I’m not one to get particularly sentimental when it comes to creators of the media I consume, let alone executives and editors. Of course, like everyone, I have my pantheon of persons whom I trust and whose content I relish and devour and track the moment it is in announced but they are few and far between, but even of those, I know which projects I might cling to and which I can avoid. That said, there was one imprint I trusted fully when I wanted to try something new, back when my income was more disposable than it is now; before the recession, before I was an ‘adult’. The imprint in question was Vertigo Comics, and the reason I trusted it was by and large because of Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Karen Berger.
An end of an era has come, as DC has officially announced that Berger shall be leaving Vertigo and DC Entertainment this coming March in a statement released Monday:
Karen Berger, Executive Editor & Senior Vice President of DC Entertainment’s Vertigo brand, has announced she is stepping down from her post after nearly 20 years at the helm of the award-winning literary imprint. She will remain on through March 2013 where she will be assisting in the transition to a new leadership team which includes veteran staffers whom she has mentored over the years.
As I am writing this, I am more than a little choked up. Tears are stinging my eyes, as I look at my physical comic book collection (I have gone mostly digital in the past few years) and think back on my development as a comic book reader over the last decade. From the near-universally adored Sandman and Fables, the controversial-but-profitable V for Vendetta, to the practically unknown 12-issue run of the Vinyl Underground. Berger was behind each of these titles and shaped my reading and understanding of comics in ways that the mainstream superhero titles could not. They explored heavier philosophical ideas, endured more mature themes (not just violence and sex, but the many shades of gray that gradient between our concepts of right and wrong), and they kept my interest in the graphic medium when spandexed crime fighters began to feel a little too puerile even for me. Vertigo was like an independent publisher but with the luxury of a corporation behind it. Under Berger, it took chances at every turn and refused to rest on its laurels, even when the money made sense to do so.
As a girl real reading comics, it didn’t hurt that she was a woman. I remember the first time I flipped through a volume of Sandman and saw her name in small print on the inside cover. I must have been fifteen or so when I ran to my mother enthusiastically and said, “Look! We can work in comics. She did it, so can I!” Even though I am writing this article in a feature called “Heroine Addict,” which is all about women and their place, role, and future in geek culture and genre fiction, I still forget how much it means to see other women succeeding and paving the way for future female creatives and executives. Visibility matters.
It only helped that she managed such a strong and stable history of amazing titles and creators filter through during her tenure. American Virgin, Transmetropolitan, Garth Ennis, Grant Morrison. Household names now, but then? What would life be like if Karen Berger hadn’t been there? Certainly some of the greats would have made it through, but in a world where George R. R. Martin turned down Neil Gaiman to write for an anthology because he was too unknown, one cannot truly surmise how greatly she has impacted us as individuals, let alone as a community. I do not want to spend too much time on hypotheticals, but one thing is certain: for the past decade when I picked up a number one of a new title or bought a trade by an author with whom I was not yet familiar, if it had the Vertigo logo on it, I knew I was in for some solid storytelling, brilliant ideas, and great characters.
We do not know yet where Berger plans to go from Vertigo. She simply said that she was in need of a “career change,” and in light of DC pulling the plug on Hellblazer and other Vertigo staples coming to an end, one can only speculate that even with Fables, its spin-offs continuing their runs, and Sandman returning in March, this very well appears to be Vertigo’s twilight. Lucky, for me, there is still a back catalog of work that was produced under her tenure that I have yet to complete (namely Y: The Last Man and Scalped), and a few I couldn’t quite get behind but may revisit (i.e., Preacher—I loved the ideas, but sometimes the gore was just too gruesome for me to get past). At least for now, there is more to be read and, of course, her legacy will remain in print thanks to trades and digital publishing. But what of the future—for both Vertigo and Berger? We will have to wait and see: one with morbid curiosity, the other with hope.