Comics readers let out a huge sigh of disappointment when DC announced that Vertigo, the superhero publisher's imprint of 25-plus years, would close come 2020. Vertigo characters who made the jump to the mainstream DC universe, like John Constantine (who I guess we can begrudgingly call a superhero nowadays), have managed to survive its closure, but the sad fact remains that DC will be without one of its most beloved elements before the year's end.
I'll get to some of the more famous and indeed beloved Vertigo comics soon enough, but one title I really want to hone in on right now is American Vampire. The series was a Scott Snyder-Stephen King collaboration that featured some truly mesmerising art from Rafael Albuquerque and Mateus Santolouco, and one that offered a fascinating new reimagining of old Vampiric mythology by charting the generational and genealogical differences between the different vampires of the world.
Moving through the eras, American Vampire was bold, ambitious and bone chilling when it had to be. It was also the comic that probably landed Snyder his gig on Detective Comics (where he would write The Black Mirror), and later Swamp Thing and Batman, so it's well worth reading if you loved his work on those particular titles.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
