Ambiguous Authorities: Vertigo and the Auteur Figure

Isabelle Licari-Guillaume

doi:10.21825/aj.v6i2.7700

Abstract

This article examines authorial performance in the context of DC’s Vertigo line. In the 1990s, Vertigo gained its reputation as an innovative and progressive imprint by promoting the work of British scriptwriters, who were hailed as true author figures, despite the inherently collaborative nature of the mainstream comics industry. In a manner reminiscent of “auteur theory”, writers such as Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis or Grant Morrison developed attractive author personas which they consistently displayed through interviews, letter columns or social media, but also, more importantly, by inserting their avatars within the comics they scripted. Upon closer examination, however, it becomes clear that their work in fact simultaneously asserts and destabilizes writerly authority, in a manner that is consistent with Linda Hutcheon’s view of postmodernity. By multiplying author figures and playfully disseminating authority, Vertigo authors question their own authorial control over the text, asserting instead the crucial role played by the reader.

Highlights

1.1 Vertigo Comics In the late 1980s, following the tremendous success of Alan Moore’s Watchmen (19861987), DC Comics began recruiting a number of scriptwriters from the pool of talent that developed around British anthology titles like 2000 AD
Vertigo has built its identity as a game-changer and has striven to destabilise conventional mainstream practices in terms of production and narrative standards: it pioneered the trade paperback publishing format, while its creators focused on non-superhero genres, devising new ways of using imagetext and, crucially, forging specific authorial personae for themselves that gave more visibility to said
I would like to focus on the specific example of Grant Morrison’s “On the Ledge” column, which appeared in Vertigo comics cover-dated September 1994, not long before the debut of his series The Invisibles (1994-2000)

Summary

Introduction

1.1 Vertigo Comics In the late 1980s, following the tremendous success of Alan Moore’s Watchmen (19861987), DC Comics began recruiting a number of scriptwriters from the pool of talent that developed around British anthology titles like 2000 AD. He suggests that these directors constructed their image through extra-filmic means, either as storyteller in the case of DeMille (Hediger 50) or as “sadistic master of ceremony” in the case of Hitchcock (60, my translation), who would sometimes pretend to be tricked by his own stratagems, adding a more relatable side to his persona It seems that a similar strategy was at work within Vertigo, with authors playing their own roles in paratexts; as we shall see, this construction was predicated on the specificities of comics as a medium—notably its use of specific promotional spaces like reader columns, and the possibility for creators to be graphically represented within the diegesis

Building an authorial persona

All of these activities had been depicted In Vertigo comics prior to 1994

Vertigo writers as ambivalent authors

Conclusion