Before (or possibly while) the holidays were swamping everyone, Dark Horse Comics announced that they had picked up a new manga license.

Blood-C: Demonic Moonlight is a prequel to the CLAMP inspired anime Blood-C which has also been adapted into a manga that Dark Horse is also releasing. The series takes place in occupied Japan in 1946. An American military investigator is sent to the Yokohama base to look into a number of bizarre deaths. He soon discovers that the murderer isn’t human!

The series was serialized in Kadokawa’s Newtype Ace magazine and was collected into two volumes. Dark Horse will release the first volume in May of this year. The main series, Blood-C, with Dark Horse releasing the fourth and final volume this month.

Dark Horse’s license of this series isn’t surprising since they already publish the main series. They must be pleased with the sales of the first series enough to get this license. The publisher page for the first volume boasts 70,000 copies in print, so it must be doing something right. Even though I haven’t read Blood-C, I would find this prequel interesting just for the historical setting. We haven’t seen many titles set in post-war, occupation Japan.