Dark Horse Comics

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Dark Horse Comics is a prominent American comic book publisher and manga translator. It was founded in 1986 by Mike Richardson in Milwaukie, Oregon. They were chosen by Nintendo to translate the Super Mario Bros. Encyclopedia, after success with translating several The Legend of Zelda books. They will also translate the The Art of Super Mario Odyssey in October 2019.

History

Dark Horse publishes many different comics and manga, including Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Predator, RoboCop, Planet of the Apes, Astro Boy, Ghost in the Shell and Akira. Prior to publishing Mario books, Dark Horse translated The Legend of Zelda: Hyrule Historia, The Legend of Zelda: Arts & Artifacts, The Legend of Zelda Encyclopedia, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Creating a Champion for the Legend of Zelda series.

Criticisms

Within the Mario fandom, the company is infamous for taking fan names for enemies and characters lacking official English names, such as the name "Whimp" (conflated by editors from the Super Mario Wiki) for Pattan. They also took transliterated Japanese names for some enemies, leading to very inconsistent names for the Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins enemies.

The book also contained several glaring translation errors, such as conflating different enemy species as the same thing, such as Spoing and Scuttlebug, due to over reliance on the Super Mario Wiki.