![]() DC had punched Superman to death and was rewarded with fevered media coverage. ![]() Marvel was breaking sales records by hawking titles in which oversize forearms held oversize firearms. ![]() The previous few years had seen the rise of the blockbuster superhero comic. It’s essential to remember how unusual such an approach was back in ’93. That’s somewhat fitting for an experiment that was remarkable for the degree to which it favored contemplation over bombast, conversation over kicking. To DC’s credit, a celebration-slash-relaunch of the imprint is planned for August, but this frozen month saw no parades for Vertigo. This landmark is being recognized quietly. In January of 1993, 25 years ago, those aforementioned six series got the Vertigo label stamped on their covers and two mini-series became the first titles to begin with said label: Enigma and the Sandman spinoff Death: The High Cost of Living. In other words, perhaps Vertigo was simply an idea whose time had come, and the Weltgeist had no interest in standing in its way. No uphill climb, no personality clashes, no desperate searches for funding. A few months later, Vertigo was launched. So one day, DC’s powers-that-were asked Berger to set up her own imprint where such creators could tell impressionistic, unsettling, explicit, and formally inventive stories. In shepherding those books, Berger fostered the development of some of comics’ most stunning young talents, many of them British: writers like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Peter Milligan, Jamie Delano, and Grant Morrison, to name just a handful. The Sandman, The Saga of the Swamp Thing, Animal Man, Doom Patrol, Hellblazer, Shade, The Changing Man - these were unprecedented experiments that birthed indelible new characters and reinvented old ones. As the 1990s dawned, DC Comics editor Karen Berger had already built a name for herself, helming a handful of acclaimed series that walked their own weird path, diverging from the standard all-ages superhero fare that the average comics fan was familiar with. By all accounts, the process behind the scenes was dull (in a good way). I always fail, and everyone involved should take that as a compliment. Over the past few years, I’ve repeatedly tried to find a juicy story about the founding of Vertigo, the “mature readers” imprint of DC Entertainment. (The most recent happened this past August.) Given this news, we’re republishing this essay from January 2018 about Vertigo’s significance, which was originally published on Vertigo’s 25th anniversary. Sadly, the news wasn’t unexpected, as sales had been disappointing for the better part of a decade, despite numerous reboot attempts. Photo: Art by Shawn McManus and Daniel Vozzo.Īfter a 26-year, industry-changing run, DC Comics has canceled its Vertigo imprint, the home of the Sandman, Preacher, Y: The Last Man, and many other enduring, adults-only hits.
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