DC's Vertigo imprint helped change the face of comics in the 80s and 90s. It introduced the wider comics reading audience to a range of exciting new talents, new genres and new themes, and was a pioneer in the development of the trade paperback market. Today, however, the imprint seems to be floundering. Smaller publishers are taking bigger risks, and all its most reliable talents are working on more mainstream products. Armed only with several bottles of wine, the Ninth Art editorial board asks, has Vertigo lost its relevance?

ANDREW WHEELER: In any given month, how many Vertigo titles are you reading?

ANTONY JOHNSTON: I'm reading TRANSMET. I got issue one of CODENAME: KNOCKOUT and thought, mm, no. 100 BULLETS I buy in trades. CRUSADES - don't make me laugh. LUCIFER and OUTLAW NATION I may pick in trades after good reviews. SWAMP THING I have no interest in.

ALASDAIR WATSON: There are some SANDMAN PRESENTS I want to pick up. TRANSMET I'm buying. Not CODENAME: KNOCKOUT. "Get some IQ with your T&A" is not the way to sell T&A to me. If I want some cheap porn I have an Internet connection. 100 BULLETS and LUCIFER I buy in trades. AMERICAN CENTURY I never even looked at. CRUSADES; I bought the zero issue and the first two issues, and couldn't work out what was going on and gave up. HELLBLAZER I'm stopping buying. OUTLAW NATION - I may get the trade. SWAMP THING I'm not buying.

ANDREW: I've just stopped getting TRANSMET, which I'll get in trades. LUCIFER; I'll probably get in trades. I like the 100 BULLETS trades, I might get them. HELLBLAZER I was getting for the artist, but I can't put up with it anymore. OUTLAW NATION is probably the only thing I'm still getting monthly, which surprises me. I didn't realise that was the case, but now I've stopped getting TRANSMET...

ANTONY: Why have you stopped getting TRANSMET?

ANDREW: Warren Ellis is writing it for the trades, so I'll buy it in trades. So, given what we've said we're buying, how does that compare to the past? Is Vertigo less appealing today?

ALASDAIR: Yes. I stopped buying x-books around the time I started getting Vertigo. You've always said Vertigo is what x-book readers grow up into, and it's true, I went from buying X-MEN to buying SANDMAN, BOOKS OF MAGIC, HELLBLAZER, PREACHER. There was a point where I was buying pretty much everything that Vertigo put out.

ANDREW: They had a lot of miniseries you probably weren't getting, things like EGYPT, ENIGMA... and you weren't getting SHADE.

ALASDAIR: I was probably getting about six titles a month, and now I'm down to, what, two? Plus some trades. I'm not belittling the creators' efforts here, but there's part of me thinking, where has the fun gone from the Vertigo line?

ANDREW: Was it meant to be about fun? Wasn't it meant to be about 'the darkness that lurks in the corners of your tiny mind'?

ALASDAIR: If I say that's my idea of fun, you'll call me a goth, so I'm not going to say that's fun.

ANDREW: I'm going to call you a goth anyway, because that's fun.

'Where has the fun gone from the Vertigo line?' ALASDAIR: Something's gone out of the Vertigo line, and what I think it is is the spirit of innovation. Look at them. What's new about these books? They're currently trading off SANDMAN PRESENTS.

ANTONY: They've always milked SANDMAN. SANDMAN was the thing that convinced DC that trade paperbacks made sense.

ANDREW: But at least two or three books a month are SANDMAN.

ALASDAIR: OK, if you take out Old School Vertigo, the stuff they launched the line with, what've you got?

ANTONY: You're left with... TRANSMET has been running for a few years, so that doesn't really count as innovation.

ALASDAIR: But it's the only one that's keeping my interest.

ANTONY: CODENAME: KNOCKOUT...I'm not enjoying it, but...

ANDREW: CODENAME: KNOCKOUT is crass.

ANTONY: It's unexciting. Speaking as a straight man who likes looking at pictures of pretty women, it's just not titillating. There is actually too much flesh on show, and there's too much sex in the story. The whole point of T&A books, and why we decry them, is that there isn't any sex in the story, but the pictures are all bursting with tits and arse. CODENAME: KNOCKOUT, on the other hand, is all about sex. 100 BULLETS... it's crime, but the concept is fairly innovative.

ALASDAIR: 100 BULLETS is cracking.

ANDREW: Although it's essentially THE LITTLEST HOBO...

ALASDAIR: Sorry?

ANDREW: It's evil LITTLEST HOBO. Travelling from town to town, solving a problem, moving on. It's THE LITTLEST HOBO with guns.

ANTONY: That's not quite the way the story's working out.

ANDREW: OK, it has slightly more of a grand arc than THE LITTLEST HOBO, but not as good a theme tune.

ANTONY: So what's AMERICAN CENTURY? HIGHWAY TO HEAVEN?

ANDREW: AMERICAN CENTURY feels like something non-Vertigo DC were trying to do back around the time Vertigo first existed, stuff like their SHADOW books.

ANTONY: AMERICAN CENTURY I specifically didn't pick up just because of the solicitation for the first issue. The first half of the solicitation was about [protagonist Harry Kraft] faking his own death, which sounded interesting, and the second half was about him returning to the US as a vengeful justice avenger with his plane, which sounded dreadful.

ALASDAIR: What's the premise?

ANDREW: I can barely remember the first issue. The hero's wife cheats on him or... I dunno. Everyone's a bit mean, and he gets all pissy about it. No one smiles enough. I dunno.

ALASDAIR: "World not a nice place, film at eleven."

ANDREW: So he goes and becomes a communist or something. I don't know, it was boring, I didn't like it, I'm not going to read it and you can't make me. OUTLAW NATION is the book that I'm reading and enjoying from Vertigo. The only one I'm buying every month.

ANTONY: Having just flicked through this issue here, the art's gorgeous.

ANDREW: It looks great. You're actually looking at the issue where the art team changes, but it looks exactly the same. Sudzuka was the penciller before this. Now Parlov pencils and Sudzuka inks. But Parlov's art is so much the same as Sudzuka's, it's really fairly seamless.

ANTONY: And didn't you say Sudzuka's similar to Biukovic?

ANDREW: Yeah, so there's this weird Croatian mind-meld happening, or Biukovic is possessing them and making them brilliant, which is fine by me. If Biukovic wants to possess Ian Churchill, that would be fantastic. Biukovic was the greatest new artist of the nineties, and is sadly dead, in a Jenny Sparks style. Going out at the end, there.

ALASDAIR: I thought you were going to say 'sadly missed'.

ANDREW: Well, he is sadly missed, because someone else is doing HUMAN TARGET 2. But one of the things I said when Biukovic died was, it's a shame he wasn't around long enough to influence anyone, but it's now clear that he has. OK, so it's the people that he was, I don't know, sharing a house with in Bosnia. Still, it's fantastic that there are people that appreciated his art, and I suppose in the end it was inevitable that someone that brilliant had an impact. There are only three trades with his art in, and one of those is a bloody STAR WARS book.

ANTONY: STAR WARS, GRENDEL, HUMAN TARGET and that's it? Good lord.

ANDREW: And the only other story of his I've got is that brilliant WEIRD WAR TALES story, 'Prayer To The Sun'. It's my favourite short story in any comic. It makes me weep to read it. It's Darko Macan writing it. They also did GRENDEL: DEVILS AND DEATHS together, which I adore.

ANTONY: I wasn't blown away by it, but it's alright.

ANDREW: Ah, shaddup, you like NEW STATESMAN, what do you know?

ANTONY: Funnily enough, his art on DEVILS AND DEATHS reminded me of Jim Baikie.

ANDREW: Well, then, Jim Baikie's come a long way, baby.

ANTONY: He'd have a long way to come. He lives on some Scottish island where the only other inhabitant is Cam Kennedy, or so I'm told.

ANDREW: Do artists just wash up on the shore every few years and call it home?

ANTONY: Wrapped in seaweed, with a FedEx package of artwork to deliver.

ALASDAIR: "Jings, it was cold in that water! We're not going back in."

ANTONY: Do you think the comparisons between OUTLAW NATION and PREACHER are fair?

ANDREW: No, the comparisons only exist for two reasons. One, because of the Glenn Fabry covers, and two, because it's partly an autopsy of America.

ALASDAIR: I've never read OUTLAW NATION, but I read Delano's and Ennis' HELLBLAZERs back to back some years ago, and I was so struck by the very different sensibilities.

ANTONY: I think the essential difference is that Delano is a pessimist and a cynic, and Ennis is quite obviously at his heart an optimist and a romantic.

ANDREW: I think that's true. I think PREACHER glorifies the myth of America. OUTLAW NATION rips the myth apart. It's so dense in American myth, but like you say, it's more cynical, and it looks at America and American history in a lot more depth, which is what makes it a much better autopsy of the American dream. PREACHER was more of an autopsy of the American male.

ALASDAIR: PREACHER was a Western and a love story.

ANDREW: Yeah, so it's about being a man and having honour and the usual Ennis themes.

ALASDAIR: And I wish he'd stop now.

ANTONY: I think it's safe to assume Vertigo will trade this. I think Vertigo are at the stage where they will trade every ongoing series at least once, and if that fucks up, a la DEADENDERS, then they will cancel it. They'll give everything at least one trade because they're realising that a lot of people will wait for the trade. I'm waiting for the trade on this. The LUCIFER trade, from what I've gathered, has sold exceedingly well and has bolstered the series. Is anybody reading CRUSADES?

ALASDAIR: I read the first three issues and thought it was shit.

ANTONY: You got further than me. I read one issue in the shop and thought, what the fuck?

ALASDAIR: I bought the zero issue, prestige format, and having paid for it, there was part of me going, well, it was alright. Maybe it'll be OK. I'll buy a couple of issues. By issue two the only thing that interested me was how that knight got to San Francisco, and how his morality would interact with the city, but sadly the weird DJ, who is an arsehole, seems to be the lead character, and I'm not interested in him.

ANDREW: CRUSADES is an example of promotion working against a book, because when I saw the promotional image at the Bristol convention last year, it was the most Liefeld-esque piece of shite, and I thought, well I'm not buying that. Steve Seagle's an OK writer, but he's so pretentious.

ALASDAIR: I want to read his issue of HOUSE OF SECRETS told entirely in symbolism. The premise of HOUSE OF SECRETS had this jury, five of them, and one of them was a flaming hand, which is a symbol anyway, and his origin story was apparently told entirely in symbolism with no dialogue.

ANTONY: Kelley Jones I've got no interest in as an artist.

ALASDAIR: I like his art.

ANDREW: I'm sure it must be better than that promotional art was.

ANTONY: Well actually, no, it isn't. Not in my book.

ALASDAIR: It's creative distortion.

ANTONY: You could call Liefeld's creative distortion...

ALASDAIR: Yes, but Jones' creative distortion is for effect, rather than just for 'I can't draw feet'.

ANTONY: You may be right, but in my opinion it's a bad effect. Distortion's fine if you're in some kind of fantasy world, but when you switch to scenes that are supposed to be taking place in the real world - a bit like Corben - that kind of distortion just throws you out.

ANDREW: I really dislike Corben's art. I know he's this great, revered horror artist...

ALASDAIR: Horror?

ANTONY: Oh absolutely. He's an old hand.

ALASDAIR: But his stuff on HELLBLAZER, I thought, this isn't horror. They're rubber-faced!

ANDREW: The sort of horror he did was the sort of horror you might associate with the seventies. I don't know how old he is...

ANTONY: He's not young. I don't know exactly how old he is, but I'd be surprised if he's under 40. He's a veteran.

ANDREW: The only thing I've seen of his is that HELLBLAZER story, and I would like to see what it is he's done that's made him so revered, because I cannot see it in that story. Everyone looked like their face had been drawn on a balloon.

ANTONY: There's something about Jones' art that really turns me off, and I read the CRUSADES issue zero and thought, this is awful. Uninteresting, bad dialogue, no tension.

ALASDAIR: I had assumed the approach to the first one, a prestige issue zero, would be different to how the series would be. Here's one side of it, and we'll flip it around and show you the other side in the series. And it never did.

ANTONY: Is anybody reading SWAMP THING?

ANDREW: Is anybody reading SWAMP THING?

ANTONY: Please! Somebody must read SWAMP THING.

'LUCIFER is serving the SANDMAN audience without going over old territory.' ANDREW: I don't think many people are reading SWAMP THING. [Note: Since this discussion was recorded, SWAMP THING has been slated for cancellation.] I think it plays to the same old Vertigo audience that LUCIFER plays to, but less successfully. I've not met anyone who has a bad thing to say about LUCIFER.

ANTONY: LUCIFER is a far more intriguing character, let's be honest.

ANDREW: A very cool, very sexy character.

ANTONY: This is the devil! It doesn't get more interesting than that, does it?

ANDREW: And it's completely serving the old SANDMAN audience without going over old territory.

ANTONY: It's Mike Carey writing it, isn't it? He was at Bristol, and he was at Dreddcon.

ANDREW: He was a very quiet, reserved fellow, and I thought, what's he going to have to say about the devil? But it's good stuff.

ALASDAIR: It's your classic Old School Vertigo, done well and interestingly, not just churning it out.

ANTONY: Can we define what Old School Vertigo actually is?

ALASDAIR: Mystic horror. Look at the launch titles. You've got SANDMAN, HELLBLAZER, SWAMP THING...

ANTONY: SHADE?

ANDREW: SHADE is the other edge of it. INVISIBLES too. There's the mystical stuff and the psychedelic drama. The surrealism is no longer Vertigo's bailiwick, really. Who is doing surrealism now?

ALASDAIR: This ties in to what Warren Ellis was saying on his Delphi message boards the other day. Who is doing the pop culture thing? Why isn't Vertigo doing the strange stuff, like SHADE and DOOM PATROL?

ANDREW: Has anyone got anything psychotropic to say anymore? If Grant Morrison is writing X-MEN, where is the psychedelia supposed to come from?

ANTONY: Morrison has become the mainstream. OBERGEIST is pretty surreal.

ANDREW: Which is... Top Cow. Maybe surrealism has had its day.

ANTONY: But why isn't Vertigo doing things that make people go, "fucking hell, that's weird", whether it's surreal or...

ALASDAIR: The best point of Vertigo was when they were publishing the tail end of SANDMAN, PREACHER, INVISIBLES... SHADE was probably still going. Look at the diversity in just those four. Four big, serious, literary works.

ANDREW: You look at the books that they're putting out now, and it's like college kids writing their thesis. All of these books feel like a thesis. It's as if Vertigo can't do stories anymore. It used to do stories that told ideas, and now it's taking ideas and trying to turn them into stories.

ALASDAIR: Yes. I would exclude TRANSMET from that

ANTONY: No, TRANSMET is a dissertation on journalism and politics.

ANDREW: 100 BULLETS is an attempt to take genre fiction to the nth degree. CODENAME: KNOCKOUT is the same only less successful. CRUSADES is exploring modern culture. OUTLAW NATION is certainly a thesis. The exceptions are LUCIFER, which is Old School, SWAMP THING, which straddles both... HELLBLAZER may be an exception, but what the hell is HELLBLAZER nowadays?

ANTONY: Delano's stuff is always a thesis. His HELLBLAZER was a thesis on British culture and Thatcherism.

ALASDAIR: The Vertigo I cited had four titles strongly associated with their writers. Steve Grant talked about this in a recent Master Of The Obvious column. Giving writers a chance to develop voices.

ANTONY: A lot of musicians who survived the sixties and seventies bemoan that young musicians aren't given enough time to make mistakes and learn their trade. They're expected to have number one right from the get-go, and they aren't allowed to have a poor-selling first album and to be given time to find their voice. I think Steven's absolutely right, it's not happening in comics either, and I'm not sure there's any solution to it. It's a bit of a sad state.

ANDREW: So Vertigo is suffering because there are no voices?

ALASDAIR: It's suffering because there is nowhere letting new talent in, no-one willing to give new talent the chance to come out and say, "I do things this way". Today your best hope for new talent is in the really small press, to pay for it yourself and hope you get noticed.

ANTONY: I agree with that, and I think part of the problem with Vertigo is that they are too concerned - and I'm sure they are valid financial concerns - with making sure whatever they launch is a hit. I don't think Ed Brubaker will be doing another ongoing series at Vertigo for some years to come, and I think that's a shame, because he is a great writer, and I don't think it's his fault that DEADENDERS was poorly received, but Vertigo can't afford those luxuries anymore.

ALASDAIR: Unless you're already a big name, you don't get to do your own series where your own voice comes through. The only way to become a big name is to get the sales, and you get the sales by having your own voice, and blah blah blah blah blah.

ANTONY: I may be wrong on this, but I don't consider Morrison was a massive name when INVISIBLES started, but somebody somehow, despite appalling sales on volume one, allowed him to carry on and write the second series, which was infinitely better and more commercially successful. Even Morrison needed a second chance with something that was very obviously his voice.

ANDREW: So maybe it's DC that has ceased to be patient? Maybe they feel that as an experiment, Vertigo...

ANTONY: ... is not as viable as it was?

ALASDAIR: Will the market even support being patient?

ANTONY: I don't think it will, and I think DEADENDERS proved that.

ANDREW: Maybe they thought Vertigo was this great opportunity to branch out, and all it has done is create a trade paperback market which, while successful, they don't think is quite justifying it. Maybe the pressure is on for Vertigo.

ANTONY: The pressure is on for them to have a commercial hit? It's been argued a few times that they don't have a SANDMAN or PREACHER anymore.

'Even Morrison needed a second chance to develop his voice.' ALASDAIR: Back in the day, they had SANDMAN underwriting the costs of INVISIBLES volume one. They don't anymore. SANDMAN and PREACHER, when you look at where they came in the charts, did much better than TRANSMET. TRANSMET is doing about 20,000 per issue. PREACHER did, what, 50,000 to 60,000?

ANTONY: And SANDMAN, at its height, was selling half a million copies per issue.

ALASDAIR: As I recall, one month it was actually DC's best-selling comic. These days HELLBLAZER is Vertigo's top seller, and that's doing around 30,000-odd.

ANTONY: It comes to something when HELLBLAZER is the top selling book at Vertigo. Its best sellers should be the brief flares of genius like HUMAN TARGET, where everyone goes, my God, that's brilliant. It shouldn't be the dependable stock company-owned title.

ANDREW: Vertigo has become conservative. Perhaps inevitably.

ANTONY: The way I feel about Vertigo at the moment is possibly very akin to you as an X-MEN reader, in that I don't think Vertigo is at its highest peak, but I have some kind of confidence, based completely on trust and with no evidence, that given a couple of years, something will happen and it will suddenly become an imprint that everyone is going 'wow' about again. I want that very much to happen and I will continue to follow its endeavours as a result. I think there is a good comparison to be made between Marvel zombies and Vertigo readers. I have that blind faith. I know Vertigo is better than this.

ANDREW: It's what I've said before about comics as sports team. If you love them, you'll support them through the bad times too.

ANTONY: The thing is that I don't follow any sports teams with that fervour, but making a dual comparison, I can see how that works now.

ANDREW: Well, my team is so whipping your team's arse at the moment.

ANTONY: Only because you drafted Grant Morrison as a free agent.

Wheeler, Johnston and Watson are the Ninth Art editorial board.

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