News
Penguin Random House Expands Partnership with Dark Horse to Distribute Single-Issue Comics/Manga
posted on by Alex Mateo
Dark Horse Comics announced on Wednesday that it has entered into an exclusive worldwide multi-year agreement with the Penguin Random House publishing group for the latter's sales and distribution of Dark Horse's newly published and backlist single-issue comic book periodicals, graphic novels, and manga to direct market comic shops. (The direct market is mostly composed of comic book stores that receive their inventories from certain distributors, separate from most other kinds of bookstores or mass-market retailers.) This expands the companies' current partnership, in which Penguin Random House sells and distributes Dark Horse's trade books and graphic novels to bookstores.
Diamond Distribution was Dark Horse's previous partner for nearly 30 years. Dark Horse's products will still remain available on Diamond.
Penguin Random House Publisher Services' clients include Seven Seas Entertainment, Kodansha USA Publishing (which handles the Kodansha Comics and Vertical imprints), Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd. for its Square Enix Manga & Books publishing label, and Dark Horse Comics.
ViacomCBS announced in November 2020 that it had agreed to sell the publishing business Simon & Schuster to Penguin Random House LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA, for US$2.175 billion. The cash transaction was expected to close in 2021. After the purchase, Simon & Schuster would continue as a separate publishing unit under the Penguin Random House umbrella. Simon & Schuster's President and CEO Jonathan Karp and COO and CFO Dennis Eulau would continue to head the company.
Simon & Schuster distributes Viz Media manga and novel publications in North America.
Mike Richardson founded Dark Horse Comics in 1986 as an offshoot of his comic book store chain Things From Another World. The company published its first manga, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, in 1987.
Last December, Embracer Group AB entered into an agreement to acquire Dark Horse Media. Embracer acquired the company in March, making Dark Horse its tenth operative group.
The company formed a partnership with Hong Kong-based entertainment company Vanguard Visionary Associates in 2018. Richardson stated at the time that he would retain a "large chunk" of the company after a "large investment into a number of areas, including a stock purchase,... a development fund and a film fund, investment in the publishing and product divisions, and expansion of our retail efforts."
Source: Press release
