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Dark Horse Adds Bloodline Battlefront, Drifters, Shinjuku Azul

The North American publisher Dark Horse Comics is announcing at its New York Comic Con/New York Anime Fest panel on Friday that it has licensed Yasuhiro Nightow's Bloodline Battlefront (Kekkai Sensen), Kouta Hirano's Drifters, and Yoshitaka Amano's Shinjuku Azul.

The story of Bloodline Battlefront is set after the collapse of New York and the overnight rebuilding of a new city. Our reality and another reality intersect in this supernatural city with vampiric creatures, and a secret society maneuvers behind the scenes to keep everything in balance.

After he finished Trigun Maximum in 2007, Nightow launched Bloodline Battlefront as a one-shot manga story in Shueisha's Jump Square magazine in May of 2008. He then turned it into a three-part mini-series called Kekkai Sensen -Mafūgai Kessha- in the same magazine in 2009. He has since continued the story in the spinoff magazine Jump SQ.19 this past May. Shueisha compiled and published one book volume in January.

Drifters centers around a band of time-traveling adventurers in the year 1600 during Japan's sengoku jidai, the era of the warring states known internationally for inspiring many samurai stories. Hirano launched the manga in Shonengahosha's Young King Ours magazine in April of 2009 after he completed Hellsing the year before. Shonengahosha has compiled and published one book volume this past July.

Shinjuku Azul is the second of three illustrated novels in the Shinjuku series by Amano. Amano collaborated with movie director and writer Christopher Morrison ("mink") on the first book, which shipped this past April. The story revolves around a bounty hunter who tracks down his long-lost sister in Shinjuku, a Tokyo district that is populated by denizens of the criminal underworld and the literal underworld in 2020.

Update: More background and story information added.