The Morning After is a recurring column in which our intrepid commentator, Lars Pearson, wakes up, makes the coffee, discovers he’s a boy wizard in a world where magic is real (as one does) and looks at recent geekery in the harsh light of day.

I’ve started to dread Friday afternoons, because it’s when the Powers-That-Be try to dump depressing news, to head off the potential online dumpster fire that could result if the masses were actually paying attention. It’s a classic strategy – memorably brought to life in The West Wing episode “Take Out the Trash Day” – but it still works.

And so it was that this Friday brought news that we’d all been expecting, but was still saddening to hear… DC will start the process of shuttering Vertigo, its (shall we say) coffeehouse imprint that’s been running since 1993. Moving forward, the DC brand will reign supreme, albeit with “age-appropriate” labels. DC Kids will be aimed at, well, kids; the DC banner will denote material for anyone 13 and up (plus precocious 7 to 12 year olds who reflexively ignore such labels); and DC Black Label will encompass anything judged to be “mature” content.

In recent years, Vertigo’s demise has felt like a slowly oncoming iceberg; we all sensed it was happening, but there wasn’t much to do about it save recommend songs for the band. Now that the moment has arrived – and I can’t be alone in this – I’m caught between it raining in my heart, while my brain has some empathy for the business decisions at work here. Stupid heart! Stupid brain!

Vertigo, for those of you needing to step back and look at the forest here, started off life as a coalition of edgier DC books produced for the Direct Market, so didn’t have the content limitations of the comics produced for grocery store newsstands and such. (The same Direct Market strategy, of course, gave rise to the eye-watering success of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns.) What I’m going to loosely generalize as Wave 1 of Vertigo entailed the likes of Animal Man, Doom Patrol, Sandman, Shade the Changing Man, Swamp Thing, etc. being bundled together under the Vertigo banner in 1993. Those books had been running already, but would, in the years ahead, be showcased alongside new series such as The Books of Magic, The Invisibles, Preacher and Sandman Mystery Theatre.

It’s hard to overstate how much this raft of titles creatively saved the whole of the frikken 1990s for so many of us. The decade was something of a creative rut for Marvel and DC – partly because the A-level development lavished on series such as Uncanny X-Men, New Teen Titans, George Perez’s Wonder Woman, etc. in the 1980s had ground to a brutal halt (and wouldn’t truly restart until Marvel launched its Ultimate range in 2000), and partly because the publishers were expanding their output so quickly in the 90s, they worked their writers half to death, and literally didn’t have enough qualified artists to fill out the ranks.

Yeah, of course you can sift through the rubble to find something great from that decade – it gave us, to pick some examples, The Infinity Gauntlet, The Golden Age, James Robinson’s Starman, Alan Davis’s Excalibur and Peter David’s Incredible Hulk and Aquaman (plus X-Men: Age of Apocalypse, which see-sawed up and down in quality, but certainly has its moments) – but broadly speaking, that period left a lot of mainstream comic book readers feeling malnourished. So, thank God Vertigo was knocking it out of the park. It single-handedly made the era worth experiencing.

The staggering success story in this, of course, was Sandman (1989-1996), elegantly written by Neil Gaiman and vividly drawn by Kelley Jones, Jill Thompson, Colleen Doran and more. It was pretty great on its own merits, but happened to latch onto a cultural zeitgeist (particularly an upswing in goth culture), so became the comic book series for people who didn’t normally read comics. I lived in Los Angeles in 2000, and even then would see people in cafes reading Sandman whom I’d bet hard money didn’t touch any other comic series.

Wave 2 of Vertigo entailed another flourishing of hit new properties, including 100 Bullets, Fables, Lucifer, Scalped, Transmetropolitan, Y the Last Man and, a bit late in the game, American Vampire and iZombie. Those series weren’t just awesome, they helped make the writing careers of Brian Azzarello, Warren Ellis, Brian K Vaughn, Jason Aaron, Scott Snyder and more take flight, just as Wave 1 had lifted the sails of Garth Ennis and others. Vertigo wasn’t just a powerhouse of innovation, it put a new generation of talent onto the chessboard.

Then came what we might call Wave 3 (more of a thin drizzle, really), in which… oof… just about every Vertigo relaunch resoundingly failed. A round of new books in 2013 went down in flames, and still another relaunch in 2015, which included Clean Room (by the normally bankable Gail Simone), perished just as fast. Vertigo was still trying, but it became increasingly obvious that almost nobody cared. The imprint could not catch a break.

Critics like to link Vertigo’s downfall to its editorial matriarchs, Karen Berger and Shelly Bond, leaving / being shown the door (delete, in Berger’s case, according to which version of events you believe) in 2013 and 2016 respectively, and that almost certainly didn’t help. But the imprint’s fate had been sealed irrespective of that.

A story that’s persistently told concerning Vertigo’s decline involves a meeting some years back, when – as best we can tell – Alan F Horn, as President and COO of Warner Bros (the company that owns DC’s ass, which owns Vertigo’s hind quarters), discovered the extent to which Vertigo was publishing creator-owned work, meaning said creators were free to take the TV rights, film rights and so forth elsewhere. Horn apparently cracked down on that, and ordered that moving forward, the contracts would cede such rights to Warner Bros. To be clear, it appears that the Vertigo creators would still be paid if Warner Bros turned their property into a movie or TV show or somesuch – they just couldn’t make coin selling those rights to a rival studio. Cue a migration of talent to Image Comics, which was founded by artists, and seems perfectly happy to be a publishing guru and nothing else. The financial incentive to work for Image rather than Vertigo became startlingly obvious.

It’s easy to demonize Horn for a bout of corporate short-sightedness and stupidity, but looked at dispassionately, he made the right call. As much as we might love them, comic books are puny compared to Hollywood – the entire comics industry made slightly north of $1 billion last year, which is the equivalent of a single blockbuster (say, Captain Marvel). For Warner Bros, there is no glory in owning a publishing company that exists to lavish money and people-power on various IP, only for creators to migrate that IP to a rival studio, which can potentially make tens of millions of dollars on films or TV shows while you’re stuck with the comparatively piddling sales of some comic books.

It’s just to say: if you’re Warner Bros, better no Vertigo at all, than one that exists to make you peanuts while being the means by which your opponents can creep up behind you and slit your throat. That would be corporate stupidity. Executive heads have rolled for much less.

The other big thing that kneecapped Vertigo was DC reclaiming the properties that it had loaned out in the first place, leaving Vertigo without tentpole titles to work around. You can easily imagine Swamp Thing by Scott Snyder or Animal Man by Jeff Lemaire slotting into the Vertigo line-up, but they were instead part of DC’s New 52 initiative in 2011 (probably to the relief of those creators, who most likely got a higher page rate than Vertigo could offer). Likewise, DC reabsorbed John Constantine, the star of Vertigo’s Hellblazer series, in 2013 and repackaged him into its Constantine comic, just in time for the doomed Constantine TV show.

Increasingly, Vertigo couldn’t launch #1 issues with any name recognition, which inevitably meant that its remaining troops would charge onto the battlefield without much support, and get slaughtered. The exception was in 2018, when Vertigo launched a cadre of Sandman spin-offs… the marketing of which thumped the “Sandman Universe” aspect harder than the Vertigo label. Sandman‘s renown has become such, Vertigo is now surplus to requirements.

For some time now, critics have questioned whether we actually need Vertigo, given that Image is such a hub of new and innovative series. It’s a fair point, but Image lacks a house style – if you enjoyed one Vertigo book, you stood a fair chance of liking others, but Image has a much bigger ecosystem. Just because you like, say, The Walking Dead, it doesn’t automatically follow that you’ll want to check out I Hate Fairyland. Also, Image doesn’t elevate fledgling talent like Vertigo did. Image prefers for its creators to forge their careers elsewhere, however that happens, and then come to them – a perfectly sensible way of doing things, but one that leaves newcomers with nowhere to go.

That’s the most sobering aspect about Vertigo’s demise: the feeling that it’s a door closing with regards new talent and properties, without a corresponding one opening. DC Comics will continue, and some of Vertigo’s back catalog will presumably stay in print under DC Black Label. But as sales on individual titles struggle, we can expect DC to go into a protective crouch, and not try anything bold and daring – which for decades was Vertigo’s raison d’être. Marvel has a solid and enjoyable line-up, but doesn’t seem inclined to take many risks either. Image will continue to innovate as best it can, but still.

People keep asking me what I want from any given comic series, and I keep saying, “For God’s sake, surprise me. Make me laugh, make me cry. Bring a new voice into the mix. Have something to say. Go for it, whatever ‘it’ means.” Vertigo excelled at that, and now it’s gone. In terms of the comics industry being poised, eager and ready to reinvent the wheel with any regularity, we’ve turned a corner.

Back when Tim Hunter was learning to shave (and this whole magic thing), Lars Pearson was a department head at Wizard: The Guide to Comics. With Lance Parkin, he recently won an Independent Publisher Book Award for Ahistory: An Unauthorized History of the Doctor Who Universe.