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Underground > Comic Books >

So Why Do People Hate Vertigo?

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Regrettable Juvenilia

11:21 / 29.11.04

Good luck with that.

rabideyemovement

11:28 / 29.11.04

I've always loved the Vertigo comics and I have just about everything ever printed under that line. But honestly, I haven't much cared for anything since about the time Transmet ended. 100 Bullets can sometimes be thoughtful, and Fables is alright, but mostly its crap compared to when they began. And that newest Swamp Thing offering? Blecchh!!! At least Hellblazer is getting better...

11:45 / 29.11.04

but but but what about the Helix line?

11:49 / 29.11.04

I've always loved the Vertigo comics and I have just about everything ever printed under that line.

Should I take this to mean that you've bought almost everything Vertigo's ever published, or that you've sampled every title? If the former, are you mad?

Suedey! SHOT FOR MEAT!

12:55 / 29.11.04

I read comics sometimes, but overall I decided this: fuck comics.

13:47 / 29.11.04

No Suedey, FUCK YOU!

14:14 / 29.11.04

>> I predict that in five or six years time, we'll eat our meals in a pill, we'll live on the moon, and the wisdom in comics will be for classic long-established characters who no-one has ever seen before. This should cause a lot of heads to explode at Marvel and DC and we can live in peace with our Martian Overlords.

Amen.

Seaguy published by Wildstorm?? Maybe they should have had Deathblow and Gen13 guest-star in issue 2. WildC.A.T.S. on the moon fighting the anubis jackals!!! YESSZZZ!!!!

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

19:34 / 29.11.04

Finder Wolf, not to be overly snarky, but your post almost shows that once a brand identity is set, it's nearly impossible to break. Wildstorm has gone from an Image line with Flashy art and no story to a mature readers super-hero line with Ex Machina, Authority (and even WILDCats became a decent comic after the first 20 issues or so)....

As for comics sales figures, my site has too much in the way of snotty commentary on the numbers, so just go to this site and get the raw numbers. Y-The Last Man is Vertigo's best selling comic, and is usually selling around 25,000 copies a month. Most of the other Vertigo comics sell around 15,000. They sell much better as trade paperbacks, but I also think that is because the line identity is that "anything worthwhile will be collected as trades, so you can ignore it".

20:13 / 29.11.04

True about the line brand, although I was just taking the piss, of course. But yes, when I think Wildstorm, that's kind of the silly cliche of what I think. Ex Machina is the exception (i.e. quality comics from Wildstorm). Many people laughed when they came out with the subdivisions Wildstorm Signature Series, Wildstorm Universe and Wildstorm Some Third Fucking Category That Further Splits Hairs. (Maybe Wildstorm Written By Kurt Busiek In His Astro City Universe?)

20:16 / 29.11.04

And I do like The Authority, of course, I'm totally overgeneralizing about 'quality comics from Wildstorm'. But the last years of Authority since Millar left have been pretty silly and the new Brubaker is OK but nothing too exciting. I know WildCats has gone in and out and sometimes been pretty good. But it seems like Wildstorm boils down to Ellis (now gone) and the occasionally halfway decent Casey WildCats book (also now gone). Now it's Brubaker, Vaughn and Busiek in terms of the standard bearers of good Wildstorm books now (not counting Alan Moore's ABC under the auspices of Wildstorm Comics).

And yes, I know that Ocean by Ellis & Sprouse is Wildstorm also.

I'm just talking generally here.

21:50 / 29.11.04

Solitaire Rose - to reiterate a point I was attempting to make up thread - I don't think Vertigo's decision to collect and keep in print trades for the book shop market is based on any nebulous notion of brand identity. Rather, i think DC's editorial staff percieve
that the Vertigo books appeal to a different, and far wider, potential market than, to use your example, Legion of Superheroes does.

06:36 / 30.11.04

Solitaire, without trying to gang up on you, your argument seems to be of the "I reckon" type. I remain far from convinced.

And, what Sleaze said.

rabideyemovement

07:38 / 30.11.04

Do they really sell better in trade paperbacks than in single issues?
And Bobossbot, I meant that own nearly everything Vertigo ever put out. Missing some of the Unseen Hand, a couple of Animal Man issues, and a few of Shade and DP... I stopped collecting most of the new stuff about two years back.

ONLY NICE THINGS

08:48 / 30.11.04

Ye Gods.

Can I just say that it's interesting that unBjork had to couch this in terms of "hatred", despite, it seems, there not being much in the way of Vertigo hating going on? Why exactly was that? "People don't seem to like the books being put out by Vertigo as much as I do" became:

Since I started coming to these boards, I've noticed an undercurrent of dislike/hatred for the Vertigo imprint that occasionally breaks through the crust in an occasion of only occasionally backed-up invective.

Call me curious...

10:56 / 30.11.04

Rabid, you must've lurved Vertigo. That, or you had a lot of money to burn.

ONLY NICE THINGS

11:04 / 30.11.04

That really is pretty scary, rabideye. On the plus side, you've got a lot of resources to draw from. On the other... all of it? Even, like, the Dreaming? And Millennium Fever? And... all of it?

Cripes.

Regrettable Juvenilia

11:04 / 30.11.04

Solitaire, what evidence leads you to conclude that Vertigo's sales would be *higher* if they had decided not to attempt to break out of the spookybeard ghetto, rather than *lower*?

Haus of Mystery

13:34 / 30.11.04

I actually thought the line would fold a few years back, when the initial surge of post-Sandman titles were drying up. Preacher & The Invisibles gave it a rejuvenating shot, and since then I think it's done a good job of bringing off-beat titles to the mainstream, and ensuring high production quality and regular(ish) publication. Sure there's plenty of duffers, but generally I'm impressed it's still going. Look at Marvel's MAX imprint in comparison, an umbrella term that seems to mean 'swearing & exit wounds' (and softcore Elektra covers). No hate here.

14:30 / 30.11.04

Elektra, scarily, wasn't even a MAX book.

I read a year of The Dreaming as a foolish undergrad still wowed by Gaiman's Sandman. The Pete Hogan issues were just about passable.

Vertigo has played a definitive part in my comic readership, inasmuch as - for some time - I'd sample most of a cabal of Brit men's writings (not Delano, though, after having read Batman/Man-Bat or his Transformers annual text piece, c.1985, when I was 6) who'd once written/were currently writing for the imprint. And, latterly, Ed Brubaker. Prior to that, I was a juve reading X-books and Comics World which always told me how bad the books I read were, and how good Vertigo was, basically. The local library had loads of stuff, including a complete Sandman GN run. It was obviously more erudite than Liefeld and Nicieza's steroid crazed ravings in X-Force.

In retrospect, I find a lot to like in Sandman, most especially 'A Game of You' and the Prez story, along with perennial fave 'Season of Mists'. Haus mostly has Gaiman to rights, though; he's certainly a better visual writer than he is a novelist. And it kind of peeves me that he jumped ship (1602 excepted, and really there's not a great big amount to recommend that) on the medium that made him.

I hadn't been so into Vertigo a couple of years back; think I was only getting an ailing Transmetropolitan. Oh, and Hellblazer which Carey's tedio-core scripts have finally made me drop.

I still like digging up a lot of old series and back-issues from the imprint, and proto-Vertigo stuff (Doom Patrol, Skreemer, Moore Swamp Thing obviously.) That said, I prefer to think of the former and latter as happy accidental by-products of mainline DCU.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

23:45 / 30.11.04

I base my theory on the sales figures that Marvel Knights was able to rack up by positioning itself as a "mature readers" line for Marvel.

Like any theory, I'm still thinking about it, and if DC does the mature readers versions of the mainline heroes that we've been hearing hints about, it'll make for interesting sales comparisons.

Granted, Vertigo does sell well enough in book form to continue, but just doing quick calculations, when Hellblazer only sells 15,000, that means it only pulls in around $18,000 into DC's coffers, and that's before you figure printing costs, overhead and the like. I would say that a lot of the books are just breaking even, if that. Granted, everyone thinks of "Sandman" as a huger success, but the highest selling issue of it as a comic book was #50 with the glow in the dark silver tricked out cover which sold 70,000...back when X-Men was moving about 750,000 a month.

08:25 / 03.12.04

Can I just say that it's interesting that unBjork had to couch this in terms of "hatred", despite, it seems, there not being much in the way of Vertigo hating going on? Why exactly was that? "People don't seem to like the books being put out by Vertigo as much as I do" became:

"Since I started coming to these boards, I've noticed an undercurrent of dislike/hatred for the Vertigo imprint that occasionally breaks through the crust in an occasion of only occasionally backed-up invective."

Other way 'round, to an extent. That's why I wrote that, in retrospect, 'hate' may have been too strong of a word. Apparently, the impression I was working from was off-base, as you're correct in saying that there really isn't much hate to be found now.

Curiousity sated?

Haus of Mystery

09:40 / 03.12.04

But it has been an intersting recap of people's highs and lows regarding the imprint, so worthwhile thread IMHO.

10:12 / 03.12.04

Constantine is quite an ideosyncratic title since its one of the few remaining ongoing vertigo comics which DC fully owns. It also has a movie coming out imminently, thus DC have an interest in publishing the title at the moment regardless of sales...

12:24 / 03.12.04

They also make money from advertising.

21:56 / 03.12.04

At least DC didn't change the logo on the Hellblazer comics to make it exactly the same as the shitty half-moon movie logo. They changed it, of course, marketing dictates that and you do want to make sure someone who sees the movie and comes into the shop can tell from the cover/title that "Constantine" is "Hellblazer", but they didn't totally just cut and paste the movie logo like Marvel has done in the past (cough*X-Menmovies*cough)

22:44 / 03.12.04

So is Ol' JC going to start dying his hair black so keanu Constantine and comic Constantine match up...

07:46 / 04.12.04

Quickly on the upcoming Hellblazer movie... I still hold faith. I hear a lot of criticism of it just because Keanu got the role; but in all honesty, I think he's one of those actors that has the ability to do a halfway decent job, but not the ability to choose between scripts that should/shouldn't be done.

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