From Bleeding Cool: "After Twenty-Six Years, DC Comics Rumoured to Close Vertigo"

It seems some Warner Bros. suit questioned why more Vertigo properties aren't fodder for movies, and learned that's because most of them are creator-owned. The reaction was to change Vertigo's contracts with creators, which led a lot of them to go elsewhere. And the series that have come along since haven't set the world on fire. 

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  • I wondered what caused Vertigo's previous collapse. Altered contracts, eh?

    Well, if it's not going to produce good comics, I won't be sorry to see it leave. I still have the old books if I want to remember Vertigo's heyday.

  • Which was one of the points of Vertigo in the first place: creator-owned characters but why foster such a culture if you have to share or lose that movie money?

  • Because without fostering that culture, there's no movie money to share?
  • I was being sarcastic, Rob!

    DC and Marvel are giving royalties because of the change in culture, not altruism. I'm sure WB would be churning out more Harry Potter movies if it wasn't for that pesky J.K. Rowlings. Look at what Disney did after Lucas was out of the picture!

  • Oh, duh, of course you were!

    I don't know why I didn't catch that, Philip. Sleep deprivation, I suspect! 

  • I've been thinking over the past few years that the heyday of Vertigo has long passed, and nothing seems able to bring it back. It had a good 15 years of heyday, but it just can't catch that fire anymore. At the time, it filled a big hole in the mainstream market, but now with Image and Dark Horse and several smaller companies filling that void, Vertigo seems to be kind of unneeded, I'm sad to say.

  • I have to agree that the creator-owned space now has lots of companies active. Image especially, although I remember reading something recently that said a lot of their titles aren't selling well recently (with the obvious exception of blockbusters like Saga). The Vertigo label used to be prestigious, and I bet that's still an attraction to some creators even after the contract change. I'd still hate to see it go (says the guy who named his blog "Mr. Vertigo").

  • Mark Sullivan (Vertiginous Mod) said:

    The Vertigo label used to be prestigious, and I bet that's still an attraction to some creators even after the contract change. 

    Thinking about this, it's possible that a prolific writer could have a good idea and a great idea. He/She might take the good idea to Vertigo (or whatever replaces Vertigo) to get attention and later take the great idea to a company that allows creator ownership. 



  • Wandering Sensei: Moderator Man said:

    I've been thinking over the past few years that the heyday of Vertigo has long passed, and nothing seems able to bring it back. It had a good 15 years of heyday, but it just can't catch that fire anymore. At the time, it filled a big hole in the mainstream market, but now with Image and Dark Horse and several smaller companies filling that void, Vertigo seems to be kind of unneeded, I'm sad to say.

    In addition, I think the Vertigo style was so influential that it was incorporated into mainstream comics. At that point, Vertigo didn't seem quite so groundbreaking and unique anymore.  I remember reading Grant Morrison's X-Men and Peter Milligan's X-Force/X-Statix and thinking, "these could be Vertigo books."

  • Boy, I'm going to miss Vertigo. I really think the wind came out of the sails of this latest relaunch when the writer of Border Town -- the runaway hit of the bunch -- was revealed as a serial harasser, and they decided to stop publishing it. It was the right decision, but it left the new lineup without its centerpiece. (Of the other books I read from that wave, Hex Wives was good but slow -- a decent read in trade, I imagine -- and American Carnage is really going all-out for the 100 Bullets/Scalped audience...including me.) 

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