Jonathan Davis-Hunt

In the late '90s and early '00s, Warren Ellis helped reinvent Wildstorm Comics for the 21st century with runs on titles such as Stormwatch, The Authority and Planetary. The imprint and its characters were folded into the regular DC Universe as part of The New 52, but next year DC is setting them up in their own corner of the publishing line once again, with Ellis taking control as the curator of a new "pop-up" imprint similar to Gerard Way's Young Animal.

Imagine you had the perfect life with everything you ever wanted and a partner to share it with. Now imagine that your partner read a self-help book that drove them insane to the point of suicide. Wouldn't you want answers? That's the kick-off to Gail Simone and Jon Davis-Hunt's Vertigo series Clean Room. Within six issues, we've followed Chloe Pierce as she tries to understand the inner-workings of a Scientolgy-like cult headed by the enigmatic Astrid Mueller, and things keep getting stranger and more unsettling the further down the rabbit hole we go. ComicsAlliance chatted to Gail Simone about building the world of Clean Room, plus Vertigo provided us with pages from this week's Clean Room #7!

As Vertigo's two currently longest-running series head to a close -- Bill Willingham's Fables and Mike Carey and Peter Gross's The Unwritten -- the DC imprint is doubtless looking for new series with long-term potential to run alongside FBP, Astro City, and American Vampire. At New York Comic-Con on Friday the publisher announced two titles that might fit the bill, both from DC writers making their Vertigo debut. Grayson writer Tim Seeley will team with former Madame Xanadu artist Marley Zarcone on Effigy, while once and future Secret Six author Gail Simone and former 2000 AD artist Jonathan Davis-Hunt are the team behind Clean Room.