What in the World Is Vertigo for Kids?

In the spring of 1994 I had been working at Welsh Publishing Group for a few years, but things were about to change. Rumors had started spreading that Welsh was going to be sold to Marvel Comics. My job before Welsh had ended abruptly when the publisher I was working for had been bought by a competitor and shut down, and I did not want that to happen to me again, so I was determined to find my own way to new employment.

At that time I had been working on Superman and Batman Magazine for a couple of years. The list of people I knew at DC from my earlier adventures had grown, and I was convinced that if I was ever going to make the jump to DC – a long-held goal of mine – this was the time.

Superman and Batman Magazine was inspired by the two 1990s animated series, and my main contact at DC, Charlie Kochman, had gotten me added to the DC comp list. My assistant editor and I would take stacks of comics home, read them, and bring them back the next day to discuss. I liked a lot of what DC was publishing at the time: the “Death of Superman” saga, the “Knightfall” epic, the Green Lantern / Parallax stories, and more.

What really excited us, though, was the Vertigo line, which then included Swamp Thing, The Sandman, Hellblazer, Animal Man, and other titles. Vertigo was like nothing I’d ever seen before. The best way to describe them might be…someone like Stephen King writing comics starring characters you kind of know from previous versions.

Then I had an idea.

What if we put together a dummy magazine called “Vertigo for Kids”? My assistant editor, Scott Sonneborn, and I recruited art director Jim Nicholas to work on this side project with us after hours and on weekends. We stuck to the Welsh formula: stories, puzzles, letters pages, short items, etc. Applying that narrow scope to the broad palette of Vertigo seemed funny in and of itself, and the content quickly came into focus. If there was a through-line to most of the Vertigo line, it seemed to be that all the protagonists were in danger of losing “their very souls,” so we stuck that line everywhere. And I stole the idea of completely made up letters from National Lampoon.

When it was all done – 16 color pages! – we made copies, and I sent them to everyone I could think of at DC, from Paul Levitz on down. The reactions were amazing: Mike Carlin thought it was hilarious; Karen Berger proved she was a good sport by liking it as well; a vice president named Seymour Miles wanted to publish it.

The best response came from Chantal D’Aulnis, Charlie Kochman’s boss at the time and VP of Licensed Publishing, who faxed a contract for the project to my bosses at Welsh.

The result was that both Scott and I soon got hired at DC…sorry, Jimmy. And not long after I left Welsh, in the fall of 1994, the company was sold to Marvel as we had been hearing

Here, then, from the early days of the “desktop publishing” era, are a selection of the pages from Vertigo for Kids. Proceed with caution…