Art For Art’s Sake # 281: More Of Those Great Vintage Vertigo House Ads

by Richard Bruton

It’s that time again – me trawling through the Internet in search of great art, you sitting there and enjoying your weekend and looking at said great comic art. It must be Art For Art’s Sake time!

A few weeks ago I happened on a great collection of Vertigo house ads over the years and suddenly realised just how old they make me feel. Hell, many of you won’t even remember the heady days of Vertigo, where DC Comics rebranded certain characters like John Constantine, Shade, Doom Patrol, Swamp Thing under the Vertigo banner and got in some of the best writers and artists of the time to reinvigorate them. It created a mature readers line up that resonated for the time.

Well, that was 1993, now here’s some of the house ads for 1994, showing the really massive expansion into original series, limited series, graphic novels. It truly was a time when just knowing it was Vertigo meant it was sure worth picking up a copy…

Invisibles – series artist started as Steve Yeowell but there was an awful lot of design work (as I recall) from Rian Hughes to make the incredible first image – that grenade image was just one of the best things young men had ever seen and I remember being so damn excited for the book…