Just Like You Imagined

By Charles Webb

Welcome to installment the third of Vertigo Spotlight.

Releases for the month of August

Absolute V For Vendetta (Sep-02)
Air #13 (Sep-16)
The Alcoholic (Sep-16)
DMZ #45 (Sep-09)
DMZ Vol. 7: War Powers (Sep-02)
Fables #88 (Sep-16)
Fables Deluxe Edition Vol. 1 (Sep-30)
Greek Street #3 (Sep-02)
Hellblazer #259 (Sep-23)
House Of Mystery #17 (Sep-09)
Jack Of Fables #38 (Sep-30)
Madame Xanadu #15 (Sep-23)
Northlanders #20 (Sep-02)
Sweet Tooth #1 (Sep-02)
Unknown Soldier #12 (Sep-30)
The Unwritten #5 (Sep-09)
Young Liars #18 (Sep-02)

What's grabbing your interest from this list?

Death of the Young Liars

This month sees the publication of the final issue of David Lapham's Young Liars which struggled to find an audience given its flat-out odd story of brain damage, rock and roll, incest, and spider aliens. I'll need to reread the whole run to give the series a good think, but my first impression is that it felt like an uncomfortable mix of Lapham's masterful Stray Bullets and the Cliff's Notes version of Ennis's Preacher.

Sweet on Sweet Tooth

Jeff Lemire's (Essex County, The Nobody) post-apocalyptic body-drama (as opposed to body horror) Sweet Tooth hit shelves last week and I'm kind of digging it. This is my second exposure to Lemire, the first being his brilliant Essex County*.

I've let it kind of roll around in my mind over the last couple of days, and I have to say that I enjoyed it. It's not an absolute, out-of-the-park success like his acclaimed multi-character familial drama, but it has some of the same tones and textures to it. Using striking imagery and very little dialogue, we understand the relationship between Gus and his father much in the same way that Essex County, with a couple of awkward silences and character actions, helped us to understand so much about Lester and his uncle--all in a way that speaks to the virtues of the page and panel form.

Relying on the visual shorthand of making Gus's mutation one that endows him with the features of a deer goes a long way towards telling us what the character is about (fear, innocence) and what the book is going to be about (the loss of said innocence and maybe overcoming fear).

The premise has room to grow in the first chapter, and its twitchy, off-kilter mood just does its thing.

If anything, it reminded me of the odder passages in Jonathan Lethem's recent remix of Omega the Unknown. That is to say, it's damned odd but gentle at the same time, defined by its misfits who want/need--to be loved in spite of their maladjustments. By design, you want to protect the book's literally doe-eyed lead, but it remains to be seen what Lemire has in mind for further installments as our hero goes out into the larger world.

*Read the review by Jason Sacks and me and, in the meantime, you can check out Jason's thoughts on The Nobody here.

Alan Moore Goes Absolute (Again)

This month also sees V For Vendetta getting its own Absolute Edition, surely on the back of strong sales of the long-in-print trade which gained a boost after the not-so-bad movie from a couple of years back. The big question is why did Vertigo wait so long after the film release to get this edition out? Or better still, why not when Moore-mania was at its fevered pitch last year with the lead-up to the film release of Watchmen (which actually saw the Absolute version go out of print briefly)?

Surely better minds than mine had their reasons, but one has to think that the big changeover in leadership with Diane Nelson at the helm might see such oversights rectified in the future. One has to imagine that it will be of some importance to Nelson, who was responsible for managing not only the Harry Potter film brand but also coordinating that brand with the book properties, to ensure the synchronicity between film and print product during her regime.

Look Away, There is No Diane Nelson Article Here!

Seriously, better minds than mine have had their say on the issue, and it's all anyone has talked about save Joe Wilson's throwing a verbal shoe at our President. I will say that here that interest in exploiting the Vertigo properties may bode well for a company that owns its own distribution channels for an ongoing program (HBO, TNT) so I wouldn't be surprised if we start getting more traction on projects like Mark Steven Johnson's Preacher series (for better or worse).

Conjectural Markets

As kids, I bet many of you comics fans liked playing the old mix and match game--who could beat whom and how, and wouldn't it be great if artist X drew comic Y (I was always holding out for an extended Erik Larsen run on The Incredible Hulk).

Let's play that game today, but in a theoretically mature sense, by looking at the creation of the Vertigo Crime line and considering some other hypothetical labels that Vertigo could use. The purpose of this exercise would be to define some ways in which the label could do with some clear lines of demarcation: this is what Vertigo is about--come read our fine and well-written books. It would also help for the publishers to see when perhaps they've got too much of a good thing on the shelves: too many hard-boiled crime comics with tough-talking heroes? Maybe push one back to next year. And so on...

Of course, if you have any others to add, please do so in our fine forums.

Verti-Gore
Okay, I'm only half-joking with that godawful title, but I think Vertigo should have a separate imprint for its horror stories, with a red-tinged logo and everything. Think of how LionsGate promotes its annual horror offerings with the red gate and gears at the opening of their films. This would be a clear sign to the readers what they're in for, as well as being a good indicator for new readers of where they can find similar work to that graphic novel that just got made into a $30 million movie with Megan Fox's inevitable nude scene.

The trade collections for The Exterminators and perhaps a collected version of the Flinch anthology from a few years back would populate this catalogue. The recently-revived House of Mystery would also find a comfortable home in "Verti-Gore."

Most importantly, this would also be home to perhaps the one-off Vertigo treatment of the DCU's horror-themed characters: The Spectre by Mike Carey or an "uncut" version of Steve Niles' late, lamented Simon Dark (not to say that there is one, but what if the publisher threw in a little extra-hard R content--after the fact--to spice it up for trade?). This is the place where are the gore and guts that seems to end up in the all-ages horror comics should go.

The hardened takes on the mainstream horror characters would have double the added effect of allowing DC to soften its main line, making them new and young-reader-friendly while creating a certain cachet around the "extreme" takes on the characters.

Vertigo Heroes
Think of how the MAX line rehabilitated Frank Castle and you'll know where I'm coming from here.

"Heroes" would be the place where DC could exploit some of their back catalogue of second-string characters they're so insistent on giving their own series. This is where the aborted Suicide Squad should have occurred, with a creator like Brian Azzarello at the helm.

"Heroes" would also be a great place for the more outre takes on regular continuity characters: Azzarello's Joker OGN from last year fits the bill perfectly--a radical reimaging of the core concepts with a more adult tone that doesn't really fit in next to the brightly-colored latest issue of Billy Batson and the Magic of Shazam. If you have Kevin Smith writing for you--this writer who excels at playing "blue"--wouldn't you want to take advantage of what some feel is his verbal virtuosity without the fear that you're alienating the younger segment of the audience?

Or what about moving Gail Simone's Secret Six here and letting her brutal imagination run completely free with this sextet of misfits being the flagship characters for the line? Given that these characters feel like they're in a grimier, grittier, meaner version of the DCU, I say go all the way and put them in the Vertigo-ized versions of Gotham, Metropolis, and Star City.

"Heroes" is where you'd get your painted minis and OGNs, lovingly crafted and dark and completely demented. It would be the bridge to the really "hard" stuff of "Vertigo Crime" or whatever other labels they opt to create in the future. These are the books that would have very prominent covers featuring the DCU characters with very obvious redesigns for the purposes of this line. Essentially, it's all about the alternate exploitation of the properties here, and to that end, DC would do well to underline that purpose. Also, the mature audiences label should not only be prominent to keep the books out of the grubby little hands of children but also to establish that this is where you'll get the monthly allotment of the so-called comic decadence so prevalent now in the DCU.

Best of all, these would be your $2.99/$3.99 books--a premium charge for these titles to supplement the experimentation of other books released by Vertigo. Think about it--the moderate success of Secret Six making sure that books like Crossing Midnight get to stay on the shelves at a $1.99 price point to boot.

Vertigo Prestige (or just plain Vertigo)
This is where the titles with no discernable genre would go--Air, Unwritten, and reprints of Paul Pope's 100%. This would of course be the flagship line: where all things Vertigo would flow. Here, readers would find the high-concept comics, bios, and hard-to-pin-down works that tend to get notices at the end of the year on the "best of lists.
Vertigo Prime would be the prestige branch within the prestige branch, where lauded indie creators would rub shoulders with comics auteurs. This would, I believe, make the line more about the high-profile creators and less about their otherwise hard-to-describe books which, more often than not, get lost in the shuffle. Here, the creator's names would be given as much prominence on the cover as the title or publisher.

However, this is the line where the books would cost the least in their monthly format. At $1.99, they would be printed on regular paper stock at 24 pages each, collected in premium-priced hardcover trades and creators' editions to justify the reduced initial revenue. The lower $1.99 price point would create and maybe sustain a monthly audience while the value tax on the trades would make them thriving endeavors.

Vertigo Classics
Finally, this would be the line where reprints of the earliest Vertigo content would be arrayed. Let's say 1998 is the cutoff point beyond which it wouldn't be right to consider a title a "classic." Not a whole lot to say beyond this point--these would be the building blocks of Vertigo: Why I Hate Saturn, Sandman, Swamp Thing. Absolute editions for some of the longer ongoing books would be fine and all, but keeping the paperback trades in print would keep these titles alive. Re-launching them with the Classics trade dress would help them stand out on the shelves while keeping the appearance of vitality.

So what do you guys think out there? Am I right? Wrong? Crazy?

Let me know.

Until next time.

--CW

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