Advertising Comics: Grunge Rock, Flannel, Whatever

Part One: An Introduction To Dizzy Virtues

From a time where I can remember little more than flashes of fantastic and enticing images printed on a pulpy stock of paper that would smear when wet and absorb light, comics have been a part of my life. It wasn't long before superheroes got old to me. At that time, DC's Vertigo imprint brought a perspective and aesthetic that mirrored the tone of the new alternative grunge culture, even though most of the writers were from across the pond. Today, the paper has changed along with the talent. Karen Berger, the person responsible for cultivating the talent that would change the face of comics, is no longer the editor for Vertigo. Today, Vertigo still prints stories that don't belong in the same continuity as most of DC's other properties. The only difference today is that Dark Horse, Image, IDW, and many other publishers that knew Vertigo was on to something, have started publishing stories with a Vertigo feel. When Vertigo started out, it wasn't a completely new style. While it's hard to say where it officially began, Heavy Metal did something that caused Marvel to respond in turn with the Epic imprint which would publish two great stories that Vertigo would reprint: J. M. DeMatteis' Blood: A Tale and Moonshadow. A little spooky, a little sexy and a little "other,"one thing I loved so much about the Vertigo line from the 90's to the early 2000's, which I affectionately refer to as the Berger books, is that it seemed like anything could happen. There was something about the titles that was undefined and almost improvisational. But when you look back at the books that were coming out together, it's obvious they were all meticulously cultivated in the same lab. There was something about reading those titles that felt dangerous and I don't think it had anything to do with the presence of profanity or the occasional nude figures. It was the overall tone of the time, the cultural shift of the 90's where teen angst didn't only bond high school friends, it had a fierce presence in the beats of pop culture, fueling the movies, music, television and comics of the time.

The faces of Vertigo moving into your local comic store

At some point in the 90's, cynicism, greasy hair, Seattle, torn jeans, flannel, black and white photographs, Kurt Cobain and the term "alternative rock" coalesced in an orgiastic marketing strategy that birthed the term "heroin chic" live on MTV to be discussed on daytime television by men with slicked back hair and women in pant suits. This was the culture of the 90's. This was the world Vertigo spoke to and of.

Calvin Klein Models: "Nothing gets between me and my needle."

It's impossible to know how much of the general aesthetic of Generation X came from Seattle before being co-opted by marketers. Would acid-washed jeans and mismatched clothes have lasted and been as popular if the visually hypnotic media of television, film and magazines weren't as common? Would "extreme" have been such a ubiquitous adjective? It's not important to find an answer. What's important is to identify the markers that created the aesthetic, the attitude behind the generation. Or is the attitude something the generation was shown and then imitated? It's a slippery slope with a chicken/egg dilemma. Disregarding the answer, if there actually is one, the look and feel of the extreme/grunge culture was everywhere in the 90's. Two teenage characters from Rosanne, Darleen and David, not only dressed in the style of the 90's, but cover the walls in the 90's aesthetic found in posters of two comics that are benchmarks in 90's comics: Neil Gaiman's Sandman and James Robinson's The Golden Age.

With The Golden Age, James Robinson brought superheroes into environments where moral ambiguity take the place of justice and absolute authority to examine characters with human flaws dealing with drug abuse, guilt and power-hunger, similar to how Alan Moore used Charlton/DC characters in Watchman. The Golden Age is a book that looks at the aftermath of WWII on the superheroes of its era. While the story doesn't take place in the 90's, it's a perspective on classic heroes and the possible lives they lived after WWII that became popular in the 90's. After all, how better to appeal to a cynical teenager, frustrated with recycled superhero stories, than to show him an alternate history where heroes are just as crooked as the people on color television, with cops that are caught beating unarmed men on the news and voyeuristic real-life scandals on Hard Copy? The book also launched Robinson's version of

Starman which casted an actual member of Generation X in the lead role. After taking a look at the characters of the past through a present tense perspective, Robinson had Jack Knight inherit his father's Starman mantle to recreate the superhero in a modern and very 90's fashion. With a leather jacket, blue jeans, tattoo and bad attitude that stemmed from the resentment of having to take on the role of Starman, Jack has to pick up the pieces from the mess his father left behind. While not a Vertigo titles, the new Starman (along with titles like Hitman), gave readers a taste of the time by using characters that live in, look like and act like the 90's. Similar to the flagship Vertigo titles filled with offbeat characters, Starman and Hitman (a character in an interracial relationship that virtually lives in a bar and kills people for a living) don't play well with the rest of the toys in the chest.

Maybe Starman and Hitman don't play so well with the other characters in the DCU because they were new characters without 40 years of backstory to draw from. Maybe it's because they were Americans created by men from the United Kingdom. While both titles are very different than the other superhero books being published in the 90's, they couldn't really fit in with Vertigo either. Starman and Hitman may have been the bad boys of the DCU, but Tommy Monaghan and Jack Knight only pushed the boundaries.

Are you ready for Vertigo?

Vertigo, on the other hand, is the place boundaries would be beaten, broken and forgotten. While there's a lot to say about what Vertigo did to comics, the point here is not to break down Sandman, The Invisibles, Shade, The Changing Man, or any other title. Instead, the purpose here is to look at the general aesthetic, the visual and narrative tone, to show the ways they mirror and are an extension of the 90's culture they reflect and capture, to look at the way the books were publicized, with their covers and advertisements.

Making comics that weren't intended for children was not a product of the 90's. R. Crumb and the rest of the Haight/Ashbury scene made that clear in the 60's. But when Zap came out, it was mostly found in head shops, not comic shops, and certainly not published by DC. The challenge Vertigo faced was in talking to a mature audience while the kids are still awake, grabbing the attention of readers that may be ready for something new and keeping readers that may be outgrowing super heroes by offering them something they hadn't seen before they walked away from comics for good.

The cover for Preacher #1

For the most part, if a burning church was seen in a comic book, it would likely be there to give a superhero the opportunity to save someone, to right a wrong and (no pun intended) play god by saving the lives of those in danger by putting out the fire with super powers before throwing the perpetrator into a courthouse or prison cell. It was a new sensation to see the image of a burning church on the cover of a comic, where someone dressed like a priest is smiling in the background with hands clasped in villainous intent, all painted with realistic details stressing the believability. For this cover, the caricature-like images of superheroes are distant. When Glenn Fabry painted a cover for Preacher, it was clear the story behind the cover would be something you don't see in superhero books. A main theme Garth Ennis wrote about in Preacher was the role of certain elements in pop culture as artifacts of an American religion, but another thing Ennis did was uncover the horrors in American culture by digging under the surface. Those horrors are made perfectly clear in the first cover of Preacher, which is destructive, blasphemous, scary and begs the question of what kind of bizarre story and characters await. Not only would such a book and cover not exist on your average DC book, it wouldn't look like this without the 90's changing the cultural attitude towards censorship and what made for audience appropriate material. In the early 90's, shows like N.Y.P.D. Blues pushed the boundaries of what could air on television with its notorious reputation for broadcasting scenes with nudity and realistic violence. Ellen Degeneres made headlines and caused controversy when her character came out as gay. My So Called Life challenged how people viewed teenagers with a cast of high school misfits that questioned the motives and actions of their parents as easily as parents questioned their children. This was a family drama unimaginable to the audience of Father Knows Best. While the shape of television was changing into something more similar to a movie, comics that were more like books started to fill comic shops with the Vertigo imprint. More importantly, these covers lacked the approval of the Comics Code Authority.

Cover for Sandman #1

With the term "graphic novel," comics were given a makeover that tried to make them get the public to think of them more as literary books with pictures in them. Still, comics are the books that beg you to judge them by their cover. The cover of a comic is the first point in advertising. If the cover doesn't give a potential reader a good idea of the story that will be found under it, then it has failed. The cover of a 400 page novel does not work the same, it's supposed to provide an image that generates a tone that reflects the story of the book in some way, while the blurbs on the back do the job of giving a reader a description of the story within. With Vertigo, an interesting phenomenon in comics happened, the covers didn't always act like comic covers, at least not the way comic covers usually acted. With Sandman #1, Dave McKean hints at what will be within. In a multimedia style that blended digital photography with original paintings and illustrations to form beautiful, rich imagery, Mckean asked readers to dream about what could be in the pages of Sandman. This is a technique and style that Mckean would repeat every issue of Sandman, adding to the mystery, allure and general tone of the book.

Vertigo ad from 1993

It would be this tone that gave Vertigo comics a distinct style, feel and general attitude. And those are the elements that Vertigo would use to advertise itself. Like the Frank Zappa and Velvet Underground albums in an older sibling's record collection, Vertigo wanted to give readers stories they didn't know comics could tell. Vertigo's goal was to make its audience question how the horror genre worked while it casted a shadow of question on what comics were and could be. Looking at the advertisement (left) featured in DC comics the month before "Vertigo" would be printed on the cover of Sandman, Shade, The Changing Man, Doom Patrol, Swamp Thing, Animal Man, and Hellblazer, the flagship titles are given the element of danger with a black, white and red splash page that dares readers to take a look by asking the subconscious to fill in the hidden face with a mental image of itself.


Part Two: Rebelling Without A Cause

Using alcohol, cigarettes, mysterious masks, John Lennon's sunglasses and an ankh, Vertigo caught the eyes of people in comic shops. Partially because of the newness of their titles, but mostly because the intrigue that Vertigo wrapped their books in, titles like Hellblazer, Sandman, Mystery Theatre, and House of Secrets would attract a young adult audience with an artistic approach that was different from what they were used to.

By taking on characters and titles from DC's history, Vertigo reworked the mythology to appeal to a new group of people that most likely never heard of those titles, or couldn't afford to read them. The comics boom of the 90's created collectors out of fans when comics from the 1950's to 1970's started selling for five or more figures. Though the fade of looking at comics as investments would end as soon as the people buying three issues of the new number one figured out the golden and silver age books sold  for such high prices because of their scarcity, the surviving copies of original titles Vertigo was bringing back were expensive and trade paperback collections weren't as popular.

With the new House of Secrets and Prez offering different looks at old characters and titles, and Sandman Mystery Theatre taking a much darker look at the classic character fans were familiar with, Vertigo made it clear that it was publishing books that had never been seen before, comics that gave a reader with predictions "a good hard kick in the assumptions."

Originally the title of a horror anthology that debuted in the 1950's, House of Secrets titled a book for the first time in almost twenty years when Karen Bergen decided Vertigo comics would let Steven T. Seagle and Teddy Kristiansen reinvent it for a new generation in 1996. House of Secrets advertised itself with the question, "Can you keep a secret?," warning readers that their "unspoken truths" would "become dread realities in a court of supernatural horror." The image that accompanies this text shows a teenage girl with a sharp knife in her hand and grungy clothes on her back. Standing at the top of a crooked staircase with a scowl on her face, her and her background are drawn in the jagged, sketchy style Teddy Kristiansen would use to keep readers uneasy with an advertisement that is as unsettling as it is compelling. The ad also hints at the story of a female protagonist. Since comics were mostly advertised to a male audience, it was a gamble to make your lead character a teenage girl. But this was Vertigo and the aesthetic of the ad would capture a tone that worked perfectly for a horror comic. With the new faces Vertigo was giving to comics, and the success of The Sandman, the number of female readers was increasing. With Sandman's little sister Death personified in a female form, The Sandman was not only attracting new readers, many female, because Tori Amos mentioned the book and its writer in her songs. New readers were coming because comics were showing different worlds than the familiar ones where women mostly wore bikini-like costumes. Instead, comics started showing people fictions based in the world they lived in, setting that reminded them of their own.

House of Secrets wasn't the only title that sought to update characters from the past. Twenty years after Prez Rikardson became the first teenage president, Ed Brubaker wrote Prez: Smells Like Teen President. Taking from the title of a Nirvana song that was one of the most well recognized on the time, Prez is shown on his cover standing on a car filled with bumperstickers. If generation X wasn't excited to read a story about politics, they might be interested in a character that likes the same bands, as made clear with stickers that say Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr. and Nirvana, the bands that were royalty of the alternative airwaves. With its cover alone, the new Prez could have excited kids to go out and rock the vote, just as MTV told them to.

While changing up the past to suit the present is a creative approach that was successful for the books mentioned above, as well as Peter Milligan's  Shade, The Changing Man (which lasted for 70 issues), nothing would speak to a generation that tried so badly to separate itself from the previous generations like a brand new cast of characters that would speak their language while trying to create a new one.

With an advertisement for the first Invisible collection, a series of silhouettes build a layer of mystery around the characters with text that promises "the ultimate conspiracy," in a time where The X-Files used the same topic to much fanfare. With a neon hand grenade acting as a period on the corner of the ad, it's hard to know exactly what The Invisibles will be about. Even after reading and rereading it, it could be hard to figure out exactly what The Invisible is about. Still, it's the mod style of the characters, the idea of what exists in the shadows and the grenade painted in explosive colors that suggest this is a different kind of story about a new type of team.


Part Three: Tunnel Vision

The new wave of commercial comic books on shelves in the 1990's brought superheroes that were younger and acted like it (Starman, Hitman). Spider-Man may never hit his 30's, but he'll also never hit a rebellious chord, and Vertigo titles aimed to change the atmosphere of comics altogether. But the aesthetic and tone that vertigo used was so well defined that the Vertigo feel would become easily identifiable and imitated like any other successful brand. More than something that would be found and discussed between the walls of comic shops, titles like The Invisibles and Sandman would get written about and reviewed in popular youth culture magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone.

Even something as mainstream as the Washington Inquirer couldn't help but get on the bandwagon to discuss Vertigo when it said "Vertigo Comics is by far the HBO of the comic-book world." While fans and comics journals had been talking about the dream project of turning Sandman into an HBO series ever since HBO adapted Spawn for tv in 1997, making it even more gritty, violent and dark than the original comic was, it's no less true when the Washington Inquirer says it and Vertigo uses it in an ad printed in a 2007 issue of Hellblazer.

Like HBO, Vertigo created a style that was identifiable and imitated. It's hard to imagine cable tv putting out shows like Breaking Bad and Sons of Anarchy if not for The Sopranos. And, when Vertigo became popular, other publishers were paying attention. The variant cover for the first issue of Gen 13 (right), is as much an homage to  Dave Mckean, and the style he used on all of the covers of Sandman and The Dreaming as it is a way to get readers to give the book a second look and wonder what story rests behind the cover. Mixing photographs with painted and drawn images, cover artist Joe Dunn imitates Mckean's style with precision while also making it eerily reminiscent of Twin Peaks. This cover may have been a way to attract the same audience as Vertigo readers, but Gen 13 was trying to cast a wide net when advertising its superhero team of generation X characters. With 13 variant covers, the artwork parodied images of the 90's, including a famous cover of a recent issue of Spider-Man, a poster of the movie Pulp Fiction and the Janet Jackson cover of Rolling Stone. If nothing else, when Gen 13 ripped off of Vertigo, it was obvious that the imprint had made something recognizable, big and popular enough to steal. Reinventing comics for an American audience, it was clear Vertigo wasn't just publishing comics, it had officially turned into its own brand.

Vertigo's resident journalist Spider Jerusalem