You Are Now Leaving the 21st Century: Getting Vertigo

Swamp Thing. Hellblazer. Shade the Changing Man. Animal Man. Doom Patrol. Sandman.

In the late 1980s, these were the mature titles being published by DC Comics. An eclectic mix of horror, superheroes, mythology, and psychedelica, they challenged the reader by taking all the pre-conceived notions of what comic books could be and twisted them into something new. It was the promise, delivered, of what comic books should be: smart, literate, dark, and complex.

In 1992, as the popularity of those titles increased, Group Editor Karen Berger crafted a plan to kick it up a notch or three with a new imprint to house these mature-themed books. Working alongside a collective of forward-thinking editors, such as Art Young and Shelly Bond (neé Roeberg), Karen constructed not just an imprint, but a comics movement.

The new books to emerge that following winter still played within that more sinister and haunting corner of the medium, but this time the rules had changed. Within the pages of the existing titles, and now with Kid Eternity, Black Orchid, The Books of Magic, and Sandman Mystery Theater, the characters were no longer tethered to the DC Universe proper. These were mature stories that were allowed to truly be mature. They were given new breath, moving through the visual ether like dark wave phantoms. Opaque and brilliant all at the same moment.

New ideas. Innovative approaches to conceptualization. Intelligent, creative and free transformation. The writers and artists were let loose to create comics that delivered the cool, touching on themes as disparate as gender identity, the sins hidden in bourgeois decadence, mushroom consciousness, and the perceived boundaries between the individual and technology. Superheroes were now traversing not urban cityscapes, but rather landscapes of the id, silently recognizing their genetic codes as beings of information and imagery, their villains informational anthesis, cold and rational and basic, sublimely disguised as garish and horrific caricatures of ideas.

The Vertigo books gave readers a frenetic and oft-times insane window into the soul of the thinking person’s comic, a task it would gladly uphold for many years. That is until the creator-owned trumpets sounded, heralding in a change to Vertigo’s raison d’être.

Next week: unholy preachers, gonzo journalists, and invisible freedom fighters.

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