The Vertigo Thread

[And thanks for the fake-out Jocelyn. I read your first comment and literally went, "Whew! Tee hee. I guess I'm not the only-" and then your next comment, "- WHAT?! Arrrggggh..." It's all good, though. It's all good... I mean, hah, I was just kidding about all witch stuff, hah ha... ha.]

Moving it over from the "what are you reading" thread:

I really liked Kiernan's Dreaming for the most part (I don't think she did much else for Vertigo outside of the rare Sandman-related miniseries). I mean, she's pretty goth-y, but you have to have a tolerance for that sort of thing if you're delving very deeply into that era of Vertigo.

I'm generally fond of the Vertigo/pre-Vertigo titles that got all of the accolades (Sandman, Swamp Thing, Morrison's Animal Man and Doom Patrol, etc.), but I have a special place in my heart for a lot of stuff that went under the radar.

I've said as much on the board at least a half dozen times by now, but the simultaneous runs of Veitch's Swamp Thing and Delano's Hellblazer comprise some of my favorite comics of all time. Mine is not the most widely-held opinion, I know, but I think that's the apex of those characters and their respective titles.

Rachel Pollack's Doom Patrol is a hot, hot mess, but it is decidedly its own thing. Weird and inscrutable in a different way than Morrison's run. I don't think it's very popular, but I dug it.

Mark Millar's Swamp Thing run (which is rumored to have been ghost co-written by Grant Morrison for more than just the initial four issues for which he was credited) is quite good. It feels icky like a horror book should (Phil Hester's art helps greatly). Some clever conceits and episodic world building that make it feel a bit like modern day genre television. Avoid the pre-Millar Nancy Collins run like the plague (probably the worst thing to come out of Vertigo, which is saying something).

I'll have to have a think about this.

{This thread, for the sake of future reference.)

I never read much of these but the last Vertigo thing I read was Cuba:My Revolution, a welcome slap against all those "Che Guevara was great" comics by Spain Rodriguez and too many others. It's kind of an autobio by Lockpez, as someone who really wanted to believe in the revolution but kept seeing the horrible reality. I don't think Haspiel's art did anything special but works well enough to get the account across.

I read most of Hard Time by Gerber but it really didn't do anything that wasn't done better by the OZ tv prison drama. Hard Time had a supernatural element but I never read the last few issues to get the relevance of it.

I read 7 or 8 issues of Codename: Knockout but the covers by Chiodo were the only thing that made an impression. It was a sexy crime comic.

hard time was gonna be part of this whole line of 'semi-realistic' people-with-powers titles that wasn't even part of vertigo. the rest of the line got killed in the crib (yes i had a pitch that was green-then-red-lit) and hard time was the only one to see the light.

that willow wilson book looked cool did any of you guys read that?

Cairo or Air?

Cairo

Agree that Veitch’s Swamp Thing is great, and feels more coherent than Moore’s, too. Largely because of the more consistent art, and the way that fill-in artists were usually fit to specific stories (Gaiman may have drawn from this on Sandman), under Veitch’s planning, not just parachuted onto an issue in panic by the editor, which seemed to generally be the case in Moore’s run (Pog one obvious exception). Also notable that Veitch ghosted much of the Bissette/Totleben material in Moore’s first year. Not sure this particular strand ought to have been migrated here though because

Moore's Swamp Thing is the only Vertigo run I ever read the whole of

Moore’s Swamp Thing ended six years before Vertigo started.

I just wish the whole British invasion could have just stayed in Britain with creator owned books that Americans could read

Stayed in Britain with what industry?

Mark Millar's Swamp Thing run (which is rumored to have been ghost co-written by Grant Morrison for more than just the initial four issues for which he was credited) is quite good.

Morrison & Millar kibbitzed a lot on plots but Morrison didn’t do any actual writing past those first four, I believe.

Yeah, first Vertigo Swamp Thing is during the Nancy Collins era. First Hellblazer is during Garth Ennis' run. Doom Patrol starts with Rachel Pollack's first issue. The first Vertigo Sandman is Brief Lives pt7. The final launch title is Shade #33, the first one with him back in the present day as an empty shell.

It's weird to think how late it actually started, compared to the public perception.

Fables is the only one I'm still reading, and it's racing towards conclusion in the next 9 months.

I've read both Cairo and Air... I think Wilson has a lot of cool ideas, and she has a unique take on magical realism, but her writing is also kinda uneven and sometimes feel oddly deflated, considering the type of stories she tells. Air is definitely better than Cairo (which feels like a practice piece), though it suffers from the story ending a bit prematurely due to its cancellation (at least there is a proper ending, though). M. K. Perker's art is pretty inconsistent too, he's great at composition and wide-scale images, but his humans often look oddly disfigured, and he has problems keeping the character models consistent, so people's faces may look wildly different from panel to panel.

But I'd still recommend checking Air out, as far as urban fantasy/magical realism goes it's quite unlike anything else Vertigo has published.

Any of you been following The Unwritten? IMO it's been consistently good, and Carey's take on storytelling, myths and fantasy is certainly more original than what Fables & co are doing. That said, I'm glad it's soon coming to an end too, since it feels Carey has said pretty much everything he can within this framework.

I liked Fables too for the first 50 issues or so, despite Willingham's conservative politics occasionally shining through too obviously, but feels like it's been going on way too long due to its success. (Fables must be the second most popular Vertigo book after Sandman, right?) The story should've ended with the defeat of the Adversary, the Mr. Dark business and everything after that has been more or less anti-climactic. (Though I gotta still love him for making the second Big Bad an evil version of Gaiman's Sandman.) It's pretty obvious Willingham had no long-term plans for the plot once the war arc was finished.

I know it only officially started later on but don't all those collected editions have the Vertigo label on them? Treated as Vertigo comics in retrospect.

Obviously my speculations about what the British comics scene could have been is more made of wishful thinking than business knowledge.
But in the 80s and early 90s there were quite a few more British comics (including Marvel UK titles that weren't just reprints). I don't know what kind of money they were making or if they needed other jobs to support their comics work. But imagining they all stayed, surely there would have been a bigger comics scene in britain?

It's not that I'm particularly pro-British, it doesn't bother me at all when brits get published by American companies, more that I could see them having more control over their creations and probably less pressure to fit in to the sort of titles DC was willing to produce.

What made me think of all this was Quentin Tarantino complaining about brits relying more on America than keeping their own film industry growing.
I'm not really sure what to make of that because it's difficult to imagine Jason Statham ever having the sort of career he wanted in Britain but Tarantino was in favour of the sort of unique things that can grow in different countries.

I'm not putting this very well but I'd like to see you guys thoughts on this.

British comics in complete decline by then, sales had dropped to the point where Battle merged with Eagle in 1988 (and it had already absorbed Action in 1977). Tiger was kind of the daddy of them all, taking in lots of titles (such as my well-loved Speed) before it finally folded in the early 80s(?) and was kind of taken over by the Roy Race comic which ran until the early 90s. Scream only ran for about 3 months before it became part of Eagle. Starlord and Tornado were both fairly short-lived before 2000AD co-opted them, Vulcan had about 2 years before merging with Valiant which then merged with Eagle a couple of years later.

Most of the people you associate with, say, 2000AD and the remainder of the IPC line were also doing the girls' comics such as Jinty and Misty (both of which I really like).

The biggest success story in terms of publication was, and still is, Commando by DC Thomson which has an awful lot of art that's recognizable by e.g. John Ridgway and famously (according to him) refused to let Garth Ennis write for them, which was why he did War Stories.

Weren't Crisis, Revolver, Deadline, Toxic and 2000AD doing quite well? There was another title that was a lot like Heavy Metal but I don't think it was successful (explains why I can't remember but I think I have an issue somewhere).
I have no idea what kind of sales Marvel UK titles like Motormouth and Death's Head did.

Crisis only ran for three years, was mainly reprints for the last half of that and was a monthly for the final year. Revolver was only 7 issues. Toxic ran for 6 months. Deadline had a good run at it, but was as much a music magazine as comics and arguably was more interested in that side of things until Tank Girl blew up. After the failure of the TG movie it mainly reprinted US stuff like L&R, Flaming Carrot and Milk & Cheese.

Also honorable mentions to The Man At The Crossroads and his attempts through psst! and Escape to promote bande dessinee in Britain, to complete market disinterest.

> Deadline had a good run at it, but was as much a music magazine as comics

only in the last year or so. and by that time it was mostly reprints (albeit reprints of good american things that i hadn't read before).

i think they were victims of their own success really - the hewletts and bonds and dylans going on to bigger and better things.

Not at all, Blur as an example were in it all the time around the time of Leisure (91), Curve were on the front iirc before they were signed (1990), Ride were old hat by the time of Going Blank Again (early 92), Carter had a big feature when Sherriff Fatman came out (89?)...

but there'd be one or two pages of cud interview and 20 of comics.

My first reaction was, BUT... SEAGUY 3!!

I'm sure Morrison will be given carte blanche to do whatever he wants to do under the regular DC banner, but I'm not sure he'd want to given the changes they made to creator contracts a while back.

I mean, there's not much material change, as whatever little wisp of Vertigo currently remaining doesn't in any way resemble what it was back in the day, and since (as far as I can tell) the Vertigo-esque/Vertigo-lite stuff they've been publishing lately (eg Gerard Way's Young Animal stuff, the Sandman-verse titles) are unaffected. Even though the line has been a bloated drunken shut-in for most of its existence, I still mourn for the impact it had in its sleek and jaunty youth.

I think the last Vertigo comic I bought before Seaguy was the third issue of The Invisibles. Inbetween was my “comics, they ARE just for kids” snooty teenage phase.

TBH, as a kid, Vertigo’s biggest draw was the extra boobs in SHADE.

Been reading <i>The Unwritten</i>, got to Volume 3 and gotdamn this series has gotten good. Issue #17, "The Many Lives of Lizzie Hexam - A Pick-a-Story Book!" is a marvel.

Vertigo was finally euthanised last week btw

I know. I just wanted to enthuse to somebody about this series.
Also, I figure sooner or later DC will have another brainfart and dig the name back up, probably within five years.

just noting for thraed posterity!

The Unwritten was great for a while, but IMO it went on a bit too long and got a bit too meta (even for a series whose whole premise is about metafiction), Carey should've wrapped it up a bit earlier. Still, it's definitely the best post-90s Vertigo title that I've read.

Oh hey look, a new sub-imprint imaginatively titled DC Horror, which is kicking off with...Conjuring tie-in comics. Cool stuff, proud legacies.

https://bleedingcool.com/comics/dc-launches-new-horror-imprint-called-dc-horror-for-the-conjuring/

yeesh, enough with the imprints already

Question for the more experienced heads: are horror comics going through a resurgence/bubble these days? Or is it just something that I'm noticing more in the past couple years as I've started to get into them? Yes, I'm aware of some of the history of horror comics throughout the decades, but it feels like I'm seeing them more and more at the store especially in the past year. Or maybe my store is just promoting them more on social media or something. Any thoughts?

they are definitely in the midst of a resurgence. Aftershock and Boom have more than 60% of their roster as horror comics and Image and Dark Horse are likely around 40%. Chalk it up to The Walking Dead's long impact maybe?

Interesting, thanks!

They're still mostly written by Cullen Bunn, right?

lol, a lot of them are.
https://www.horrordna.com/features/7-most-promising-horror-comics-of-2021

I guess he's supposed to be good at it but, on the basis of his Marvel work, I can't say I'm champing at the bit to find out.

i don't care for bunn or kindt, which rules out like 1 of 5 comics these days

Right now it seems like there are a lot of guys -- Kindt, Bunn, Remender, Charles Soule, Tom Taylor, Dennis Hopeless, James Tynion, Donny Cates, I'm sure there are more -- who came up in the 00s and 10s, get big assignments for Marvel and DC, and clearly write better than a certain level of 90s hack (Scott Lodbell or Chuck Dixon, say) but are just... deeply, deeply ordinary.

I'm missing that layer of mid-tier writers who weren't exactly always *good* but were at least consistently weirdly interesting (e.g. Mike Baron, Messener-Loebs, John Ostrander, Ann Nocenti, etc.).

No one who's writing dozens of books a year can be consistently weird and interesting, tbf. And I don't blame these guys for taking the paychecks when they can get them

Agree, it's more like the ratio of hackwork to "weird and interesting" has gotten worse, from like 4:1 to 4:0.

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