Dark Horse Penguin Picks: November 2026
Above-the-Board Recommendation:
The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Omnibus vol. 6
You know the drill by now. I’m not giving this spot to any other series (no matter how deserving) until this sixth omnibus gets released. If nothing else, it’s still comforting to see that Dark Horse is still re-soliciting this title to come out at some point in the future rather than simply forgetting about it. Of course, if I was to give this spot to any other title in these solicitations…
Suicide Island vol. 1: What happens to those who feel that they’ve been left behind by society? Sei is a man who has been transported to a mysterious island after a failed suicide attempt along with other people in a similar situation. Now he has to figure out how to end himself in a permanent fashion, or to find a way to continue on living. This series comes to us from mangaka Kouji Mori, the mangaka who is helping to continue “Berserk” after the death of his friend Kentaro Miura. I was assuming that Dark Horse would have picked “Holy Land” as the series to represent Mori’s style given its reported prominence in Japan, but as I’ve already read the scanlated version of that title, I’m glad to see that they’re going with something different. Something that has a potentially more hopeful message too, as you’d think that a series about an island filled with failed suicide attemptees would lead towards a satisfying pro-life message in this case.
Dungeons & Dragons #1: Dark Horse has been publishing “D&D”-based comics for a minute now – looking forward to the collected edition of “Total Party Killers” from Christopher Hastings and co. – and they’ve all been miniseries. Until now. This will be the first ongoing title from the franchise they’ve published and it comes from co-writers Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzig, and artist Ibraim Roberson. Kelly & Lanzig, you’ll recall, “showran” and wrote most of “Star Trek: Year Five” before moving on to the “Next-Gen” set “Star Trek” series that was pretty decent, even if it was overshadowed in my mind by its sister series “Defiant” and petered out in the disappointing “Lore War” crossover finale. I can’t say that makes me particularly interested in this new title from them; though, I’m sure that people with more interest in the “Forgotten Realm” setting and seeing its great mage Mordenkainen deal with having his powers stripped from him may find something to like here. Particularly with the textured work of Roberson gracing this new series.
Minor Threats: The Cleaner #1 (of 4): The series-of-miniseries spinning off from Patton Oswalt, Jordan Blum, and Scott Hepburn’s superhero universe continues with this new one about a familiar character. “The Cleaner” is David O’Halloran, art dealer by day, superhero body disposal specialist by night. He’s discreet, gets the job done and is good at his work. Which is why Diamond Dahlia turned to him when she needed to disappear. Except the people she needed to disappear from are starting to get wise to what really happened and now David is on their list as well. The Cleaner debuted in the “Welcome to Twilight” miniseries from writer Gerry Duggan and artist Mark Torres, and was a fun story that played with how the series homaged famous superhero characters. Dahlia’s “disappearance” was the subject of that story, so it looks like Duggan and Torres are showing us the ongoing fallout from it, which should make for a good read if the quality of their first go-round was any indication.
Appleseed Companion Deluxe Edition: Dark Horse is doing a three-volume collection of the manga from Shirow Masamune that they still have the rights to. “Appleseed” is due out soon and “Black Magic,” “Orion,” and both volumes of “Dominion” are getting this treatment next year. “Appleseed Companion” is the odd volume out here as it is considerably slimmer than those two collections at 300 pages with (if I’m reading this right) only 132 pages of it being actual manga. The rest are going to be made up of additional illustrations from Shirow, and a whole lot of supplemental design material and data about the world. In short, this sounds like it’s going to be one for the completionists, but they’re going to be very well served by it.
Asobi Asobase Omnibus vol. 1: This has shown up in previous solicitations, so if it actually arrives in December, or winds up getting punted to a future solicitation like “Kurosagi” omnibus vol. 6, I won’t be surprised either way. As for what it is, this is the most puzzling Dark Horse manga license I’ve seen since “Elfen Lied.” While these two series are alike in that they’ve both had anime adaptations, you could at least theorize that “Elfen Lied” was similar enough to “Stranger Things” that the publisher thought it might synergize well with that audience. “Asobi Asobase’s” adaptation is a few years old at this point and appears to have just come and gone without making much of an impression beyond the small cult of weirdos who watched it. Weirdos like me who thought that this was just another series about cute girls doing cute things (in this case, playing various games after school) only to be greeted with something stranger and more surreal bordering on demented. So yeah, I’m definitely going to pick up this omnibus, whenever it arrives.
The Best of Fantagor HC: The Richard Corben library keeps expanding with this collection of short stories from his underground magazine Fantagor… as well as selected issues of Metal Hurlant, Heavy Metal, Grim Wit, and Up From the Deep. Anyhow, if you’ve been reading through the various installments of the creator’s library like I have then you’ll have a good idea of what to expect here: Lots of surrealism, general weirdness, dark humor, gory violence and naked bits. There’s also a chance that the stories collected here may be a bit more straightforward than usual given that Jan Strnad and Doug Moench are credited as co-writers on some of them. We’re promised seven high fantasy stories, three comedic tales, two sci-fi episodes, and some stuff that’s described as “unclassifiable” which is how it should be with Corben.
Rachel Rising Omnibus HC: Collecting all seven volumes of Terry Moore’s horror series in one edition, plus the never-before-collected issue #0 prequel comic. I’ve already got all seven volumes in my library, and what I can remember tells me that I don’t need to re-buy them all to get that one issue. Mainly because even though I did a podcast about this almost nine years ago, precious little of it has stuck in my head. I remember that the title character is a woman who begins the series rising up out of her shallow grave, there’s the creepy little girl who becomes a killer and goes on to star in “Serial,” some stuff about witches… Yeah, it bothers me a bit how I can’t remember most of what happened here even though there was more of Moore’s previous series, “Echo,” that has stuck in my mind for longer. Maybe I’ll have to give this a re-read to remind me what I’ve forgotten at some point. Sometime after I get through the twelve inches of new comics currently sitting in my To Read pile.