I, a lost and borderline-suicidal child in a desert country, living in a school so savage it had it’s own version of a prison riot and an honest-to-god child fight club, Vertigo Comics saved me.

DC’s Vertigo Comics contained stories time-travelling BDSM; a preacher with mind control powers hunting down God to kill him for creating a broken world; a superhuman with godlike powers who altered his brain to become gay as a baby; a drug-addled journalist who got nanotech brain cancer; and the virginal adventures of the Last Man on Earth. I read almost their entire catalogue before I turned 12 and it fucked my brain forever, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Let me say with no hyperbole whatsoever: Vertigo Comics single-handedly saved English-speaking comic books on this planet. It fought the superhero with it’s bare fists and WON.

I once emailed a comic writer from the Vertigo generation who influenced me a lot. I was trying to brag, talk myself up as edgy as possible, say I was taught by a journalist at school who regularly interviewed a serial killer, was doing journalism to help people conned in online scams, that I went to journalism school because of him. He replied with one sentence, saying, roughly, “Sorry I messed your mind up.”

Don’t be sorry.

I once facebook messaged Karen Berger as a child trying to get her to let me write a comic series for her, embarrassingly. I was convinced for at least a year she’d read my message and be so won over by my enthusiasm that she’d just hand a series to me.

My mother’s permissiveness of my reckless behavior and her freethinking tendencies are the biggest influence on my life. Vertigo Comics are the second biggest influence of my life. If you’ve ever been annoyed by my edgy bullshit, blame Vertigo.

I spent 5–8 years doing an impression of one of their characters, Spider Jerusalem, so much so I would show my longstanding friends the comic he’s from and they’d be stunned as they read his dialogue and realized I’d been acting all along. I almost died because of doing an impression of him many many times. My body chemistry is different because I tried to turn my life into a Vertigo comic. I did magic rituals from those comic books.

Now Vertigo Comics, my third parent, is dead.

I’m juggling the early start of writing and pitching maybe 2–3 comic book/other series atm, and all of them are deeply steeped in the Vertigo tradition. Everything I write, I write in direct combat and competition with Transmetropolitan, Sandman, Preacher, the Invisibles, Y The Last Man, Watchmen (the spiritual father of the Vertigo line though not originating there). I ask, is it as edgy as a Vertigo comic? Does it have as much philosophical dialogue? Are there scenes from the characters backstories so traumatizing it will appear in the readers’ therapy sessions? Where is the obligatory weird sex scene that’s illegal in developing countries and likely to get seized at the border? Without Vertigo and it’s edgy art snob artistic excesses, there would be no Saga and it’s spidersex from Image comics, no Sex Criminals and it’s unflinching portrayal of medication downfall.

The real Vertigo died many years ago when editor Karen Berger left the imprint. I mourned it’s death long ago. Other companies have risen up, and Keren Berger has BergerBooks is now a Dark Horse imprint.Image Comics current Golden Age beginning with the publishing of the Walking Dead comic and Saga can be directly traced as becoming a new Vertigo, a brighter, happier Vertigo without the need to make everything an uncomfortable Oedipian Psychodrama. It’s influence is infinite and will never end.

It’s comics will be in print forever, even as we enter virtual reality and never look back and the planet burns and we go into space. We will read Sandman and Preacher and Y The Last Man in our space colonies.

I swear it.