DC is reviving Vertigo Comics because it has to

Among all the news from New York Comic Con this weekend, there was one item to make any comics fan gasp. DC Comics chief creative officer Jim Lee announced the return of DC’s storied Vertigo imprint, a home for original, creator-owned comics, from Y: The Last Man to Preacher. 

The revived imprint will be overseen by DC editor Chris Conroy (who confirmed the news on X). While Lee did not yet reveal any new Vertigo books, he announced some existing DC books would be grandfathered into the imprint, just as the original Vertigo became the home for preexisting books like The Sandman. The creator-owned horror series The Nice House by the Sea, from writer James Tynion IV and artist Álvaro Martínez Bueno, will lose its Black Label trade dress in favor of a new suit of Vertigo branding on its next reprint. 

As creator-owned work, TNHbtS and its predecessor series, The Nice House by the Lake, are odd ones out at DC’s Black Label imprint. Black Label is nominally DC’s silo for prestige, outside-central-continuity books about DC Comics-owned characters. It launched in 2018, about a year before Vertigo was formally shuttered. 

Just a few years ago, it felt like Black Label had killed Vertigo. Now? Black Label’s success may very well be the motive behind Vertigo’s return. 

The Western market for creator-owned comics has widened precipitously since Vertigo’s 1990s inception, but the imprint still never lost its mystique, or its reputation as the home of your favorite comic book creator’s favorite comics. By 2019, Vertigo arguably was coasting on that reputation, without a new bona fide hit in some time. But it still felt shocking that DC would shutter it and retire the branding. 

Vertigo was the place where mature, DC-adjacent critical darlings like The Sandman, Swamp Thing, Hellblazer, Animal Man, and Doom Patrol sat alongside blockbuster original comics like Preacher, Y: The Last Man, and Fables. Hollywood, hungry for comics adaptations, leaned in, with adaptations of Preacher, Watchmen, Sweet Tooth, The Kitchen, and Y airing or spinning up even as Vertigo shut down. 

The stopgap was the Black Label imprint, which promised to give the biggest artists in comics as much space as possible to take big swings with DC characters — exactly what Vertigo’s company-owned books historically excelled at. Unfortunately, when Vertigo bit the dust, Black Label had barely published two issues, one of them a PR boondoggle. 

But Black Label is six years old now, and in those six years, overseeing editor Conroy has kept the ethos of a Vertigo series alive — albeit predominantly under the parameters of company-owned comics. 

Black Label didn’t just promise liberation from DC continuity, but from monthly schedules and a standard comics publishing format. Black Label pages could literally be bigger than most DC comics, while projects like Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons were allowed five years between announcement and the final issue. Every minute of that timeline shows in the exquisitely constructed final product. Since 2018, Black Label has produced ambitious projects like The Other History of the DC Universe; artist-talent showcases like Wonder Woman: Dead Earth, Catwoman: Lonely City, and The Boy Wonder; and genre-straddling work like Rorschach and The Human Target. 

Hiding among that slew of DC-inspired titles were even two creator-owned projects, the Nice House books and the high-fantasy miniseries/tabletop sourcebook combo The Last God. Black Label also became the de facto home for continuations of existing Vertigo creator-owned titles, from Sweet Tooth: The Return to latter-day Fables books. 

But primarily, under Conroy’s thumb, Black Label has lived up to its promise of providing a big arena and asking for big swings, becoming an incubator for DC’s best talent and biggest names, like Scott Snyder, Jeff Lemire, Daniel Warren Johnson, John Ridley, Garth Ennis, Tom King, Si Spurrier, Ram V, James Tynion IV, Kelly Sue DeConnick, and Juni Ba.

This list of blockbuster writers and artists who’ve worked on Black Label books all have one other thing in common: They’re all doing highly anticipated and/or undeniably successful creator-owned projects. They’re just doing them at Image, Boom Studios, the ascendant Dark Horse Comics (with its Berger Books imprint from seminal Vertigo editor Karen Berger), Substack, Dstlry, Kickstarter, or some other creator-owned outlet. 

Why, one can imagine any savvy DC editor thinking, aren’t they publishing these stories with us? Was there no space at DC Comics for Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s Helen of Wyndhorn, described by its creators as a spiritual sequel to their Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow? No place for Si Spurrier and Charlie Adlard’s Hellblazer-inspired Damn Them All? For Ram V and Felipe Andrade’s post-Sandman meditation on the lives of Hindu gods in The Many Deaths of Laila Starr? 

You could argue that even if DC had had a functional Vertigo imprint when those projects were being shopped around, it still might not have offered the best publishing deal on the market. But Black Label’s success demonstrates exactly why DC Comics should want to have a home for creator-owned books. That’s inarguable. 

If Black Label really did kill Vertigo comics, it’s given DC every reason to resurrect it as well.