“Don’t remind people what you aren’t”: DC’s Richard Bruning on prestige, Vertigo, and why Paul Levitz wouldn’t buy a Mac, Part 1

Richard Bruning has never really come to terms with the DC Bullet. The Milton Glaser-designed logo, debuted by DC comics alongside their official name change in 1976, has long been regarded as a classic of comic book design, but to hear Bruning tell it, it’s nothing but a sum of its errors: it’s too unbalanced, too loud, and above all it positively reeks of the 1970s. That sort of opinionated iconoclasm was once a defining characteristic of Bruning and it was, ironically enough, the thing that got him hired as the Design Director of DC Comics about a decade after the bullet made its debut. Bruning had come out of the graphic design world in the college town of Madison, Wisconsin, where he came to the attention of local comic distributors-turned-publishers Capital Comics, who soon enough hired him on as both Editor-in-Chief and Art Director of the nascent (and relatively short-lived) comic line. It was there, in the first years of the 1980s, that Bruning helped to pioneer a new aesthetic for comic design: unapologetically modern, disdainful of the old tropes of floppy issue packaging, and aiming for an aesthetic and an audience apart from hermetic world of devoted superhero readers....