The Best Deal in Comics Today

Dark Horse Comics hit the publishing scene in 1986 and one of their inaugural titles was Dark Horse Presents, a 32-page black and white anthology title which featured the first appearance of Paul Chadwick's Concrete as well as many other great comics stories. I liked DHP from the beginning and I amassed all 162 issues of the title over its fifteen-year run.

Dark Horse revived DHP last year, but now it is an 80-page full-color series (and a recent oversized issue topped out at 104 pages!). Even my old friend Concrete has made an appearance.

As an anthology covering many different genres by a variety of writers and artists, DHP is hit or miss one story at a time. But I have liked some of the features in every issue. There has been some Neal Adams work and some by Frank Miller and Nexus started appearing recently. (My favorite line of dialog that has appeared in any of the DHP stories was written by Evan Dorkin, in which a cool-headed lamb said to a foolhardy lamb "Why don't you just lie down on a plate of gravy?" That one got me laughing! (At least I think I remember they were two lambs; the Hayfamzone Fact-Checking Department is off today so I'm swinging on the trapeze without a net.))

Page for page, the new Dark Horse Presents is the best deal in comics today and if you haven't yet tried an issue I recommend it to you highly.