r/Vertigocomics

Comics in the 90’s were in a strange place. Beneath the wave of the “Extreme” era brought on by that era of Marvel comics and the Image boom that followed, a stranger breed of comics was being published over at DC. Vertigo, DC’s home for more mature, complex, and original comics, was going strong with some of the most unique creations in the medium. Among these was a revival of a Golden Age pulp crime-fighter in the pages of Sandman Mystery Theatre. Written by Steven T. Seagle & Grendel creator Matt Wagner and drawn primarily by future B.P.R.D. artist Guy Davis, Mystery Theatre is a pulpy neo-noir crime series that is also one of the most insightful and tonally unique comics in its genre. Taking place in the late 1930’s, Mystery Theatre tackles corruption and murder in New York City in the face of post-Great Depression class disparity and the looming specter of World War II. Despite a premature ending, Sandman Mystery Theatre is one of the greatest and most underrated comics of the 1990’s.

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Sandman Mystery Theatre’s only real weakness is its unfortunately sudden ending. While still in production of issue #69, DC editorial at the time told the creative team that the next issue would be the last. Mystery Theatre was cancelled suddenly due to poor sales, leaving Seagle, Wagner, and Davis to rush an ending they weren’t planning on this soon. Still, 70 issues is a hell of a run. Mystery Theatre still stands as one of the best and most unique comics from Vertigo’s golden age, and one of the most interesting comics of the 1990’s.

Even as Pollack transitions the title from Morrison’s hands to her own, the focal shift is evident. Far more page space is dedicated to characters’ social interactions, their emotions, and their interpersonal conflicts, than to fleshing out grand metaphysical concepts. That isn’t to say that Pollack abandoned the absurdity of Morrison’s run. If anything, many of Pollack’s stories push the envelope further than Morrison ever did, but she never feels like she’s in a hurry.

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I don’t mean to suggest that there was any animosity between the two writers. Pollack’s work on Doom Patrol challenges the constraints and weaknesses of Morrison’s run, pushing it towards greater emotional vulnerability and depth. If the silver age antics of the original Doom Patrol set a precedent for the truly weird in DC comics that Morrison could build upon, so too did Morrison’s incredible experiments in the absurd set Pollack up to ground the absurd in weighty emotional realism.

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Where Morrison pioneered the comics writer’s freedom to experiment with character and concept, Pollack paved the way for contemporary comics to be both formally experimental and emotionally nuanced. What sets Pollack’s run of Doom Patrol apart from Morrison’s is the tenderness with which she treats her characters, suffusing her stories with empathy just as Dorothy does her imaginary friends.

This constant shift in artists throughout the second omnibus of Shade represents a growing fault throughout the series. Common wisdom is that this version of Shade probably should’ve ended with issue #50, which indeed feels like a possible end, but I think the rot starts earlier.

With this volume, instead of spending most of their time on the road, the characters are stuck in Hotel Shade with the trouble coming to them. This makes the whole series, whose main characters often tried to ignore the call for adventures, even more passive. It feels more and more like stuff is just happening to these people, the constantly changing artist-roster contributes to this sense of randomness. What could’ve been charming in small bursts becomes annoying in a volume so large. Shade the Changing Man was teetering on the brink of chaos from the word "go," a series that tried to be the ultimate British-outsider-take-on-America 2, by the time of the second half subtlety went out of the window. The subtext became text.

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Oddly enough, despite the problem of the shifting artists there isn’t a page of bad art throughout this book. Just look at this list: Glyn Dillon, Richard Case, Steve Yeowell, Micheal Lark, Mark Buckgingham, Philip Bond, Sean Phillips … all in the height of their powers. And, thankfully, it is just the right period of the 1990s, before digital coloring became the new norm; I just like this period for coloring in DC comics — Daniel Vozzo and David Hornung do their best to keep a sense of consistency throughout. Murky enough to give the whole thing a distinct personality, but not so murky we forget this is meant to be psychedelic extravaganza. There’s just something that works in that particular time and place. Even when the scripts are half-baked, or over-baked, Shade the Changing Man is, if nothing else, a series worth looking at.

The artistic heights cannot, alas, mask the writerly lows. Shade ends, like so many of these types of stories, in a sort of self-cancellation, with the series pretty much admitting its time was up. Which was true enough. Sadly, it also ended several dozen issues too late.

Hey all - just wanted to post a link to my recent podcast episode where I discuss HELLBLAZER #62 by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon with Austin English of Domino Books. It’s available in an audio-only version via your favorite podcast app, or as a video on YouTube.

Austin and I have a wide-ranging conversation about all kinds of things, including the dawn of Vertigo, comics activism, the empathetic nature of Garth Ennis comics, the storytelling prowess of Steve Dillon, and early AIDS awareness efforts in comics form.

Not every episode of the pod is about Hellblazer, but figured this was the best spot to post about this one. 🤓 Hope you like it!