Over the weekend at Fanime in California, Dark Horse's always awesome Carl Horn gave a little panel about Dark Horse Comics and what to expect from them coming up. What can you expect? Hideyuki Kikuchi -- the creator of Vampire Hunter D -- at the New York Anime Festival.

If you dig back to some of the stuff I've previously written about this year's NYAF (like the introduction to the 2008 website) you'll see I've been planting the D name a fair bit, but Carl's panel is the first public announcement that NYAF and Dark Horse have been working since the start of the year to bring Kikuchi-san, the author of all the Vampire Hunter D novels, as well as Kikuchi-san's friend and translator, Justin Leahy, to the 2008 New York Anime Festival.

The New York Anime Festival is a showcase for best of Japanese pop culture, and while we will be devoting a lot of time and energy to guests and events around titles which are currently captivating both America and Japan -- I want to focus beyond just what is big and popular now and explore the creators and the creations that first and forever defined anime and manga in America. Since the first Vampire Hunter D film was released in America, it was been creating followers. Even now, more than 20 years since the movie's debut, it is a staple among America anime fans -- a classic and timeless work. And, now that the original Vampire Hunter D novels are finally available in America, fans are discovering D as never before. D is a character who some have loved for over 20 years and others are falling in love with only today, and I want Kikuchi-san -- the man behind D and all his adventures -- to meet the men and women in America who have been shaped by his words and dream nightly of D.

Vampire Hunter D is what got me into anime, and bringing Kikuchi-san and Mr. Leahy to NYAF personally means very, very much to me, and I hope they'll both mean a lot to you, too.