Short answers, pulled from the story.
Toren Smith founded Studio Proteus in 1986 in San Francisco. Smith had previously worked as a comics writer for Marvel's Epic magazine and Eclipse Comics before deciding to build a company dedicated to importing and localizing Japanese manga for the American market.
Studio Proteus operated as a "packager," handling title selection, licensing negotiations with Japanese rights holders, and the full production of translations and lettering, then delivering completed pages to an existing publisher. The publisher managed advertising, distribution, and finances. Smith preferred profit-sharing arrangements and insisted on shared ownership of derivative translation copyrights.
Studio Proteus co-published titles including Akira (1988), Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1988), Ghost in the Shell (1995), Blade of the Immortal (1996), Lone Wolf and Cub (2000), and Oh My Goddess! (1994), among dozens of others. Its main publishing partners were Dark Horse Comics for mainstream titles and Fantagraphics' Eros Comix imprint for adult titles.
Studio Proteus won Will Eisner Comics Industry Awards for Blade of the Immortal in 2000, Lone Wolf and Cub in 2001, and Akira in 2002. Lone Wolf and Cub also won Harvey Awards in 2001, 2002, and 2003. What's Michael? received a New York Library Book Award in 1991 and a Parent's Choice Award in 1997.
In February 2004, Dark Horse Comics purchased the publication rights to Studio Proteus translations. Smith cited burnout after producing 70,000 pages of manga over 15 years, and described the manga business as having grown into a corporate scale that did not suit him. He stayed on as an adviser and translator for selected titles but had left entirely by 2006.
Studio Proteus published manga in a mirrored, left-to-right format called "flopped" to match American reading conventions. By 2002, Toren Smith acknowledged that a new generation of manga readers had no difficulty reading right to left in the original Japanese format. The turning point for the industry came when Kurt Hassler of Borders persuaded Waldenbooks to stock large quantities of unflopped manga, which Smith later called Hassler "the most important person in the history of American manga."