Today's lesson comes from a time I haven't explained to you yet, but you may have overheard your parents discussing in hushed tones with other adults after they thought you'd already gone to bed: The Vertigo Plague.
In the mid to late 1980s (perhaps even before your parents met!), a disturbed genius named Alan Moore started writing disturbingly ingenious stories of horror, with gore and body counts rivaling the long-forgotten days of EC Comics (from even before your parents were born!). The stories usually combined dismemberment or exploding body parts, with bizarre sex (including the molestation of children), satanism, and plants.
Naturally, kids ate this up. [So, apparently, did Kevin Smith, but that's another story... .]
Just as gorillas once filled the pages of comics when editors noticed that gorillas sold comics, so too truly graphic horror started to pop up in all manner of titles. Eventually, editors recognized the danger of a literary pandemic, and naming the plague "Vertigo", they isolated the virus and sent the irreversibly infected characters off to live in permanent quarantine so as not to affect their Underoo-selling icons.
But before they did, some characters (and readers) suffered. Oh, how they suffered... .
Today's Great Corpse from the time of the Vertigo Plague is a little child name Jarrick. How did he earn his place as a Great Corpse, you ask?
It wasn't just because he came back from the dead as a zombie with maggots falling from his eyes.
Gee, I wonder where this is headed.
Or even because he killed his mother by biting out her throat. Impressive though that is.
Why do zombies always want to eat people, particularly their loved ones?
What really puts Jarrick among the Great Corpses is that his father split his head with an axe afterwards.
The lesson? There's a reason graves are six feet deep.
That level of pathos and gore also earns Jarrick a score of FIVE on the Rolling Head of Pantha Scale of Comic Book Violence.
Eventually, editors recognized the danger of a literary pandemic, and naming the plague "Vertigo", they isolated the virus and sent the irreversibly infected characters off to live in permanent quarantine so as not to affect their Underoo-selling icons.
ReplyDeleteTHAT is the single best explanation of the DC sub-division "Vertigo" that I have ever heard.
Any thoughts on the theory that all of the British writers who infested DC in the late 80s and early 90s were Alan Moore writing under different nommes de plume? (It would befit Mr. Moore's sense of humor to name one of his pseudonyms "Kneel Gay Man".)
Bleah...
ReplyDeleteWas that Lords of the Ultra-Realm?
"What really puts Jarrick among the Great Corpses is that his father split his head with an axe afterwards."
ReplyDeleteSplit his head and half his torso, looks like. Yeesh.
Gracious!
ReplyDeleteWhich comic is that scene from? I don't recognize it as a scene from Moore's Swamp Thing (haven't read any by Veitch or Collins), and the art doesn't look Hellblazer-y.
ReplyDeleteAnd that's only a 5?
5 is the top score, Mike; it's like "stars".
ReplyDeleteThis scene, my friends, is from the 1988 Sword of the Atom Special.
Yep. Just what I would expect from a comic about a science hero with super-shrinking powers.
This scene, my friends, is from the 1988 Sword of the Atom Special.
ReplyDeleteGreat Shades of Elvis....no wonder the Vertigo Contagion had to be contained!!!
Sword of the Atom - The gift that keeps giving!
ReplyDeleteI noticed that, too, Brian; the front view is also ... substantial.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure he'll have a brand new family in no time!