HOLY SHIT, THE RETURN OF KAREN BERGER ! ! ! ! !

via Vulture:

For a certain breed of geek, April 6 was a red-letter day. At the 2016 Image Expo — the annual event where the comics industry’s third-biggest publisher, Image, unveils its upcoming lineup of new titles — a figure clad in blue jeans and black shirt, bearing a calm, confident swagger, strode onto the stage. The crowd erupted into applause. Comics Twitter started freaking out. Comics bloggers typed with giddy excitement. Before she had even spoken a word, the audience had cause for celebration: After a falling-out with DC Comics and three years away from the comics game,Karen Berger was back.

Berger's name likely doesn't register for most comics readers, but there’s no question they’ve felt her impact. For three decades, she worked as an editor at mega-publisher DC Comics, and her long list of accomplishments while there can mostly be traced back to one risky venture: creating and running a mature-leaning imprint called Vertigo from 1993 to 2013. In that position she did more than just about anybody else in comics history to get ambitious, avant-garde, serious non-superhero work in front of a mass audience. The Sandman, V for Vendetta, Preacher, iZombie, Y: The Last Man, Transmetropolitan, 100 Bullets, Hellblazer — those are just a few of the better-known titles Vertigo produced during Berger’s tenure.

But in the latter stretch of her 20 years running the show, relations with her employer turned sour. Their difference of opinion was simple and particularly of-the-moment: Berger felt like DC was abandoning its focus on weird comics in order to put all its resources toward developing superhero stories for film and television. Leaving the publisher in a relative blaze of glory, she bade farewell to the industry and all but disappeared.

This week, she makes her return. Berger has been editing a new Image series called Surgeon X, the first issue of which comes out today. Written by filmmaker and comics newcomer Sara Kenney and penciled by veteran illustrator John Watkiss, the book takes place in a near-future dystopia where drug-resistant disease has crippled the world and a rogue doctor has taken to the streets as a vigilante healer.

Read the rest of the article HERE!

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Some of my favorite Vertigo books are:

Swamp Thing
The Sandman
Hellblazer
Preacher
Fables
Y: The Last Man
Lucifer
Enigma
Animal Man
The Invisibles
Human Target
100 Bullets
V for Vendetta
Doom Patrol
Books of Magic
Transmetropolitan 
Black Orchid
Sandman Mystery Theatre
House of Mystery
Unknown Soldier
Shade, the Changing Man
American Vampire
Scalped
We3 
Sweet Tooth
House of Secrets 
....and many more!

Karen Berger is one of the all-time greats in the History of Western Comics.