Neil Gaiman is on a trampoline. All arguments henceforth invalid.
If you thought Vertigo was going to close after Karen Berger bailed earlier this year, we have good news. DC Comics is relaunching Vertigo in the fourth quarter of this year with six new series for adults. The first one is Neil Gaiman’s Sandman prequel we reported on when it was announced last July.
Titled The Sandman: Overture, it will be published bi-monthly (same day digital) starting this October 30th with art by J. H. Williams III. The story will cover something never answered in the award-winning 75-issue run of The Sandman. Morpheus was easily captured in the first issue. He’s too exhausted to escape and he’s dressed for war. All we know is he was returning from somewhere far away. The Sandman: Overture will show us what happened.
The Hollywood Reporter also offered a breakdown of four out of the five other Vertigo titles launching after The Sandman: Overture.
- Hinterkind – about “a post-apocalyptic world in which the creatures of myth and legend have returned” – written by 2000AD veteran Ian Edginton with art by Francesco Trifogl
- The Discipline, an erotic thriller from Peter Milligan, whose Enigma series launched the Vertigo line twenty years ago, and artist Leo Hernandez
- Suiciders, a post-apocalyptic science fiction series about two boxers at the different extremes of their careers by writer/artist Leo Bermejo, and
- Coffin Hill, by fantasy novelist Caitlin Kittredge and illustrator Inaki Miranda, about a teenager’s accidental resurrection of a dark power left buried since the Salem Witch Trials.
Shelly Bond has taken over in Karen Berger’s absence. She’s intimated that Vertigo intends to “kick down the barriers between what comic books can be and what popular culture is” and “show the masses that comics are the most essential part of pop culture.” Considering which movies are making the most money now, those are both valid points.
Here’s a bit of art from Neil Gaiman’s upcoming series. We can’t see what Morpheus is standing on, so we’re just going to assume it’s a trampoline.
(Pictures courtesy of @shun_geki_satsu via Neil Gaiman and Vertigo Comics.)