“In Which a Wake is Held”—the Life and Death of Vertigo

Abstract

Although Vertigo is a much-discussed imprint, scholarly and fan conversations concerning its history and impact on the comics industry often focuses on its early years of existence, leading to a paradoxical situation where much of Vertigo’s fame is associated with series that partly predate it (Sandman being a case in point). In this introductory essay, I seek to provide a more comprehensive account of the imprint’s trajectory, from its foundation in 1993 to its demise in 2019.

I suggest that Vertigo’s history can be divided into three periods. The first starts with the birth of the imprint in 1993 and ends roughly a decade later, with 2002 marking the conclusion of Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan, arguably the last of the great “British Invasion” series. The second period, from 2003 to 2012, brought a number of changes, as Vertigo’s style was widely copied by the comics industry, while the imprint had to deal with contractual changes imposed from above. Finally, Karen Berger’s departure in 2013 was a major turning point, and during this third period the imprint struggled to reconnect with its past, through reboots and miniseries that seldom found their audience. Thus, although many fans mourned the imprint’s death in 2019, the news hardly came as a surprise in a context where the Vertigo style, if such a thing exists, has in fact pervaded much of contemporary mainstream production.