DC's British Invasion Changed The Comic Industry For The Better
The '80s era of DC brought in British talent that would narrate the future of comics.
DC Comics has produced many of the greatest works of sequential art of the last 40 years. Since the mid-1980s, DC has had a stranglehold on "prestige" comics, those books that are considered works of art by anyone who has experienced them. A very large factor in this was the British Invasion of the 1980s, when Jenette Kahn, the head of DC Comics at the time, and editor Karen Berger went to the United Kingdom to trawl for talent after the successes of Alan Moore, Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons, and other British creators.
The British Invasion brought over an infusion of talent that made DC Comics in the late '80s to the mid-'90s the best comic publisher going. The talented creators who came to DC changed the game forever. Not only were they sales successes, but their comics presaged much of what is happening today in the comic industry.
A Mounting Wave
The 1980s were an exciting time to be a comic fan. Comic books had started to grow, and DC Comics was leading the renaissance with books like Swamp Thing. Writer Alan Moore was an English writer who had gotten attention for his work with the British comic industry. Moore was the shining star, but he wasn't the only British creator making waves at the time. Brian Bolland, known for his time drawing Judge Dredd in 2000A.D., made a huge splash drawing Camelot 3000 and was considered by many to be the best artist of his generation. Dave Gibbons was also getting his share of attention. The British comic industry was a prize, and DC wanted to bring its energy to the U.S.
Editor Karen Berger, who had been working with Alan Moore and several of the other British creators, was chosen to accompany Jenette Kahn to London, where they would meet with multiple British creators. This was the turning point of the comic industry in the 1980s. The U.S. obviously had its share of superstars, many of whom could do the quality of work as Alan Moore and others, but there was something about the way the British creators approached DC and its characters. They brought an entirely different sensibility to them; for many young Americans, the superheroes were the mark of their culture. For the British of the corresponding time, American superheroes were just one part of a rather varied comic and pop culture landscape. They weren't as precious in many ways, and the British creators approached them in ways that most American creators didn't. Among American creators of the '80s, some were doing next-generation work that changed the ways comics were being perceived, but it wasn't a majority. British creators, on the other hand, all approached comics that way. The creators Kahn and Berger brought back to the States were about to take American comics by storm.
Upstarts In The Ranks
The British Invasion immediately started working. Several creators have talked about their pitch meetings back then, and one of the best is Neil Gaiman's, as told in The Sandman Companion. Gaiman was speaking to DC legend Dick Giordano and pitched him what would become Gaiman's first work for DC Comics, Black Orchid, which was drawn by Gaiman's friend Dave McKean. Apparently, Giordano didn't understand Gaiman when he started talking about Black Orchid, a minor Silver Age DC character, and Giordano said he'd have to see if DC had the rights to Blackhawk Kid. It's a funny story, but it also shows something important about the early stages of the British Invasion. Just looking back at the books that came out of the British Invasion — Black Orchid, Animal Man, Hellblazer — only one of them was about a contemporary DC character, and that was Hellblazer. The other two were Silver Age characters that no one had thought about in ages.
One of the most interesting things about DC over its long history is that they were never just about superheroes. Now, of course, the same thing can be said of Marvel, but Marvel went all in on superheroes and shut down the other parts of its line until after DC had brought those genres back to the fore. DC in the Silver Age actually kept doing a lot of those old books, with All-Star Western getting relaunched in the '70s, the various sci-fi backup stories starring the Space Cabbie and other similar characters, and horror anthologies like The Witching Horror, The House Of Secrets, The House Of Mystery, and others all having a strong presence. The best part is that so many of these were set in the DC Multiverse, on some Earth at some point in the timeline. DC had a wealth of C- and D-list characters who showed off the breadth of what DC Comics was; this gave a group of young upstarts lower-tier characters to get started on, characters who could be molded and shaped into new things. The creators of the British Invasion took this and went to town.
One need look no further than Grant Morrison's unique ideas on superheroes that the writer injected into all of their work. Animal Man started off as just a cool reboot of a Silver Age hero for the 1980s and became a treatise on fiction and how humanity interacted with it. This was the kind of idea that hadn't really been explored in comics before, or at least not in this method, which appealed to a lot of readers. However, it helped that Morrison understood how to structure a story, creating compelling, action-packed stories that entertained on every level. This was a hallmark of the books of the British Invasion. John Constantine was an intriguing character, but getting to see him, warts and all, in Hellblazer was a treat. Readers were treated to stories that had ideas and characters unlike anything had ever gotten before.
Of course, the biggest book of this period was The Sandman. Gaiman and McKean's Black Orchid was a hit, so the team made a pitch for Sandman. Since the Golden Age, there had been several Sandmen, from the original pulp-inspired Wesley Dodds version to several created by Jack Kirby while he was at DC. So, Gaiman took ideas at the heart of all versions of the character — sleep and dreams — to create a book that set out to prove John Byrne wrong with his Man Of Steel reboot — that godlike characters could be compelling. The Sandman is a masterpiece of craft, but the thing about when it was being published was that it was one of several books, from Animal Man to Doom Patrol to Hellblazer to Shade The Changing Man, that fit that bill. All of them were created by a member of the British Invasion.
A Cacophony Of Ideas
Alan Moore's Swamp Thing had been sold as "sophisticated suspense"; DC under Jenette Kahn was all about creating books for general readers on the newsstands and older readers who wanted something with more meat to it than just superheroes. This led to Vertigo. Editors like Karen Berger and Shelley Bond trusted the creators they worked with, and the books had already been delving into what was then considered "adult" topics at the time, mostly sex and sexuality, and had been more graphic. DC eventually decided to create an entire line of mature comics and give creators and editors more freedom than ever.
Vertigo is a legend in the comic industry. Calling it the most important comic imprint ever is accurate. The creators from the British Invasion — Gaiman, Morrison, Milligan, Delano — had created a corner of the DC Universe that had changed comics forever, and their reward was the power to do whatever they wanted with their stories. Vertigo published both DC properties and creator-owned comics, and the titles it put out ran the gamut of horror, fantasy, superheroes, sci-fi, and everything else. For modern readers, Vertigo in 1994 was like Image is today. It was a place where the greatest writers and artists could get together to create any kind of story they wanted.
The Sandman was early Vertigo's biggest success, but it was far from the only one. Swamp Thing, Animal Man, Doom Patrol, Hellblazer, and Shade The Changing Man were all fan-favorite books that sold well. Books like Enigma, an exploration of the self and sexuality by Peter Milligan and Duncan Fegredo, used the trapping of superheroes to talk about subjects that were taboo. Vertigo pushed the envelope and had a style all its own. While superheroes were going through an ill-advised extreme phase, Vertigo was the cool goth older brother sweeping in with their stories of nights on the edge and the strange characters there. Books like The Sandman Mystery Theater had all the trapping of superheroes but took readers to new places — and they all owed their existence to the British Invasion.
Vertigo allowed the creators of the British Invasion the freedom to take comics in any direction they wanted. These were the books that everyone was emulating; the creators of the British Invasion would become superstars, especially Morrison and Gaiman. Gaiman's work on The Sandman and the way the book sold and reached past comic fandom made him a creator too big for just comics, and he'd eventually escape the gravity of the comic industry and become a literary superstar. Neil Gaiman is an icon with a near-flawless record of hits. Grant Morrison worked at DC and Marvel, although mostly at DC, from 1989 to 2021. Morrison was a Vertigo pioneer, and their seminal work The Invisibles has become an important part of comic history — a sometimes shockingly violent comic that reveled in '90s pop culture and conspiracies starring a cast of diverse characters, from a trans woman to a foul-mouthed Liverpudlian to a militant lesbian commando. Vertigo wrote the future of the comic industry in the '90s, and the British Invasion's creators were the center of it all.
A Most Excellent Legacy
The British Invasion changed comics forever. What started as a quest for the next Alan Moore became the most important infusion of creative talent since Jack Kirby showed up at DC. It didn't create the next Alan Moore, though. It produced something more — brilliant talent like Morrison and Gaiman who would rival the greats and books like Shade The Changing Man, Enigma, and more that took the comic industry in an entirely new direction. It produced comics as they are today.
The British Invasion brought a pool of talent who had grown up away from the puritanical world of American pop culture. They brought a more sweeping view of human culture into the mix and introduced diverse characters to fans, playing with concepts like gender and sexuality in their comics in an explicit manner. They made comics safe for queer stories written by queer creators by breaking the taboo surrounding such things. They redefined what it meant to be a comic creator, doing projects that were traditional and completely irreverent. The creators of the British Invasion, and the ones who came after them like Garth Ennis, would give readers something to actually sink their teeth into during a time when comics were all elaborately sculpted cotton candy — cool-looking and sweet with no real substance. The comics that readers get today owe everything to the British Invasion. They showed that comics could be more, and the creators who came after them learned their lessons well.