DC Comics
DC attempted to address the growing market for mature readers with its Piranha Press imprint. Launched in 1989 with the ongoing title Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children, Piranha was a bold, if not entirely successful, experiment in creator-owned content. The imprint folded (colapse) in 1993, but it was revived in 1995 as Paradox Press. Although Paradox lasted only slightly longer than Piranha, it published John Wagner’s A History of Violence (1997) and Road to Perdition (1998) by writer Max Allan Collins and artist Richard Piers Rayner. Both graphic novels were later adapted into award-winning motion pictures. Far more enduring was DC’s Vertigo imprint, which began in 1993 as a home for mature-themed horror titles such as Hellblazer, Swamp Thing, and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Under the leadership of editor Karen Berger, the Vertigo line expanded dramatically to include Grant Morrison’s metafictional secret society saga The Invisibles (1994–2000), Garth Ennis’s acerbic morality play Preacher (1995–2000), Brian Azzarello’s Machiavellian crime story 100 Bullets (1999–2009), Bill Willingham’s twisted fairy tale Fables (2002–15), and Brian K. Vaughan’s apocalyptic bildungsroman Y: The Last Man (2002–08). Other DC imprints included Milestone Media, a comics line cofounded by writer Dwayne McDuffie that promoted the work of minority creators; WildStorm, an independent publisher launched by artist Jim Lee that was purchased by DC in 1999; and CMX, a line of Japanese manga comics that were adapted for a North American audience. In 2018 DC launched its Black Label imprint to serve as an umbrella for its adult-themed titles, and Vertigo was shuttered the following year. In some cases characters that were introduced in imprint titles were later integrated into the mainstream DC universe.