They only got Neil Gaiman back for Sandman Overture and Sandman Presents after a decade of negotiation, unwilling to match the terms Gaiman got elsewhere. The biggest problem Vertigo faced was recruitment – thanks to internal changes imposed from Warner Bros, the offered deal was inferior to publishers such as Image, Dark Horse, Boom, IDW, Dynamite, Avatar, Black Mask, Vault, Ahoy, Aftershock, AWA, Marvel and more – and DC lost its big guns to its rivals. While Y The Last Man by Brian K Vaughan and Pia Guerra would be condemned by some for misandry and SJWness of the worse kind for a story that killed off all but one of the men in the world. I mean, Ennis had plenty of other issues that he would end up openly dealing with in the Wildstorm comic Kev, but you can see where he heart was, even then.Įngima from Peter Milligan and Duncan Fegredo was the superhero comic book that had a character come out as gay towards the end of the book – and was the first lead gay character in a superhero comic published so widely. While even Jesse Custer of Preacher used the word of God to get racist policemen to sever their own penises and stuff them up their arses. While Transmetropolitan was a walking talking Hunter S Thompson who didn't so much punch Nazis in the face, as shoot them with bowel disruptors. Neil Gaiman says he would have written that story differently now, but for its time there was no more 'woke' comic than Sandman: A Game Of You. Her death, as she is rather literally 'deadnamed' and buried by her conservative family under her birth name, has her best friend write her name on her gravestone in bright pink lipstick – and we see her with Death, finally recognised for who she is. Sandman gave us the character of Wanda, a trans character fighting the world over who she was, against the Moon which doesn't recognise her identity. That was where I was living, it was shit, and I wanted to tell everybody.' And by 2005 he was doing the exact same thing in the same comic over The War On Terror.

One cover included the phrase 'Voting Tory can damage your health' and stating about his run, '…generally I was interested in commenting on 1980s Britain. Hellblazer put the creators' politics blatantly into the series, Jamie Delano naming British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as John Constantine's biggest threat. While Grant Morrison and Chas Truog made Animal Man a vegan. After Morrison left, trans writer Rachel Pollack took over the comic, and introduced trans characters to the team such as Coagula. The first chance Grant Morrison and Richard Case had on Doom Patrol, they took the 60s-established character Negative Man and rewrote them as a nonbinary character, reinventing DC villains, The Brain and Mallah as a gay couple. Diverse sexuality, liberal politics, anti-war and ripping apart racists were the themes of the day. Alan Moore, Rick Veitch, Steve Bissette and John Totleben's Swamp Thing was the epitome of 'SJW' comics at the time.

Vertigo comics