From The Big Two

I usually avoid discussing topics from either DC Comics or Marvel. Marvel owns more than 40% of the entire comics market. Plenty of people talk about them.

DC is like the less-successful older brother, but right now there is something I wanted to get towards with this post.

Vertigo is one of DC's imprints. It started back in 1993 when editor Karen Barger saw that certain titles, like Doom Patrol, Swamp Thing, Animal Man, and most famously, The Sandman, were being written with different goals and with a different and more mature audience in mind. The opportunity to lump them all together presented itself organically.

Famous books came afterwards, all under the Vertigo imprint, like Preacher.

Eventually after the DC imprint Helix folded, Transmetropolitan was folded into Vertigo. Preacher, Transmet, and Doom Patrol are all titles I'd like to discuss at some time, but I need to talk myself into it for this BB2 blog. Whatever...

Well, My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way is starting a "pop-up" imprint at DC under the weird-as-hell world inspired by Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol. Why not just work under the Vertigo imprint?

It turns out that Vertigo is much more like a creator owned imprint now (see Jeff Lemire's "Trillium"). This new imprint is called Young Animal, and it makes sense that Doom Patrol is the first title.

For the other titles, the story goes, DC execs gave a DC encyclopedia to Way and told him to find someone obscure.

Another Young Animal title will be "Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye." Obscurity, baby! Cave Carson has never had his own title, just a few specials in the early '60s and some crossovers later.

The whole reason this post exists is because I wanted to share these covers, from The Brave and the Bold and Showcase:

Their new title is mildly connected:

Anyway, here is a link to what a reader has called my Swamp Thing Dissertation. It's more of a review of a collection I bought too long ago that covers the first 10 issues from the early '70s.