As New York Comic Con opens, Vertigo, DC Entertainment’s celebrated nonsuperhero comics imprint, will rollout an ambitious slate of 12 new series. DC offered PW access to the creative teams behind three of the new series to get a better picture of the new offerings.
The first series to be launched will include Twilight Children, a surreal tale about an alien invasion by Eisner award-winning cartoonists Gilbert Hernandez (Love & Rockets) and Darwyn Cooke (Parker), which will be published in October, Unfollow, to be released in November, is a thriller focused on a social media mogul who dies and leaves his fortune to 140 random people, by Rob Williams (Martian Manhunter) and Mike Dowling (Death Sentence); and also out this month, Survivors’ Club, a horror tale about six survivors of a series of occult events, by noted horror novelist Lauren Beukes with art by Dale Halvorsen and Ryan Kelly.,
“This is a groundbreaking rollout for Vertigo and all 12 new titles represent the imprint at its core: smart and irreverent stories that will take you someplace stranger," said Shelly Bond, executive editor of Vertigo.
The launch of these new series marks a new chapter for Vertigo as the imprint continues to define itself after founding editor Karen Berger’s departure and after DC’s move to Los Angeles after 75 years in New York.
Twilight Children pairs two experienced creators for the first time on a comic that’s a little different from their usual work. Hernandez, known as much for his drawing as his writing, wrote the series and submitted “a simple, direct script,” said Cooke, who will draw the work. Cooke said he had to resist the impulse to channel the drawings of Hernandez.
“If you know Gilbert’s work as I do,” Cooke said, “you read the script and can almost see exactly how Gilbert would lay the page out, how he would do a panel. The urge to fall into that was very strong. I had to get myself past that and go ‘Yeah what would you do here?’”
Hernandez, who has published primarily with the small indie house Fantagraphics Books since he broke into comics in the 1980s, said publishing with Vertigo helped him expand his audience. “There was a period when my stuff was pretty wild,” Hernandez said. “They wanted part of my work, but not the crazy, nasty stuff. So I had to show I can tell a story without all that, a story like Twilight Children, for a different audience.”
Vertigo is known as a line where the editors are strongly involved in the creation of the comics. Bond, Williams said, provided “some very insightful notes” on Unfollow, which led to changes to a core character. “It makes for a stronger book to have someone questioning the characters’ actions and motivations and is there a better way of doing it?” said Halvorsen.
“You feel like you can deal with quite sophisticated themes and fit them within the boundaries of the contemporary action thriller and also get all those lovely subtextual layers that Mike [Dowling] and I enjoy,” Williams said. “It feels fun and unpretentious, and all these things were inherent in the Vertigo books I loved as a teenager.”
Survivors’ Club draws on the popular horror movies of the 1980s and looks at where the protagonists might be 30 years later. “Given the kinds of books Vertigo publishes,” said Halversen, indicating works like Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and Scott Snyder’s American Vampire, “they have a strong tradition of intelligent horror, and we couldn’t be in a better place.”
