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.

Favorite Issues nr. 1: Animal Man #5

This is probably my favourite single issue ever. I don't even own it, except as a trade paperback. It's some of Grant Morrison's first work in the U.S., a revival of an incredibly lame 1960's character. This was the first issue after the originally planned 4 issue miniseries proved successful. It's a bizzare retelling of the Prometheus myth with Wile E. Coyote as a protagonist, hoping to end the abstract violence cartoons inflict on each other and being cursed with real world suffering as a penance, and as his antagonist a gay trucker creating an elaborate deathtrap to catch him after his life spirals out of control. The titular hero only shows up at the end but is unable to read the scripture he's handed as the trucker, dying because of his own elaborate trap, kills the coyote at a crossroads, where he dies metaphorically. Animal man learns nothing and cartoon violence continues. This issue is weird, smart, funny and exciting and pretty much a statement of purpose for the rest of the series. Animals kill each other, human beings kill animals, the hero doesn't understand it, nor does he learn anything, the world is cruel and unjust because whoever runs it cares more about entertaining the audience than the happiness of those who have to live there.