Spun Out

DC Comics announced in June that its Vertigo imprint would be winding down
come the new year. Graeme McMillan wrote up the basics at The Hollywood Reporter.


Cover to Death: The High Cost of Living #1 © 1993 DC Comics.
Art: Dave McKean. Typography, Design: McKean; Richard Bruning.

I was still a fledgling comics journalist when Vertigo launched but remember the excitement in fandom and the retail community. Or maybe it’s more apt to say readership than fandom since a large part of that excitement was outreach to the potential audience daunted by or disinterested in the majority of titles that comprised DC’s long-standing superhero universe(s). Not that fandom of, say, the Sandman characters didn’t exist, as it very much did — in particular where the focus of a
premiere Vertigo release was concerned.

“The Sound of Her Wings” in 1989’s Sandman #8, written by Neil Gaiman and
drawn by Mike Dringenberg, became an instant classic when it introduced Death,
sister being to the series’ title character, Dream, a.k.a. Morpheus, the Oneiromancer, and myriad other epithets. What followed, both tightly serialized arcs like A Doll’s House and more single-issue stories like those published under the Dream Country rubric, made Sandman enticing to lapsed comics readers who’d revisited the form recently thanks to such adult-oriented superhero takes as Batman: The Dark Knight and Watchmen as well as lovers of fantasy who might not’ve read any of the medium beyond ElfQuest or those more interested in the kind of slice-of-life or relatively avant-garde stuff found in Fantagraphics' Love and Rockets, Eightball, and Neat Stuff. Death herself in the form of a young, pale-skinned goth became a fashion/vibe icon, so it made sense for a brief miniseries featuring the character to debut in January 1993, the month that Sandman first sported the new Vertigo label and trade dress alongside several other titles occupying a darker corner of the DC Universe like Animal Man, Hellblazer, and of course Swamp Thing, whose reinvention at the hands of Alan Moore in 1983 is in retrospect the earliest spark of what manifested as Vertigo a decade later.

I’m giving the barest gloss on a tidal change or perhaps changes, plural, that swept
the American comics industry in the years surrounding Vertigo’s inception, but itemizing various creators and publishing houses and formats and genre tweaks is far outside the purview of what’s really meant to be the briefest of eulogies sprung from a short Facebook post. One name that needs to be mentioned, however, is that of Karen Berger, the founding editor of Vertigo who shepherded Gaiman’s work at DC and expanded the company’s UK talent scouting.

Vertigo hasn’t been Karen Berger’s or even Shelly Bond’s Vertigo for a while now.
Bond succeeded Berger as executive editor of the imprint, and her name along with those of early staffers Art Young, Tom Peyer, and Stuart Moore conjures up for me not only numerous impressive projects but a very exciting period in my own life as it intersected with the comics world.

Of course you expect growth and change over decades in a shifting, challenging landscape, and of course Vertigo’s heyday saw great expansion from the fairly narrow “mature horror/fantasy” niche of its nascency. There’s a lot of what would once have been perfect fits for the imprint at other publishers in recent years — including Dark Horse, the home a recently launched eponymous imprint from Berger herself and,
quite surprisingly given its origins, Image. Yet I find it a shame that Vertigo’s being shuttered due to what feels like neglect.

Heidi MacDonald asked what the heck was happening at Vertigo in early June and shortly thereafter Johanna Draper Carlson wondered if there was a need for the imprint anymore. The same day that McMillan reported on the end of Vertigo and realignments in DC’s labeling, DC itself announced Hill House, a boutique imprint focused on horror under the auspices of author Joe Hill in the same vein as Gerard Way’s Young Animal, so there’s clearly still at least a perceived market for what Vertigo used to specialize in.


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