Wild At Heart

Joel Meadows Meets the Creators Behind Young Animal, DC’s New Young Adult Comics Line.

The latest DC Comics imprint, Young Animal, launches this autumn with a quartet of new titles: Shade, The Changing Girl; the eccentrically-titled Cave Carson Has A Cybernetic Eye; Mother Panic; and – just out – a brand new run of weird super-book, Doom Patrol.

It’s not the first spin-off imprint in the company’s long history, of course. There’s Vertigo, pre-eminently, which launched back in 1993 and became the home of hits like The Sandman and Preacher. Sci-fi label Helix, on the other hand, was less successful. That and the Impact Comics line, targeting younger readers, both came and went within just two years.

Initially Young Animal looked suspiciously similar to Vertigo, sparking fears that the perennial mature readers imprint may be being phased out. But as more info has been released it’s become clear that the label is very much its own (young) animal. Headed up by celebrated Umbrella Academy creator Gerard Way (interviewed on page 70), it’s designed to sit somewhere between the regular DC range and its more goth sibling.

Way has gathered an impressive lineup of creators together from the worlds of independent and mainstream comics. For Mother Panic, Way has been collaborating with writer Jody Houser, whose CV includes Faith for Valiant, Orphan Black for IDW and Agent May for Marvel. She told us that working on a series set in one of the comic world’s most well-known fictional settings – Gotham City – was anything but restrictive.