The Vertigo Effect: A Cartography of Influence
There was a time when comics split like the belly of a dead god and poured narrative viscera into our hands. Late '80s into the '90s: a wound. From it crawled something uncertain, dangerous, alive. A beast sewn from Kirby's bones, Thatcher's hangover, and the ozone hiss of 3AM snow on a cheap TV.
DC Vertigo was not a line. It was a Corridor to Elsewhere. Not a four-color gospel but a found grimoire: dog-eared, ash-stained, humming with something unnamed. It said superheroes were a lie, yet myths were true. It treated narrative like a memetic parasite: curling in the gray folds, waiting to alter you. It did not preach world-building. It urged worlds that breathe, worlds that want out. Newsprint grimoires soaked in ink, ringing with the ghosts of ideas. Those comics were sacrilege because they knew the gods by name. They drank with them. They stabbed them. They took notes while divinity bled onto motel tile. Morality was not the lesson. Honesty was. How deep would you dig to find something that refused to look away?
How That Leaked Into Games Vertigo taught me that the setting is already alive before you arrive. It mutters. It scratches at the door. It does not exist to serve a protagonist. Turn your back, and it moves. The gutters between panels are the actual theater: the place you cannot see yet feel in your teeth. Rulebooks and character sheets are not controlled. They are containment rituals: thin wards against an indifferent world. The lesson holds: rules can warp, stories invite interrogation, and stability is a costume that slips.
Writing games in that tradition means admitting the story exists beyond you. Your dice, your choices, your ink-stained fingers are only part of it. Something older waits between the margins.
Write as if the world is watching. If you listen closely enough, it will answer.
-Richard 2/25/25