For the past two weeks I've been trading e-mails and splitting pizza with C.L. Minou, aka transfeminist from
BelowTheBelt. What happens when you put two geek bloggers from other sides of the country together and feed them curry caffeine? Why, they start working on a comic, of course! And then one of them gets the idea to just run with it like it was once owned by Margaret Cho and form their own label.
Voila! Cowgirl Astronaut Comics, the first queer trans feminist comic label (run by bloggers). I can now add "editor/creator of comic label" to my ever-growing list of things I will probably never get paid for no matter how passionate I am about it. Mama be so proud. I bring this up not because I think you care what it is that I do during my "me time", but because it is a convenient and awkwardly relevant segway to my topic for this article: my favorite comic label, Vertigo.
For those who either don't know what Vertigo is, or love explanations for explanation's sake, Vertigo is DC's "darker, more mature" imprint. While it's hyped and marketed as the gritty "No Kids Allowed!" answer to DC's more kid-friendly mainstream, it is home to some of the most artfully rendered and poignantly worded comics available. And they sort of started the "trade paperback" trend, which is what 90 percent of my comic collection consists of, so yeah, read as much bias into that as you want, you'll still be way off.
The future me who might have a job and some actual follow through would like her label to a template somewhat like Vertigo (sans the megacorporate connection): mature, socially relevant themes, gratuitous but fabulously drawn sex and violence, subversion of mainstream archetypes and tropes, and the occasional dabbling in absurdism. Gotta put that college learning to use somewhere.
Below is a modest list of my favorite Vertigo comics, all of which would appear on my "top ten comics OF ALL TIME. OF ALL TIME!"
Note that while worshipping/admiring Alan Moore than I already do would probably result in a "restrainingus orderus" curse cast upon me, Moore never actually penned anything for Vertigo, although his works are cited as helping necessitate the creation of Vertigo, and V For Vendetta was re-issued under the Vertigo name
after Moore swore never to work for DC again. So, yeah, just in case you were curious.
And by no means should this list be construed as a "best". I don't do "bests" on anything. I rate things based on my own peculiar and admittedly random tastes. Sometimes I like things that suck and hate things that are beautiful. Try not to think about it. You, like the Netflix suggestion system before you, will lose your damn mind.
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