The second golden age...

Further rustling through my comics collection turned up the gems I became more interested in in the home stretch towards college, when beer money eclipsed comics for a few years. Vertigo was a weird mix of more adult-oriented material. When Alan Moore and Frank Miller revolutionised comics in 1986, Marvel did nothing, but DC decided to recruit some more Brits from 2000AD and it's competitors. The British comics scene took much more advantage of the total lack of interest from serious critics to move towards more underground and weirder stuff. Not being taken seriously meant doing whatever you felt like. Consequently the comics were tackling big issues, lacked meaningful censorship and attracted better writers. Vertigo imported these guys wholesale and set up the comics version of HBO, a well-funded mainstream home for non-mainstream material with a high emphasis on quality over quantity. Around '97 or '98 I was bored with the x-men and decided on a whim to subscribe to the four hottest vertigo/dc titles of the moment. I followed Hellblazer, Preacher, Hitman and The Invisibles. Consequently I got sucked into a mind-expanding world of shocking violence and evil occult shit. I specifically picked up the Invisibles because of a wizard magazine list of the weirdest things in the comic. If I hadn't done that I never would have gotten out of the x-ghetto, and would probably have lost all interest in comics forever.