The Hellblazer marathon: Part I - From Swamp Thing to Soho

Filed by: Darren Turpin on November 26, 2006 at 12:03
Filed under: Comics & GNs

Hellblazer is one of my all-time favourite comics series, bar none. It's provided an expressive outlet for some of the very best writers, cover artists and interior artists in the industry, and if I'm right, is the DC Vertigo imprint's longest-running title.

I first started buying and reading Hellblazer back when I was at school (aged about 17 or so), along with the original run of Sandman, Doom Patrol, Black Orchid, the four issue mini-series that was the original Books of Magic and a whole bunch of the early Vertigo titles. Then pretty much all comic buying activity stopped in my second or third year at University when I started to run up the overdraft. But I've picked up the occasional graphic novel in the series since then, and I've always promised myself that one day I'd sit down and re-read the whole run, from the very beginning.

I started doing just that a couple of months ago. First I had to fill in a few gaps in the collection, which involved some scrabbling around on eBay and I still haven't gotten hold of a copy of issue #27 - Neil Gaiman's guest writing slot; the incredibly moving ghost story 'Hold Me' - but luckily it was reprinted in a 'best of' anthology GN when the movie came out a couple of years ago. And I decided to forego John Constantine's very earliest appearances in the pages of Alan Moore's early Swamp Thing tales, because he only plays a peripheral role, and I can pretty much remember most of it (turn up, act mysterious, smoke fags, disappear...)

'Hellblazer: Dangerous Habits' by Jamie Delano & William SimpsonI have to admit that the series does take a little while to get going properly. In fact - although this is going to sound horribly disrespectful to Jamie Delano, a writer whose work I generally admire very much - it wasn't really until Garth Ennis began writing the classic Dangerous Habits [Amazon] storyline that, for me at least, John Constantine really got going as a lead character in his own right.

The earliest Delano episodes start out as a pretty straight Brit-horror comic, with demon yuppies and neo-nazi golems and all sorts of fun. It was all heavily informed by the state of Britain at the time; languishing under Thatcherism's yoke and slowly crumbling into a state of abject moral terpitude, if Delano's themes and plotlines are to be taken at face value. Plus the occasional segue to tie up some loose ends from the Swamp Thing series and generally play ball with some other stuff happening in the DC Universe at the time.

Then, round about episode #14, a rich, mystical vein kicks in, as Constantine finds himself swept along by the events of the 'Fear Machine' storyline, tangles with the Family Man and then gets involved with some serious heavy-duty magic towards the end of the run as the Pagan nation attempts to restore the balance of the world set awry by some of the earlier events, and Constantine takes numerous trips into his own twisted psyche.

All good stuff; far more intriguing, dark and mature than most folks would probably expect from a comic book, but to be honest, you do have to be interested in that sort of thing to get the most out of it. And to be honest, except for the revelation of What Happened in Newcastle in issue #13, there's probably not an awful lot in there that constitutes required reading for the rest of the series, at least, judging by how inferequently the material is referenced in the next few dozen issues. There are a couple of interesting guest writer slots though; the aforementioned Neil Gaiman, Dick Foreman's one-off about a possessed bulldog, and a typically off-the-wall and hallucinatory two-issue slot from Grant Morrison.

'Hellblazer, Vol.1' by Jamie Delano, various artistsBut that whole mystical, slightly inaccessible air is probably the main reason why relatively little material from Delano's run has been released in GN form to-date. The first fourteen issues were collected, in four volumes, by Titan Books in the UK; they were printed in black & white, which I think actually enhanced the original artwork. And DC have published the first nine issues in their Original Sins [Amazon]
volume, with the original (not so great) colourisation. Personally, I'd recommend skipping that and tracking down the Titan volumes on eBay; but there you go.

All of which brings us - rather neatly - onto the first Garth Ennis storyline: Dangerous Habits, illustrated throughout by the wonderfully scratchy and smudgy ink pen of William Simpson. This six-issue segment is probably the comics equivalent of that classic first album; the one that bands spend years honing their craft for, but then never quite manage to come all the way close to with their subsequent efforts. For me, at least, it's the distilled essence of everything that Constantine is and represents. Forget your Mother Goddes, your Arthurian heritage, your yin-yang duality, your hanged man magus hang-ups; here's a guy who 's basically a bit of a bastard, who knows a lot more than you or me about the way the other side of the supernatural fence operates, and who is faced with a fatal problem: he's just been diagnosed with lung cancer.

Hellblazer, issue 41, page 8, copyright DC Comics

How Constantine brings his unique perspective and knowledge to bear on the matter, how we decides to deal with his mortal problem, is the stuff that story-telling legends are made of. I won't commit heinous spolierage here and tell you what actually happens, but suffice to say, if you only read one John Constantine, Hellblazer storyline in your life, make it Dangerous Habits. This segment also neatly sets up a number of sub-plots that will come to fruition in the next few issues (and, incidentally, spawns the basis for the whole Preacher series, which Ennis went on to write after his Hellblazer run came to an end).

Absolutely classic stuff, the sort of thing I could read over and over, and most probably will. Yes, it really is that good...

Not that it's all downhill from there, though, by any means. There's more good material on the way, and I'll check back in another 30 or 40 issues and let you know how I'm getting on. Actually, I must admit that I only ever read up to the end of the Garth Ennis run, first time around, so from issue #83 or so I'll be heading off into new territory myself. I'm looking forward to that immensely.

Filed on: November 26, 2006
Filed under: Comics & GNs
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