With the departure of Vertigo Executive Editor Karen Berger, speculation has been rife that DC Comics may be closing the door on its nearly 20-year-old mature-readers imprint. Not so, say the publisher's Senior Vice President of Sales Bob Wayne and Vice President of Marketing John Cunningham.

They're the two who make the rounds of comics news sites each month to frame DC's direct-market sales performance, and in their conversation with Comic Book Resources they even managed to sound cheerful about the November chart, in which Marvel had eight of the Top 10 titles.

So take this any way you like, but when asked by ICv2.com about the future of Vertigo, they were pretty upbeat. Here's what Cunningham had to say:

I think everyone knows that Vertigo has been DC’s home for cutting edge and critically acclaimed stories and I don’t see that changing at any time in 2013 or beyond. If fact, if you go back to San Diego and New York and look at announcements for projects that are coming out for 2013 we announced things as wide across the spectrum as the new Scott Snyder and Sean Murphy’s The Wake, a new Jeff Lamire series, Trillium, of course Neil Gaiman returning to Sandman, aside from the continuing volumes of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the multitude of Fables products. We’ve also seen in the past couple of weeks, as we’ve done slate planning for 2013, a lot of other new series coming from Vertigo that we’ll be announcing shortly.

The industry as a whole and DC as a whole will miss Karen [Berger]. She’s been a tremendous and almost unprecedented contributor over the years, but I think we have enough good, high-quality Vertigo product in the pipeline to keep Vertigo readers happy for the near-term future.

Wayne was more vague when he was asked about whether there would be any changes in Vertigo's mix of series, miniseries and graphic novels, but it looks like at least for now, the imprint is safe.

Related: CBR's Top 10 Vertigo Titles of All Time