malpertuis:
Simon Bisley HELLBLAZER COVER Painting constantine horror SHADE THE CHANGING MAN | eBay
Bisley you magnificent bastard I read your book.
Somehow, and no one’s quite sure how this happened, these two became emblems of Warner Brothers’ most relevant and fertile comic properties. No one’s even really sure that it’s happened, but it totally has — and while Superman, The Flashes, and the Green Lantern Corpz are leaking out shiny overly-designed lifeblood all over the on the Batcave floor, the spooky properties are picking up mass. WB still has a chance to grab these two, along with Buddy Baker, Swamp Thing, Frankenstein, and, what the hell, Kate Kane to boot, and tuck them away in Vertigo before their cool rubs off in that Mainstream DC Universe.
(And, okay, no disrespect to those involved, and I don’t mean to sound like such an ass, but this kind of scene right here?

This isn’t cool. A badass in a trench coat telling Batman off using imported 80’s brit slang is not cool. And not in the, “you can’t do that to The Batman” fanboy sense, but in the “bless your heart you’re trying so hard to make something work and we’ve all come together because we love you and we want you please just to stop before it gets any worse.”
Justice League Dark should be a better comic, is what I’m getting at. This scene is from a Brightest Day spin-off from before the New 52 purge, but that’s just out of my respect for Peter Milligan.)
So, hey, I’m not saying DC’s going to implode in the next few years and then be cannibalized for parts. I’m not saying DC as a comics company is going to dissolve, sell the comic rights to Dark Horse as some kind of Dark Horse DC imprint a la Star Wars and Buffy, and then turn DC Entertainment into the primary character property company, focusing solely on animated features, cartoons, movies, and merch. Okay? I’m not saying any of that. But if that were in fact to happen, Vertigo stands to survive that collapse as its own company. They’ve got a slew of really solid titles with great critical buzz, an elder statesman title in Hellblazer (which, as I’m bound to mention whenever this comes up, now has more issues to its name than fucking Detective Comics) and probably the best art in the business. Vertigo has always been lucky with artists. Their dregs are DC’s standbys. Their tops are, just two for the sake of conversation, Mike Allred and Simon Bisley.
This is a lot of unsolicited opinion-slinging, but it seems to me Warner Brothers should start getting their prize pigs to higher ground. And make sure Travel Foreman is a very happy man.