UPDATE: Scans Have Been Located!

A big thank you to Weeb the Mystic, Aura Nova, and Tsuki on Bluesky for this. The former duo is responsible for maintaining a public compendium of scanned Darkstalkers manga in a Google Drive, while Tsuki is who first notified me of it. Apparently, it’s been around for five years or so and just didn’t appear in my searching.

I’m hesitant to link directly to the scans for reasons that ought to be obvious, but appending “Makai Realm” to your search queries should help.

The following is the original version of this article before finding the scans, preserved for posterity. In the future, I may scrap this article and rework this background into a review for the manga itself.

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After finishing Udon’s Darkstalkers comic series, I wanted to compare and contrast it with some official Japanese manga. Wanting to progress chronologically, I learned the first Darkstalkers manga was Vampire Hunter: Darkstalkers’ Revenge. Serialized in Comic Beam from 1995 to 1996, the series was licensed for an English release by Viz retitled Night Warriors: Darkstalkers’ Revenge. Viz produced six comic book-size issues from November 1998 to April 1999. This was proceeded by a single-volume anthology that released on January 5, 2000. To my knowledge, none of these have ever been reprinted.

I cannot find scans of this series. I even recruited friends to help, some of whom had access to private torrent trackers. Nothing. Scans of the Japanese release have been archived, but that’s only relevant to anyone attempting a fan translation. Given how niche Darkstalkers is, it may still be easier to find scans of the Viz release than to convince someone to write a new translation.

So, I’m crowdsourcing some help in achieving at least one of these three things:

• Locating existing scans of Night Warriors. Would be nice to reupload on archive.org for posterity.
• Someone with the physical releases scanning them for the first time.
• Donating to me directly so that I can purchase the series secondhand. The cheapest avenue appears to be buying the 2000 anthology, which fetches prices of around $65 (includes shipping).
  
  If you’d like to donate, please click here and specify if you’d like your donation to go towards the Darkstalkers Viz series. Even partial donations are appreciated! I’ll update this page with the status of any donation pool so anyone can know how close the funding is. Thank you if you’re even considering a donation.

From my understanding, getting decent comic scans basically requires destroying the material, and I admit I wouldn’t have the heart to do that. I genuinely like Darkstalkers and would enjoy this being a part of my library. I don’t want to give anyone the false impression that their donation would result in publicly available scans. It would, however, result in a review for everyone to read, and I’d be happy to credit anyone who donates.

Well, that’s all. I just wanted to bring this matter to everyone’s attention. It’s crazy to me that the beloved world and characters of Darkstalkers have a precious English media release that has yet to be archived! Every one of those is a gift, especially since the IP is currently deader than Lord Raptor.