Now You See It....

Hey, chums:

I’m getting ahead of myself here, but I think there might be two of these this very weekend! Since it’s Saturday the 1st and I’m actually on top of my comics logging, I can do a “here’s what I’m reading and here’s why I’m a bad person for having read it” post.

But I’ve been hoarding something to talk about as well, and that’s actually going to come first.

(Will I have the bandwidth to write two posts, even with there being two days in the weekend? I dunno—let’s find out together!)

You probably heard that Dark Horse Digital let everyone know they were closing their digital storefront—they closed it on February 24, 2025 and let everyone know it was being closed on…February 24, 2025. Although app users still have until March 30, 2025, to download their books to the app, the app isn’t going to be supported which means at some point in the near or far future it won’t work on your device anymore, and those books will be inaccessible to you.

There’s a lot to love about this—and by “love,” I mean “get very, very annoyed.” For one thing, Dark Horse is upfront about the fact that your books are tied to the app, and once the app is gone the books are gone. It’s kind of explained in their FAQ with a shrug. “Unfortunately, we are unable to allow downloads to your computer or provide PDFs.”What are you gonna do about it?

The word “unable” is more than a little disingenuous—at my most generous, I suspect it can be justified by, “we are unable to do so because we have gotten rid of the people in charge of the app and so therefore don’t have the manpower to set up a method for your to download to your computer or provide you with PDFs.”

Because, of course, Dark Horse has been selling DRM-free PDFs on platforms like Humble Bundle for years. In fact, it is literally selling a bundle of 27 DRM-free Plants Vs. Zombies volumes right now. 

I get that they can’t do that with everything they publish, of course—there’s a ton of stuff they publish where rights are either owned or shared by the creator. And there’s a lot of stuff they have lost the rights to over the years. (It’s almost stunning how much Dark Horse has been stripped over the years—Buffy, Firefly, Conan, Star Wars, Aliens, Predator….you kind of wonder if Mike Richardson cut in front of David Gabriel at a gang-bang or something, because Marvel’s been nothing short of rapacious.)

But, wow. If you bought your Lone & Wolf & Cub, Samurai Assassin, Crying Freeman, Lady Snowblood, Comics’ Greatest World omnibi, Crime Does Not Pay (or other public domain packaged books) on their app, Dark Horse would like to thank you for your years of service with a big ol’ “can’t be bothered” two finger salute.

(I didn’t even mention Hellboy or BPRD or even Plants Vs. Zombies, despite them also being the subject of current and past Humble Bundles, because the books I listed are just the ones that it is all but certain Dark Horse has locked in licenses that keep them from having to worry about paying out to the creators.)

Admittedly, I’ve been salty about Dark Horse and their digital department for literally a month now. Let’s rap about it! (Don’t worry, I mean in the old school “I’m going to cross my legs and talk earnestly about a tough subject for me,” not write my own version of “Not Like Us” about Mike Richardson. Though….someone should? Maybe?)

You see, Dark Horse recently started republishing Gantz in omnibus (three volumes to a volume) format, and after years of wanting to read it, I finally was able to do so.

If you know Gantz, you know part of why this is a tough subject to talk about. Gantz is pretty much the South Park of multi-volume seinen manga—there’s the same sort of “cynical yet sincere but no really just cynical” approach, where part of the fun is in the shocking degree of callousness (sex and violence in Gantz, as opposed to South Park’s, uh, morality? Ethical system? This is where I’m clearly showing my ass about South Park, having only watched a handful of episodes plus the movie, but the thing that seemed consistent about it is that, unless it was done by one of the kids in the last few minutes of an episode, any act of empathy, sympathy, or consideration for others was either virtue signaling or lemmingesque stupidity).

To be fair, Gantz may not actually be that bad—Gantz may actually posit itself as the creepy nihilistic edgelord of manga behind which rests a message about the difficulty of not turning out to be a creepy nihilistic edgelord when life itself is more than cruel enough to justify that as a response.

But it says a lot about Gantz that I’ve read twelve volumes of the title and would’ve only dared to think it was anything other than edgelord shit in the last, oh, two of those volumes?

Anyway, perhaps it is all too fitting that, after subscribing/preordering the volumes on Amazon so that I could get them into my hot little hands the Monday night of their release right at 9pm, I sat down to read the third omnibus, and discovered it was fucked up. About two hundred pages in, the story jumped 180 pages, then continued for another thirty or so, then jumped another 100, then ended in mid-chapter. A 650 page omnibus that only had 237 digital pages to it.

Because I preordered it, and because it took me a while to get to that jump, I couldn’t return it for a refund with Amazon. But I didn’t really want a refund—I just wanted to read the damn volume.

So I skeeted on Blue Sky to Dark Horse about the problem and could they, you know, correct it and push out an update?

Ignored. And ignored a week later. And ignored two days after that.

And then I called Dark Horse directly and pushed buttons until I got the voicemail box for “comics,” and left a message. Nothing.

Then a week or so after that came the good news about Dark Horse’s app. In a way, it was good news because I was already incandescent with rage about Dark Horse, and was best trying to figure out a way to let them know I’d never buy digital from them again.

And the part of me that was like, “well, there you go, Jeff. Somebody would’ve gotten back to you if they hadn’t been let go and never replaced before you ever tried to complain”? Well, that part of me as more or less quieted as Dark Horse’s email explained that, you know, they were “unable” to provide PDFs of books already had open source PDFs of.

I mean, not to be too much of an edgy nihilistic creep about it but: of course, I should expect that! Not only have I dealt with comic publishers’ social media accounts where anything directed at them that wasn’t ass-licking praise was studiously ignored, but…this is Dark Horse Comics. Dark Horse knowingly continued to keep a sexual predator in a position of power because they couldn’t risk their relationship with predator-edited Mike Mignola!

If the sexual abuse of people you see and greet in the halls every day are considered an acceptable cost of doing business, how can you even begin to care about some faceless customer?

Putting that aside (as I’ve been able to each and every time I’ve bought a Dark Horse book up until Gantz Omnibus vol. 3), what’s so stupid about this is, it’s digital. Not only would it have taken maybe all of fifteen minutes of somebody’s time to fix the problem—maybe eighteen if you count someone actually taking the time to acknowledge and then let people know on social media—but…if I prefer to read comics in digital, why don’t I just fucking pirate them?

To quote Dre: Now you wanna run around and talk about guns Like I ain't got none. What, you think I sold 'em all cuz I stay well off? Any comics publisher that doesn’t think their digital customers could pirate everything the publisher has ever published—and do their best to make sure they don’t—is…what? A short-sighted idiot? (Well, duh, they’re a comics publisher, right?)

But of course, if I did pirate, wouldn’t I just be one of those virtue signaling hypocrites South Park mocks?

All that said? The Hoopla version of vol. 3 of the Gantz Omnibus had all the pages…and so did vol. 4! The resolution wasn’t quite ideal but not a deal-breaker, and that’s even moreso the case with Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken, so I don’t know what I’m going to do now that volume 7 is coming out this Tuesday….

But that’s a problem for me to solve later down the line. Right now, I guess I’m just happy to have somehow crafted the solution to avoid becoming cynical and corrupt in the face of a cynical and corrupt system is….the library?

I’m just going to take the win and call it a post, my friends.

I hope you are well; I hope your weekend is going well; and I hope March is kind to all of us, somehow?

Cheers!

-Jeff