I returned to reading comics in the mid '80s, while I was writing my dissertation on attempts to define race in African American novels addressing the issue of racial passing. In hindsight, I can see how my interest in dual identities led me back to reading comics as a light relief from the scholarship, but I must acknowledge that two major factors were also at work at the time. Alan Moore was writing the mini-series Watchmen, and Frank Miller was offering a dramatically different take on Batman in his mini-series, The Dark Knight Returns. Both of these works were from DC Comics, publishers of the Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and Justice League comics. Radically different interpretations of a dystopian America, each prompted by the political inequities of the Reagan administration, Watchmen and DKR appealed to me, emphasizing the necessity for personal responsibility and resilience while also encouraging me to follow writers in a genre I had always loved but had put aside in my high school years.
This new engagement led to my continuing to follow specific writers' works and the works of related authors as I discovered them. Moore was involved in DC's Swamp Thing and Hellblazer, core titles of what would become the DC Comics' imprint, Vertigo, a line of comics intended for grown-up readers who were interested in reading horror, crime, and speculative works in the graphic format. Having been a long-time reader of Heavy Metal, a compilation magazine that at the time offered cutting-edge European comics, I found Vertigo a welcome experiment. When DC made the move of carefully segregating Vertigo characters from the mainstream universe, assuring, for example, that Swamp Thing would have only limited contact with the costumed heroes of the regular DC Universe, that the occult matters addressed in Hellblazer would stay in that title, limiting the aggravating tendency of grand, multi-title crossovers so common in the DC imprint, and that creator-owned, limited-series titles would assure a satisfying story arc in title after title, I became devoted to that imprint. I got to read Grant Morrison's run on Animal Man. I saw the horror and outrage of American culture reflected in Garth Ennis' Preacher. I suffered the serial heartbreak of Neil Gaiman's Sandman. Only rarely had the more mainstream comics affected me as these works had. I wrote conference papers about them and even published an article about Hellblazer in a national journal, an unusual but welcome addition to my professional CV.
(Permit me parenthetically to mention that I also followed the DC imprint Piranha Press, whose central title, Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children, delighted me but exasperated my comics dealer at the time of its publication. Piranha was a writer's imprint that had a more outre feel than Vertigo. I miss it.)
Nevertheless, I find myself with the realization that while I have read and enjoyed Vertigo Comics for a generation now, the comics industry has changed radically in that time. Part of the change has come from its misapplication of its success in the '80s. Many in the industry, seeing the violence in DKR and thinking that it was the most marketable aspect of the work, permitted the ongoing mainstream series to rely more and more on violence as a primary selling point--rather than relying on authorship to complement its art, these comics began to play a game of chicken in seeing who could up the ante further with bloodbaths and ruthlessness, at the cost of character development and story. Entire issues of some comics would wind up being little more than a continued fight scene throughout. The other disturbing element of the industry, the more and more obvious tendency of the corporations to exploit their creators to the point of stealing their creations from them, hurt as well. Creators were dying in near poverty while huge corporations were garnering obscene profits from their work. Even DC, who gained a great deal of critical and commercial success from Watchmen, denied Moore royalties from products they labeled promotional rather than commercial. These issues, in concert with questionable editorial decisions such as forcing Rick Veitch to abandon a Swamp Thing time travel storyline where the title character was to encounter Christ and a telephone survey to determine whether the new Robin, Jason Todd, was to die in a Batman story arc, led to my understanding more and more the distinction between comics as product and comics as a means of expression. Of course, I side with the creators and grow increasingly resistant to overt editorial decisions to move mere product.
In the past year, DC has condensed the Vertigo line considerably, and, next March, DC will have ended the long-running Hellblazer series at #300--a twenty-five year run. Its doing so makes an abrupt shift in policy; earlier, in its relaunching its entire mainstream DC Universe line in 2011, DC took two characters long associated with Vertigo, Animal Man and Swamp Thing, and placed them in the mainstream DC Universe, but these characters did not have titles currently running under the Vertigo imprint at that time. DC's step of cancelling Hellblazer moves its main character, John Constantine, squarely in the DC Universe, no longer half in and half out as he has been since the introduction of DC's Justice League Dark. With Constantine, the title character will find himself set fully in the DC Universe. In diminishing Vertigo, DC Comics has made its choice to reduce the number of titles whose approach I prefer to read, a move intended to beef up its line intended for action-oriented readers. This move, along with its letting go one of Vertigo's most influential editors, Karen Berger, suggests to me that DC no longer considers me a part of the reading demographic worth its vigorous attention. DC is withdrawing from me.
At this point, it is still withdrawal. There are still great Vertigo titles, most notably Fables, a consideration of how iconic figures of legend continue to interact in the current world. Vertigo will also soon offer a mini-series written by Neil Gaiman that offers more background stories about Morpheus, the lead figure of Sandman. Grant Morrison is currently writing solid Superman and Batman stories, although his involvement with Superman ends in early spring 2013. Further, as a life-long Batman fan, I cannot help but continue to pick up Detective and Batman (Scott Snyder's writing on the latter title engages me). I have also found that Dark Horse Comics offers some titles that have the feel that Vertigo has maintained, so I am also following Mike Mignola's work involving Hellboy and BPRD. I am not quitting comics cold turkey, but I see my pull list dwindling, down to a third of its former length, and I cannot help but sense that the comics industry is cycling me out.
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