Dark Horse Twenty Years [2006] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

Dark Horse Twenty Years [2006]

This is a one shot pin-up book priced at just 25 cents which, as the title makes clear, celebrates two decades of Dark Horse publishing, going back to DARK HORSE PRESENTS #1 back in 1986. Mike Mignola handles the cover, with a cluttered desktop with action figures and imagery from some two dozen or so Dark Horse published features.

For most of the book the pattern is that each pin-up features a character associated with the artist of the previous page. So after Mignola's cover, the character is Hellboy, drawn by Adam Hughes, then the Hughes-designed Ghost with art by Arthur Adams, and continuing from there. This pattern breaks down a bit in the last few pages, after Rick Geary draws Tony Millionaire's Sock Monkey, with the last two pairs being straight switches (Joss Whedon drawing Emily The Strange while an artist for that, Buzz Parker, draw's Whedon's Fray, then Stan Sakai does a Sin City piece to pair with a reprint of a Frank Miller drawing of Usagi Yojimbo from a few years before).

This is an interesting little curiosity, well worth the original cover price, but probably not too much more.  The highlight is definitely Sergio Aragonés drawing Conan, long before the actual GROO VS. CONAN book actually came out (and in that one, Tom Yeates drew the Conan figures).  That's in the middle of a nice stretch of the book, with then Conan artist Cary Nord doing a nice Aliens piece ahead of it and Paul Chadwick taking the next page to draw Aragonés' Groo. There's also some nice work by Matt Wagner and others.

Worth picking up if you can find it cheap. It'll almost certainly never be put out digitally, with several of the licensed and creator-owned features having left Dark Horse in the intervening years.