>>104803943That's the thing. "Vertigo Characters" was a retroactive label, and Vertigo being considered as its own universe was something that developed in the years that followed the creation of the imprint. Constantine rubbed shoulders with a lot of capes in his original appearances.
All of the books that moved to Vertigo in 1993 had been running for years, and all took place in the DCU. There wasn't a continuity separation for years to come. Even then, if sufficiently lobbied, "vertigo characters" (and I use that term loosely) could appear in regular books, like when Death showed up in Action Comics, and when Daniel appeared in JLA and JSA in the 2000s. Apparently Johns had to heavily petition for Swamp Thing's ARM to appear in a single panel during Infinite Crisis.
By 2000, the only book that ran for years in the DCU left as an ongoing series was Hellblazer, and since they had decided that John aged in real-time, he out-aged the rest of the DCU and shifted out of continuity with the rest of it.
The only characters that I personally consider to be "Vertigo characters" are the ones that exist either in their own partly-creator-owned universes, or the ones who were DC properties that were completely revamped with no connection to the DCU (like Milligan's Human Target and Jones' Deadman). The only case of one of those characters appearing in a regular DC book that I can think of it Saint-Of-Killers in Hitman, but even that had him looking like a small Asian man instead of the old Caucasian cowboy.
