Vertigo’s Tainted is a Thiller That will Send Shivers to Your Spine

One of my favorite comics of all time is Tainted by Jamie Delano and Al Davison. It is a one-shot that was published in 1995 under the DC/Vertigo imprint. I read this comic every Halloween because it scares me at night. Brings me the shivers to my spine.

Its one of those comics that starts out sorta normal and then it jumps off into the deep end in the second page. And so much blood and gore. This comic literally made be more careful when I hand scissors to people. I kinda don’t want to stab them.

The main character George Palmer is introduced to us as a lonely middle-aged man who has an inheritance and donates his time to charity. He has 2 tenants, the nurse Lisa, who works nights at the hospital and the drug addict Steve, who kind of has some hate against George even though he hasn’t paid the rent yet. All of these 3 sketchy characters are living in the house George inherited from his father.

Also, I feel like the story takes place in the 70s or 80s based on the art and what the characters are saying. I think they would have to have Polaroids/Film Cameras in the 50’s or 60’s for the backstories to work. Also, I think it might take place in Britain. The comic doesn’t really say where the story takes place. I don’t think the story took place in 1994, the setting seems too old for that. But what do I know, I don’t know anything about the 90s to be honest.

The Consensus: The story itself takes place in either the 70s or 80s

George’s childhood: in the late 30s or 40’s or 50’s( because they mention his father talking about Nazi’s)

As the story goes on, we notice the George self-harms himself to get rid of the pain of his family all dying. He also starts peeping on Lisa the nurse through peepholes in the basement. He gets caught and Lisa ties him up and “torchures” him and makes a video of it( Steve’s idea to make the video). Lisa and George are aroused by the scenario and it’s super weird. I like BDSM, but the surrealness of the comic scares me in a way that makes me feel uncomfortable. The art is very realistic too in these scenes.

There is also a subplot where Lisa is stealing drugs from the hospital and selling them to Steve for 20 quid( that’s when I realized this took place in England for sure). Which is illegal, of course. I don’t know, I guess nurses didn’t make a decent money back in the 70s and 80s, but this was good way to make money. They literally have to dispose of morphine in the trash if there is 2 doses in a box, so its not stolen because people steal it. Also, I don’t condone dealing drugs because its a good way to make money, but it definitely exploits people and kills people.

Lisa shared the video with Steve and Steve wants to kill him and steal George’s money. But Lisa doesn’t want to do that, so that causes tension at the end of the story. George ends up figuring out that Steve has seen the video and he gets depressed and feels dirty. Then they all get in a big fight:

It’s not shown anywhere in the comic, but George believes that he has strangled Lisa and then killed her in the way he killed his sister all those years ago. This is the creepy part, hold unto your seats:

He was in love with his sister’s body when he was 12 and was peeping her and taking pictures of her when she was undressed. He also made the peepholes around the house so he could spy on her. I was shook after that part. I was just thinking that their was peepholes in the basement because they messed up when they were repairing the house…

When the sister found out he was peeping on her, she threatened to tell the parents and was obviously disgusted. So he grabs her hair and slams her against the bathroom sink, killing her( same way he grabbed Lisa’s hair and slammed her against the dresser). Then he took the sister body and put it in the tub to look like she slipped in the tub.

Then he called his parents saying something happened to Annie, and they rushed home and had an anime parent-killing accident.

In animes, they love to kill the parents when the car hydroplanes in the rain when they try to rush home or a hit and run. Slowly they are trying to switch to more typical situations like single parents and divorces, because no one’s parents really die, its more they divorced or walked out rather than died.

So the parents are dead after hydroplaning, and he is all alone. Instead of putting Lisa in the tub, he puts himself in the tub, cuts off his penis and dies. Steve dies, because Lisa poisons the morphine that she gives him, but that is all in vain because she dead. So basically everyone dies and this story is so fucked up. The only one who really didn’t deserve to die here is Lisa, tho. She sold morphine to Steve, and tried to conspire with him, but she redeemed herself by trying to stand up for George. We also do not see the Lisa childhood story like we do with the men, so we don’t really know what made Lisa fucked up. But maybe she wasn’t fucked up at all and she was a victim of circumstances?

Now, you know why on Halloween, I curl up with this story at night and freak out. It’s a late-night thriller, which could be a good movie. With all the CGI that happens today and a good 3 main leads, they could make a good thriller/horror out of this.