At PW, Rachel Deahl scoops a new Vertigo Crime imprint from DC:

As thousands of fans and industry professionals prepare to descend on San Diego for the annual Comic-Con, DC has unveiled a new offshoot of its edgy, celebrated Vertigo imprint, Vertigo Crime. The new line, dedicated to crime titles, will launch in 2009 with two lead titles, one by Ian Rankin and another by Brian Azzarello (100 Bullets). For Scottish crime writer Rankin, the forthcoming DC title will mark his first foray into comics. A rep from DC, who said the house would have more details to share tomorrow, confirmed that, despite the launch of Vertigo Crime, Vertigo itself will continue to publish crime titles.


Like Minx before it, this new line has been a poorly kept secret for well over a year. Much-respected editor Will Dennis is the driving force behind the line, and from what we’ve heard over our ham radio, you can expect many of his stable of creators to be contributing. More as it develops.

10 COMMENTS

  1. Sorry to jump the gun, but…

    Will the trade dress and design reflect the graphic novel aspect, or the crime fiction aspect? Will it be shelved with the graphic novels, or in the Mystery section. (And if they are with the mysteries, how will DC counteract the effect Minx suffered when those titles were shelved as young adult fiction, and not YA GN or Adult GN/manga?)

    If this line is successful, will crime titles migrate from Vertigo (and Paradox and Piranha)? How will DC compete once the mystery publishers begin producing/importing graphic novel titles? (Such as HarperCollins’ Agatha Christie adaptations?)

    Might this be the beginning of graphic novels moving from a media categorization to a genre categorization? Just as there are “series” and “anthologies” subcategories in the various fiction categories, might there soon be a “graphic novel” or “illustrated” subcategory?

    Is David Hahn’s “All Nighter” one of the titles? (And I’ve handsold Watchmen to mystery buffs by describing it as a murder mystery…)

  2. Here’s to the day when comics are shelved in bookshops and libraries by genre, rather than lumping them all together, as if “graphic novels” were a genre itself. It’ll be another day closer to comics growing up and joining the book trade, rather than the forced arrested development “the biz” clings to.

  5. I hear you, Mark K., but on the other hand, my local libraries carry a lot of graphic novels. Some shelve them all together, and I like being able to go to the one section and see their whole selection. Others do shelve them by author in their respective genres, and it makes it a pain to browse.

  7. this is a joke
    this isn’t about advancing the medium of comics or providing a wider creative outlet for cartoonists

    this is just another leg of the AOL-Time/Warner R&D branch

    if there’s a list of questions the submitions editor needs to ask themselves before green-lighting a new project, you can make damn well sure “can we turn this into a profitable movie” is on the top of that list.

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