Founded in 1986 by Portland State University graduate and business leader Mike Richardson, Dark Horse Comics has it's name for a reason. The comics market was totally dominated by Marvel Comics and DC Comics, and if anyone else tried to get into the market, they were truly the underdog.

Today Dark Horse is the number three comics company worldwide. Many of their biggest comics have connections with the film industry, being either movie adaptions or having later been filmed. The first of these categories includes Star Wars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Predator and Aliens, while the other includes the Mask, Barb Wire, TimeCop and Virus. Future comic-to-movie adaption projects include Hellboy and Concrete.

Dark Horse Comics is headquartered in Portland, Oregon. They are the first serious competition to Marvel Comics and DC Comics.

By the mid-1980s, Mike Richardson had already established himself as a business leader in the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area with the successful chain of retail comic-book shops he founded after graduating from Portland State University.

In 1986, he invested profits from the chain known nationwide as Things from Another World (the world’s largest comic-book retail chain), and with that money founded Dark Horse Comics.

Dark Horse: "The largest bite any independent publisher has ever taken out of the DC-and-Marvel dominated business." –Premiere Magazine

Soon Dark Horse was publishing some groundbreaking comics including Paul Chadwick’s Concrete, which went on to earn an unprecedented 26 awards and nominations within two years of its Dark Horse debut. The series was a remarkable boon to the industry overall, as it proved popular with women and mature audiences–two groups too often ignored by comics publishers–and it helped further establish to comics readers worldwide that Dark Horse was producing a line of quality books that would appeal to a wide variety of readers.

Today Dark Horse is one of the United States’ largest comic-book publishers. According to figures published in the May 1999 issue of Diamond Dialog, the specialty comics retailer’s monthly, Dark Horse was ranked number three out of 150 comics publishers, with a 12.32% share of all dollars spent on comics and magazines by specialty retailers worldwide.

Dark Horse is known for comics such as: The Mask, Hellboy, Sin City by Frank Miller, Star Wars, Aliens, Predator and Terminator comics based on the movies... Mysterymen Comics, Flaming Carot Comics, and many others including my fav Hellboy by Mike Mignolia.

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