Ingrid Bohnenkamp

Comics continue redefining boundaries, tackling complex social issues, and educating readers, even as they entertain.

Karen Berger’s career in comics began at DC Comics in 1979, when she was just 21. With a keen eye for cultivating new talent, Berger rose quickly through the company’s ranks and in 1993 helped establish DC’s experimental and hugely successful Vertigo line, editing boundary-busting classics such as Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta, and Moore’s Swamp Thing.

Like W.E.B. Du Bois’s fictional megascope—an instrument that allows users to see forgotten aspects of history—John Jennings’s new Megascope line, launching this fall as a subimprint of Abrams’s ComicArts, will delve into the past and future, reviving classic stories primarily by creators of color.