There’s delays of manga, there’s indefinite delays of manga (see: Seven Seas’ unknown holding pattern with their Angel Beats! releases), and then there’s whatever has been happening with Dark Horse’s release of CLAMP’s Wish. For those who probably pre-ordered it a while ago (and maybe even longer than that. Or cancelled it), you likely won’t be surprised to know it’s now been pushed to come out in February…after it was originally targeted for a January 22 release. Now to be fair, it is supposed to reach comic book stores by the end of January…after it was originally targeted for a January 9 release.

So the obvious question is — what gives?

First, we’ll have to take a bit of step back before moving forward. Wish originally was released by TOKYOPOP starting in 2002. Obviously TOKYOPOP shut down, but VIZ picked Wish up and sold it digitally for a time as part of their VIZ Select line a few years ago. However, at some point in 2017 (maybe even 2016) Dark Horse announced somewhere (or maybe not at all) that they were releasing the series. It’s hard to find out when exactly they did, but in any case, it was scheduled to come out at some point in 2017.

At about 800 pages and receiving a brand new translation, it would be an impressive title to have on the shelf. However, the following occurred:

1) The earliest scheduled release was August 2017. That got delayed.
2) The next scheduled date was September 2017. That got delayed.
2) The next scheduled date was October 2017. That got delayed.

You can probably figure out that it was likely delayed some more after the October 2017 solicitation. We first, however, noticed that it would be getting released in July back in March of this year. It has since seen delays into September, October, December, and then into January, with at one point Amazon temporarily making it unavailable for purchase. Now it’s scheduled for a February 12 release, but at this point, that’s more like a placeholder date than anything definitive.

It’s not uncommon for a title to see a delay for many reasons — I think over the past year Yen Press has been picked on for whatever delayed them from releasing No Game No Life Volume 7 — but generally, you only see delays for debut titles, and even then, the delay’s not terribly lengthy. Could be for marketing purposes, production problems, where the volumes are at in Japan, etc. Companies can communicate this better, but it’s rarely ever something to be too worried about.

For Dark Horse, however, this is mostly confounding. It can’t be translation problems, because they’ve assured fans that they’re being conscious of that:

Could it just be design issues? Production problems? It’s hard to really figure out why this is having so much trouble, and now this will stretch even further into 2019. I have reached out to Dark Horse to see what’s going on with the release of this manga, and will update the post if they respond in a timely manner.

For now though, this might just be in a similar limbo like Udon’s releases of Rose of Versailles and Sugar Sugar Rune. Yeah, those don’t have any release dates, but at this point, does Wish have one too? It might be in Dark Horse’s best interest to set the record straight on what’s going on.