Yeah, taking regular DC titles and turning them into Vertigo titles was morphing titles I liked into a subculture or genre I generally didn't like. I guess what annoyed me most in Vertigo titles was that all the characters, even eternal mythological gods, had a trendy 1990's look, and looked like the people you'd see in a rock band of the period, or a trendy night club.
In some ways Vertigo was innovative and had good storytelling and new talent, but mostly I saw it as a way to re-package stuff and market it to a new audience. I'll never understand why people rave about the alleged brilliance and literary transcendance of SANDMAN. It had a degree of quality and I generally liked it, but I felt it was made out to be so much more than it actually was, and that made me less receptive to it.
Likewise a series like PREACHER, that while powerfullly impactful at times in Ennis' writing, was a truly ugly story with characters I didn't like, and went out of its way to be as profanity-laden and blasphemous and as unbelievably foul as they could possibly be.
Likewise Grant Morrison's 3-issue KID ETERNITY series.
Likewise Y THE LAST MAN, which was briskly written and fast-moving, and often very funny, but overall had a lot of dark and cynical elements that kind of ruined and overshadowed the more enjoyable elements of the series for me.
I was repelled from the outset by titles like TRANSMETROPOLITAN and THE INVISIBLES.
Even of the Vertigo series I enjoyed, none of these are titles with great concepts or beautiful prose and art I enjoyed to the point that I would like to re-read them multiple times, such as O'Neil/Adams BATMAN and DETECTIVE, Wein/Wrightson SWAMP THING, Moore/Bissette/Tottleben SWAMP THING, Goodwin/Simonson MANHUNTER, Dave Sim's CEREBUS and so forth. I think Gaiman's SANDMAN is the only Vertigo title I've re-read.
But I can't deny there's an audience for this stuff, and that Vertigo opened that market. I see Vertigo as more of a packaging and marketing tool, and Vertigo-izations of titles like SWAMP THING and DOOM PATROL are examples making that point.
Even titles like SANDMAN and PREACHER and FABLES weren't lacking in episodic franchise exploitability, and have been the jumping point for many spin-offs and limited series. As opposed to, say, WATCHMEN or V FOR VENDETTA or MAUS or FROM HELL, that were novels in comic book form with a clear beginning, middle and end.
To my knowledge, Art Spiegelman's MAUS (which won a Pulitzer Prize and was marketed almost exclusively through mainstreaam book publishing and only slightly after the fact through comic book distributors) and Neil Gaiman's SANDMAN (which won a World Fantasy Award for best short story, and then World Fantasy members changed the rules so that a comic book could never win the award again!) have truly broken through into mainstream publishing.
I do see reviews and cover blurbs from a lot of mainstream sources on Vertigo collected books. But that's also true for a lot of non-Vertigo books, such as Alan Moore's works, and Frank Miller's DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, Frank Miller's 300, and one of my favorites, ENEMY ACE:WAR IDYLL by George Pratt, or Rick Veitch's ABRAXAS AND THE EARTH MAN, to name a few.
So I'm not 100% clear on what it is that Vertigo did that no other publisher has.
Australia-Dave has talked about how many Vertigo titles have broken through into movies or TV series, but again, I don't see how that's unique to Vertigo. Marvel and DC have broken through for decades into box-office topping movies and TV series and animated series.
And in the acclaim department, Dark Horse has also done that for close to 30 years with movies like The Mask, Sin City, Men In Black, 300, Mystery Men, Hellboy, Hellboy II, Golden Army and others.
So while I'd agree that Vertigo has opened up another avenue for these kind of cross-cultural influences, I again don't see where Vertigo has uniquely and singularly done so.
