Vertigo Quarterly: Magenta #1 – Review

By: Too many to list—or even to review. Just check out the issue.

The Story: You’ll be tickled pink by what you read.

The Review: I enjoyed the last quarterly just fine, but I couldn’t help being a little dismayed by the $7.99 price point. That’s a lot of money for a bunch of shorts, not all of which are gems. On the flipside, none of them sucked or anything, and for what is basically a collection of pieces by mostly unknown writers and artists, that’s pretty remarkable. You might say that what you’re really paying for is the dreams of some talented creators, for whom this might be an opening to a big break.

That just leaves the puzzle of the color themes for each quarterly. Cyan produced such a jumble of different pieces that it didn’t really seem to be much of a unifying theme at all. Magenta looks to be a very different story. There’s still plenty of variety in the stories generated in this issue, but certain patterns emerge, ones that just might have something to do with our psychological perception of magenta itself.