It’s a sad time for comics fans as DC Comics announced the end of their Vertigo imprint, which was established in 1993.
Vertigo publishes comics aimed at adults, and it has been kept almost entirely separate from the main DC Universe, bar the occasional crossovers in Sandman and Hellblazer, both of which originated in the main DC imprint before moving to Vertigo.
The imprint was launched and overseen by editor Karen Berger, and helped to launch the careers of leading comic book creators including Neil Gaiman, Garth Ennis, Grant Morrison, Brian K. Vaughan, Brian Azzarello, Mike Carey and Warren Ellis. The line boasted such big-name comics as Sandman, Preacher, Hellblazer, Y: The Last Man, Transmetropolitan, Fables, Lucifer, iZombie, 100 Bullets and The Sheriff Of Babylon.
DC have also dropped their Zoom and Ink labels, and from January 2020 onwards will be dividing their content into three camps: DC Kids (for readers aged 8-12), DC (for readers aged 13 and over) and the DC Black Label (for readers aged 17 and over). Any Vertigo books still running – including the Sandman Universe books – will move over to DC Black Label.
In its 26 years Vertigo has crafted a reputation and a body of work that’s impressive enough to allow it to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with all the main comic book publishers, despite ‘just’ being an imprint. Pretty much all of the most daring comics of the 90s and early 00s came out of Vertigo, and it changed the perception of comics forever, proving to a relatively mainstream audience that comics weren’t just for kids, and that they could be a bold and challenging medium in their own right.
Vertigo has still been putting out excellent work in recent years, although its regular relaunches (the most recent being in 2018) indicated that DC didn’t quite know what to do with it following Berger’s departure in 2013 and the rise of Image Comics.
DC will officially stop releasing comics under the Vertigo banner at the end of the year. Get all the latest books news in every issue of SciFiNow.