The Rewriting Ethos of Vertigo Comics, or, Critical Perspectives on Memory-Making, Canonization, and the Logic of Fields

Vertigo, DC’s adult-oriented imprint, is often praised for having “fully joined the fight for adult readers” in the early 1990s (Weiner 2010: 10). Yet, little attention has been devoted to how this “fight” has been played out. My contention is that Vertigo may have “redefined” the comics medium in developing a specific poetics which can be subsumed, albeit perhaps reductively, under the idea of “rewriting.” Intertextual strategies indeed pervade the Vertigo catalogue. The core titles that launched the label in the early 1990s (The Sandman, Animal Man, Swamp Thing, Hellblazer, Shade The Changing Man, and Doom Patrol), for example, are all critical transformations of characters from the DC universe. Other series such as Fables and Preacher critically engage with the revision and challenging of certain genres such as the Western or the fairy-tale. Yet other Vertigo narratives such as Uncle Sam, The Nobody, and Greendale rewrite and reinvent existing icons, stories, and cultural artefacts.
This “rewriting ethos” seems pivotal to Vertigo’s development of a critical discourse on the history of the medium, to comics’ renewed perception and search for legitimacy. In exploring the specificities and implications of these intro- and retrospective discourses, I would like to show that Vertigo participates in a logic of commemoration and canon-making. More specifically, I would like to argue that Vertigo has used strategies of rewriting to support a distinctive agenda in the field of comics historiography, acquire “symbolic capital” (honor, prestige) and thereby possibly create a canon of its own which 1. undermines the dynamics of power relations structuring the field of American comics and 2. challenges Thierry Groensteen’s claim that comics is an “art without memory” that “gladly cultivates amnesia” (2006: 67, my translation).