

I am a Hero marks the first time that Dark Horse has licensed a manga from Shogakukan since the company began releasing manga in 1988 with Kazuhisa Iwata's Godzilla manga. Dark Horse's Carl Horn noted that the company was able to acquire the series "due to the persistent work of director of Asian Licensing, Michael Gombos." (Dark Horse has published series that were originally published by Shogakukan before, such as Crying Freeman, but Dark Horse's edition was based on a later 2000 edition of that manga that Koike Shoin had published in Japan.)

Dark Horse will release the series in a 2-in-1 omnibus format, and each volume will include color reproductions of the fully-painted color story pages that began each of the Japanese volumes. Dark Horse plans to release the first volume in April 2016.

Hanazawa launched the manga in Shogakukan's Big Comic Spirits magazine in 2009, and Shogakukan shipped the 16th compiled volume in December. The series won the General Category of the 58th Shogakukan Manga Awards in 2013. Yuuki Honda (Tokyo Yamimushi) is launching a side story spinoff, titled I am a Hero in Osaka, this summer. Shinsuke Satō (Gantz) is directing a live-action film adaptation of the series.