Vertigo Comics (Creator)

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Vertigo (briefly rebranded "DC Vertigo" in 2018) was an imprint of DC Comics, founded by Karen Berger in 1993.

As the The Dark Age of Comic Books moved on, DC Comics noticed they were publishing several series with the label “Suggested for mature audiences", that weren't just dark, they were mature — with complex, thinky, often philosophical stories and deep, complicated characters, by names like Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and Neil Gaiman. Thus, to separate these from the "normal" DCU fare, they created the Vertigo Comics imprint.

Many of these were remakes of old DCU properties, given new life through clever writing. The Sandman (1989), Animal Man, Doom Patrol, Shade, the Changing Man and Swamp Thing are probably the exemplars here. It seemed the rule was "The more obscure, the better"; series like Brother Power the Geek, a two-issue Totally Radical attempt from the '60s to appeal to the "hippie" market, were brought back as dark, edgy romps.

This had the knock-on effect of pretty much excising certain characters from the main DCU, for fear that a John Constantine and Batman crossover would encourage little kids to pick up Hellblazer. This meant that certain comics, though still technically part of the DCU, were unable to do "proper" crossovers or acknowledge that connection directly. This was relaxed occasionally for one-panel cameos (Constantine in Hitman), characters whose comics have ended (Daniel from The Sandman (1989) appeared in JLA, while Animal Man and the Doom Patrol have come back to The DCU full-time) and characters who have always straddled the divide between the two (the Phantom Stranger, Zatanna, et al). DC's 2011 partial Continuity Reboot brought several characters like Constantine and Swamp Thing back into the main DC continuity fold. The Vertigo-only Hellblazer continued to be published separately until issue 300 in 2013, when it was replaced by a main-DC-universe Constantine title. This left Vertigo proper no longer publishing any ongoing title featuring characters originating in the DC universe.

Over the 2000s, however, the focus of the imprint had gradually shifted from its original shared-universe titles to creator-owned original works. These were still often in the horror/fantasy genre. 2009-11 saw an unsuccessful attempt at genre diversification with a series of "Vertigo Crime" graphic novels, although a number of the published titles retained supernatural elements and one of the first to be published was a Hellblazer special. In the second half of the 2010s, DC launched two separate new imprints, Young Animal and DC Black Label, which in many ways revived the old Vertigo concept of stories set in the main DC universe but with more "adult" subject matter and a more experimental artistic approach.

The Vertigo line was edited by Karen Berger from its inception in 1993, until she stepped down in 2013. It was Berger who edited Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, and brought Neil Gaiman to prominence on The Sandman (1989), the series that led to the formation of the imprint.

In 2019, Vertigo was announced to be shutting down, with various reports being that the edgier subject matter being more socially accepted today, or that the 2018 relaunch (which ended up being mired in controversy after the announced Second Coming was dropped following pre-emptive protests from fundamentalist Christians over its subject matter, and the well-reviewed Border Town had to be cancelled after four issues following credible accusations of sexual assault against its writer that caused the artist to withdraw from the project) proved a Creator Killer. In either case, the titles moved elsewhere in DC. Ironically, the closing of Vertigo coincided with the release of The Kitchen, a film adaptation of their comic of the same name, which prominently featured the (short-lived) DC Vertigo logo in its marketing and opening titles.

Compare Marvel's various adult imprints, Marvel MAX for Darker and Edgier versions of Marvel Universe titles, and first Epic Comics and later Icon Comics for mostly creator-owned stand-alone works.

Some of the best-known series published by Vertigo include:

100 Bullets
American Splendor (2006-2008)
American Vampire
Animal Man
Art Ops
The Books of Magic
The Childrens Crusade
Clean Room
Crossing Midnight
Daytripper
The Dead Boy Detectives
DMZ
Doom Patrol
Enigma
Everafter: From the Pages of Fables
Fables
The Filth
Flex Mentallo
Goddess Mode
Hellblazer
Hex Wives
House of Mystery
Incognegro
The Invisibles
iZombie
The Losers
Lucifer
Madame Xanadu
Muktuk Wolfsbreath, Hard-Boiled Shaman
Preacher
Pride of Baghdad
Punk Rock Jesus
The Sandman (1989)
Saucer Country (subsequently moved to IDW Publishing)
Scalped
Seaguy
Shade, the Changing Man
Sheriff Of Baghdad
Swamp Thing
Sweet Tooth
Transmetropolitan
Unknown Soldier
The Unwritten
V for Vendetta
We 3
Y: The Last Man
You Are Here

Some Vertigo series are technically part of The DCU, due to using DCU characters, and Word of God says the shared universe titles like Hellblazer and The Sandman (1989) ARE part of the mainstream DCU. However, not all of them are always Canon for the DCU characters, and some of them effectively take place in a world of their own. These include: