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.

Vertigo Quarterly: Cyan #1 – Review

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

The Story: It’s impossible not to feel blue after reading this.

The Review: Of all the showcase titles out in recent years, the ones from Vertigo have been the best by far, with a good mix of known and unknown writers confidently spinning self-contained yarns from the chosen motif. Until now, I haven’t had a proper appreciation for the choice of motif, which provides some degree of unity to what would otherwise be jumbles of disparate, unconnected stories. But revolving stories around a color doesn’t quite do the same trick.

The big difference is that a color is an abstract concept in comparison to, say, witches or ghosts, which are somewhat more defined, even if a writer takes the notion in some radical direction. In theory, you can write any story and shoehorn a bit of cyan in there, which is what a lot of the features in this issue do, whether it’s Shaun Simon’s unconvincing “Serial Artist” or a metaphysical numbers extravaganza in Mony Nero’s “Much Ado About Nothing.” It’s easy enough for the colorists to dab a bit of sharp light blue in any given feature, but difficult to grasp the color’s effect on the story.