Hellblazer by Jamie Delano Annual #1

This was a rather creative annual issue with fifty-three pages worth of exposition and action that focus on the mysticism and old magic that have surrounded John Constantine's lineage, particularly in his ancestral roots. It turns out that he's a direct descendant of a king named Kon-Sten-Tyn, a replacement of the fallen and broken king Arthur Pendragon, and was actually the true Once and Future King after all (or so Kon-Sten-Tyn claims, which can be easily accepted, considering the lengths he had gone through to ensure the stretch of his immortality). We got a delightful ensemble of characters for this issue entitled The Bloody Saint including the surprising yet welcomed appearance of Eve (who was still a crone here, it was only in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman that she got beautified).

Speaking of The Sandman: I did mention before that it was in Preludes and Nocturnes where I first met John. But a few volumes later, I got acquainted with one his predecessors, Johanna Constantine in Fables and Reflections, and she had the gift for the paranormal and the occult as well, so it wasn't really that difficult for me to believe that Constantine comes from a long line of mystics and conjurers. He himself takes pride in his patronage of the dark arts after all. I don't want to discuss every page for this annual because that would be unfair for anyone who wants to experience the story for him/herself but I will say that it's a pretty solid one. 

It's less about John after the Newcastle ordeal (we get to see brief scenes of him wandering about in Ravenscar Correctional Facility, losing his damn mind due to guilty conscience), considering this was truly more about his ancestor Kon-Sten-Teyn who has re-defined assholery and self-entitlement like a motherfucker, tormenting the old wizard Merlin who used to be his mentor and friend, and well, does a series of unforgivable, selfish acts that makes John look harmless with his own set of narcissistic impulses and decisions. I am in no way denying that what we have come to know and understand about John so far is false. He can be a jerk by choice. He can be unintentionally harmful to the people around him, especially if you're his loved one. But I'm just saying that this annual issue does a good job providing us with a backstory from centuries ago which explained that perhaps such destructive habits are cultivated by all Constantines before John, and that it most probably runs in the blood because Kon-Sten-Teyn, the father of that douchery, has indirectly cursed his family tree, spreading the sickness of his corrupted soul to generations upon generations after him.

Like I said, I won't expound too much. The paragraph above is really all I can say, lest I spoil your enjoyment of reading this for yourself. But it's a very comparable scenario, the actions of the ancestor with that of his current descendant; yet I believe that John is not the piece of shit we are starting to think he is, or he believes he is; not when you contrast him with Kon-Sten-Teyn who was just so...hateful. It ties back to that dream-sequence narrative we get in issue #13 where we do see a vulnerable and tender side to John. He is not completely driven by his lust for power or blinded by his disregard for other people in the name of self-importance. 

There is still a goodness to him that is unmistakable when we do see him in his weakest and humane of moments. John does care but is unable to show the extent of his concern in appropriate and universally acceptable ways because he is Kon-Sten-Teyn's heir--and that comes with the steep price of the frequent assholery and condescending cynicism.

But it's obvious that the Hellblazer series has painted him as an anti-hero of questionable morals and actions, so it shouldn't surprise us when we find ourselves liking him the least as we read on. Personally, I think John Constantine is a worthy titular character because he forces us to look at the darkness in our own reflections. He is able to make us very uncomfortable only because he exposes the bad things that we are all capable of, and the kind of repercussions and ramifications that entail; ones which we can hardly face ourselves when we are dealt with cards that are not always in our favor. But there is also a saving grace when he finds a way to overcome them. It allows us to hope that, if met with the same fate, we'd be capable of rising from the desolate pits and come out just as strong.

RECOMMENDED: 8/10

Hellblazer by Jamie Delano issue #13

I've always been a sucker for dream-sequence narrative especially in film. I also keep a dream journal myself where I take time untangling and making sense of my dreamings. I strongly believe that the comics medium should also be a very gratifying way of expressing that level of visual craft. Still, I did not expect to get it from Hellblazer just yet, to be honest, but this issue proves to have been very fascinating for me during reading it and even after I turned the last page.

Right off-the-bat, I think I will finally use my perfect rating for On the Beach, and then proceed to justify in this review why it deserved it.

BE WARNED THAT THIS WILL BE FILLED WITH SPOILERS because the symbols in John Constantine's dream must be disclosed and interpreted.

This is the first time I actually paid more attention to the artwork and illustrations. I'm quite aware that the style for comics back then (mid-eighties) do not always appeal to me for some reason and Hellblazer has a tendency to alienate me in that aspect which is strange because I tend to always notice the art first before the story, most especially on how it brings out the quality of the narrative. Unfortunately, since reading this series, I've only been caught up with Delano's prose and I often do not care much about looking at the artwork long enough to appreciate it. 

You may have noticed that I don't talk about it at all when I review Hellblazer which I know would seem like I'm doing it a disservice but I just think that there was nothing special worth discussing before in the previous ones (save perhaps a couple of great panel layouts here and there but that's normally it) so I opted not to include a visual examination in my reviews. Now I'm actually glad I did hold back from doing that because now I'm presented with an issue that is dying for such an analysis and I will joyously comply here. You can be rest assured of that.

So the issue opens with John Constantine walking around, licking ice cream and having basically a normal day at the beach. He monologues about his childhood while looking at the families spending quality time together. He then finds himself in a corner of the beach somewhere where there are large boulders and he decided that it would be the best place to stay in, maintaining a low-key presence the entire time as he even listened in to a couple's conversation a few yards away. There was nothing that would indicate that he was in a dream just yet. Even I didn't think it was less real, considering this is John we're talking about and our hero always seems to find himself caught up in the threshold of what is readily tangible and what is beyond the scope of human understanding.

The scenario becomes immediately ominous in the later pages where some sort of chemical power plant a few miles away from the beach exploded and started to kill both aviary and aquatic life around it. The families looked on in abject horror and disbelief as the world around them started crumbling. The couple earlier on got separated, with the man running away and leaving his girlfriend behind. John tries to chat her up, presumably to comfort her, but she dismisses him, probably assuming he was just being a sleaze. So John gives up and was then asked by one of the mothers to find her husband and to do it quickly because her children are allergic to feathers (and there are dead birds across the stretch of the shore). While in that quest, John was apprehended by masked men who seem to be working on finding a solution to the ecological disaster at hand. They forbade him to go further.

John returns to the mother who decided that the best course of action is to drown herself with the children so they could 'adapt' to the new environment. She takes her children's hands and they swim together in the ocean, and the mother looked creepily content with that choice. You don't see John stopping her at all. Instead he was fixated on the girl from earlier. We find out that it's only the two of them left at the beach. He fetches some sort of mutated starfish from the water and presents it to her as a way of courtship. By this time I know that this is not actually real anymore--and maybe the entire thing since the chemical power plant explosion is a nightmare.

Things got uncomfortable when John and this unnamed bikini-clad girl (whose boyfriend never did come back to her) started to live together in a small hut. Their bodies are deteriorating, probably because of the chemicals around them. But they have sex anyway and then John watches in solemn anticipation as the girl's belly gets bigger. Soon, he was assisting her in giving birth to their cursed offspring; which turned out to be a two-headed baby seal. John was instantly affectionate towards it like any father would be, but then said baby seal started to run away from him. He chased it down the beach and realized that the seal only wanted to go home to the sea, but then a group of carnivorous skeletal birds started to eat it. John tries to stop them but failed. He then proclaimed that it was his last child, his last hope for immortality. Distraught and feeling abandoned, John stands there as the hurricane of skeletal birds began to consume his body until all that was left of him were bones. He walked into the ocean, contemplating the extinction of human race as he allowed the water to carry him to a darker horizon ahead.

Thankfully, he wakes up. He looked more annoyed than frightened about the dream and we realize that it's only because his sleep had been populated by such nightmares lately, especially after Newcastle. But the events in Newcastle just had a closure so why is Constantine's psyche not giving him a proper break? It's really not that difficult to make sense of John's nightmare for this issue. The apocalyptic backdrop, his failure to save innocent lives, his desire for a compatible mate and even his secret hope of parenthood to me felt typical for someone of John's character and pathology. John's life is filled with chaos both in a paranormal and intimate sense. Being an occultist has made him vulnerable to potent and malicious forces that seem to demand his blood more than anything. This would affect anyone's social relationships and we have seen him doom a lot of his close ties to death or torment. We have also seen him chase after women quite narcissistically, often getting entangled with them for the ability of these women to dull his hungers that run deeper than for the occasional shag and lukewarm companionship. On top of that, John wanted a semblance of family. We know he was estranged from his sister Cheryl, and he doesn't seem to have that many fond memories about his parents either. The manifestation of this longing is the two-headed baby seal.

But why a mutated anthropomorphised offspring, you ask? Well, John knows he couldn't possibly have a normal family and it was also an indication of his guilt for all the women he 'spoiled' in the past (the most recent of which was Zed whom he allowed to get killed by an angel during a botched immaculate conception). In his subconscious, John knows he had to be punished severely for the reckless endangerment he subjected in the women he supposedly care about, hence a mutated offspring whom he also had to lose quite viciously to unknown forces that he faces daily, given his line of work.

I think this issue worked well in contextualizing John's complex characterization with the events unfolding in his life, both in the personal and the supernatural level. The dream-sequence narrative was enigmatic as it was disturbing and eerie to read. My bias about such literary device mainly influenced my perfect rating. This issue spoke to me and made John Constantine insufferably more irresistible. I simply consider it both a terrifying and pleasurable experience to be exposed to the inner workings of his damaged goods.

RECOMMENDED: 10/10

Hellblazer by Jamie Delano issue #12

"For the first time since Newcastle, when I poisoned myself with a stupid lust for power, I'm conscious of standing on the brink of the future--rather than the tail of the past. We have to turn inwards. Enter the siege perilous-- and wrestle. It's not those grotesque, tired institutions of heaven and hell that are the problem-- it's the devils we know."

The Devil You Know, this issue's namesake, comes from a phrase that had always amused me, and I often apply it in my life when it comes to decisions that have, well, ambiguous contexts. To expound on that cheery note, I think I should admit by now that I just realized why I enjoy reading John Constantine's tales the way I have (even if they are about his less admirable moments). I suppose I do recognize my faults in nature when I contextualize my  experiences with his own. 

Over the course of the thirteen issues I have finished reading so far, I've also learned to put myself in his shoes and knew--uncomfortably so--that I would have chosen the same things (even if my motivations differ strongly from his). Could it be because we're both Taurus natives? (We find out about his birthday in the ninth issue which was on May 10. I was born on April 24. Since this Hellblazer leans on mysticism, I felt the need to bring up zodiac signs here). Whatever the logic behind my connection with this character is my own shit to deal with, I guess. So let's move on to the review.

This issue is the conclusion to the Newcastle case from the previous one. I'm quite happy that Delano and co. don't drag the stories for long and they usually come in two issues while others are standalone ones. It is arguable, however, when it comes to Newscastle since this plotline has been mentioned since the very first issue but was only finally discussed by the eleventh and twelfth issues. Newcastle is a significant game-changer event in Hellblazer because it showed us a past where John is arrogant and impulsive and it ended up costing the life of a little girl and, to a lesser extent, his friends who were involved in the botched ritual. This mistake has haunted him since we met him when Hellblazer started and it's only in this issue that John Constantine can finally put his demon (literal and metaphorical) to rest.

I've already been very indulgent with spoilers from the last issue so I think it's only appropriate that I don't talk about the events of this issue in detail anymore because I really encourage anyone who might be following my Hellblazer reviews to read the issues themselves if they can find the time and copies online. But overall, this has been a fantastic way to end the storyline of Newcastle. You can actually feel John Constantine himself feeling invigorated about life and living in general. Sure, there was another loss along the way but he can contend himself with the reality that all the scars he had collected since should be worn with pride and dignity this time.

RECOMMENDED: 7/10

Hellblazer by Jamie Delano issue #11

I can't be sure if Jamie Delano intentionally writes John Constantine as a character you don't instantly like and rarely sympathize with, but I'm rather enjoying that approach because such a flawed mechanism of a character has been advantageous to the stories Hellblazer has told us so far. It's worth noting that Delano did not just decide to write our titular protagonist this way without some backstory to affirm the characterization so far. So, finally, we get the issue that explains it all--yet it's also a story that manages to leave us disconcerting realizations of our own regarding John Constantine as the center of the series.

During the first nine issues, there were mentions of 'Newcastle', from what we can understand, it seems to hint some sort of mysterious and tragic event that happened in John's past which ultimately claimed the lives of his friends who were a part of it. It certainly has a I Know What You Did Last Summer vibe to it (that is if you grew up in the nineties like me and that's your go-to pop culture reference pertaining to this kind of horror trope). I have stated previously that this issue is the very first Hellblazer story I ever encountered and it's also coincidentally one of the significant issues in the series because it revealed an arc that will play out for the upcoming issues.

This won't be a spoiler-free review. 

After all, it would be impossible to review this issue without discussing several points that I want to inspect closely, all in direct considerations of John's role in this bloody mess and how his characterization in the current timeline was actually validated through it, and in consequence of what happened in Newcastle. So here we are in issue #11, otherwise known as "Newcastle: A Taste of Things to Come".

First of all, what the hell is 'Newcastle'? Well, it's just a place in north of England. Nothing ominous to it except of what happened in its location, specifically in The Casanova Club, a nightclub where John Constantine and his band Mucous Membrane (have I not mentioned he's a punk musician too?) has performed in once. So the owner failed to pay the band so the MM crew returned the next day to collect the money. However, based on John's monologues, he also secretly decided to come back to the dreary place because of his suspicions concerning the owner Alex Logue and his daughter Astra. And he wasn't wrong.

He was joined by characters we have seen in the previous issues like Gary Lester (issues #1-2), Ritchie Simpson (issue #7) and the ghosts who have been haunting John like Benjamin Cox (a teenage occult expert) and Anne-Marie (who later became a nun). The only two characters that newly appeared for this issue alone were Frank North, a biker, and Judith, a tantric magician/ocassional fuck-buddy of John. Together they broke in to the place and uncovered a foul massacre in the basement. John quickly finds the little girl Astra and hypnotizes her to understand what happened. As it turns out, Astra was indeed being sexually abused by her father and he would often force her to participate in orgies with his other elder friends and the hookers who frequent the club. Unknowingly, due to the extreme pain and suffering, Astra had somehow conjured a demon named Norfulthing who manifested itself in earthly plane and butchered her father and the rest of consorts. 

Things got even more horrific when they realized that Norfulthing was still lurking around and ends up raping Ben before Frank rescues the poor boy and shoots the demon in the face. John asked Judith (with help from Gary Lester) to summon a demon to fight Norfulthing. Unfortunately, due to reckless arrogance or plain ignorance, John was unable to name the demon properly and bind it. THIS IS IMPORTANT. THIS IS A SCREW-UP THAT YOU CAN'T JUST GET AWAY WITH IT. 

After this demon seduces Anne-Marie by disguising himself as John (it is mentioned Anne-Marie is infatuated with John), he pours acid on her face and made her jump out of a window, rendering Astra vulnerable so this new demon possesses her body and kills Norfulthing. When John tries to exorcise it, the unnamed demon claims that because he didn't name him properly, he has no power whatsoever to command him. To further spite Constantine, this demon decided to take Astra's body and soul with him to Hell. John immediately volunteers himself as replacement but the unnamed demon taunts him and shows him a glimpse of what he will have to endure next to Astra.

Meanwhile, his friends try to desperately close the portal where the unnamed demon had come from. John drags Astra with him as he runs to get out of the strip of Hell he was transported to along with the child. He manages to jump out just in time as the portal closes. For a brief moment he thought he succeeded in saving the little girl but then Judith hysterically pointed out that all that John was holding onto by then was a piece of her arm and that the rest of her had been locked in, delivered to the clutches of the unnamed demon. 

John was wretchedly devastated, but they all agreed never to speak of the incident again.

Still, each of these occultists was punished by their own guilt one way or the other. John committed himself into a mental facility for two years. Ben never recovered from the rape and became a pronounced stutterer. Badly scarred, Anne-Marie became a nun and never spoke to John ever again. Judith joined a cult which consumed her eventually. Gary Lester became a heroin addict and was killed off when John sacrificed his body as a vessel for a hunger demon to live in (as seen in issue #2). Ritchie Simpson became an underground hacker until he finally met his end from issue #7. Only Frank was relatively unharmed until he joined Ben, Anne-Marie and Judith in a Swamp Thing issue to fight an oncoming apocalypse but none of them survived. It's often funny how karma settles the score.

So that's basically what happened in Newcastle. It's the backstory we needed to get a better understanding of why John Constantine's overall countenance since we met him is sour, dismissive and often depressed. Do I think that such a formative event justifies how he acted in the succeeding events, starting from the second issue with Gary Lester until the ninth issue where he became indirectly responsible for Zed's death (after having sexual intercourse with her, soiling her vessel that she was unable to receive divine copulation from an angel who viciously kills her in the end)? NO. ABSOFUCKINGLUTELY NOT. I don't excuse his heinous and selfish decisions to sacrifice these people he supposedly cared about. I also consider it mercy-killing when he unplugged the computers where Ritchie Simpson's consciousness was entrapped in, all because he couldn't tell his friend that he had burned his body. I may sound vehement at this point but it's only because I am torn with my love for Constantine in the later issues and my feelings for him now after I read the earlier issues.

Cowardly, blinded by grief and overpowered by fear, John is at his worst when we met him for the first time in Hellblazer, and we have yet to see him at his best. It's really not a mystery that we don't approve of John's actions in the context of his spiritual brokenness, most especially when it cost so many lives, particularly of the people he is intimately associated with. But at least the event in Newcastle has clarified some of the darkness, and allowed us to understand better what ticked him off and undid the seams in the first place. I enjoyed the highs and lows that Delano has constructed in just eleven issues of this series. I'm intrigued, repulsed and saddened by how John Constantine is characterized.

Strangely enough, I think Hellblazer truly becomes groundbreaking when we are offered with morally ambiguous and grim stories such as this one. It becomes quite uncomfortable yet ultimately satisfying when we read a protagonist that keeps challenging our compassion and open-mindedness the way John has. I think we are definitely on the right track--especially now that John knows who the fucking unnamed demon was and it's no other than NERGAL, LEADER OF DAMNATION ARMY who appeared officially in issue #4. Let the mind games begin!

RECOMMENDED: 9/10

Hellblazer by Jamie Delano issue #10

"Remember Newcastle--these two words touch me as precisely as a dentist's steel probing the exposed pulp of a molar nerve."

When the 9th issue ended, the continuation went on in Swamp Thing issue #37 which I decided to skip. This issue opened with a short summary of what transpired in there and I got a pretty good idea nevertheless (that, and I researched the actual content for that issue right after I finished reading this one). 

Amusingly enough, this title is named Sex and Death and the first few pages starts with John Constantine being expelled as a sperm, monologuing quite comfortably about it as if this occurrence is natural (the readers' confusion will beg to differ, however). As it turns out, Constantine is in the astral realm after he lent his physical form to Swamp Thing so said creature can mate with (and impregnate) girlfriend Abigail Arcane. Yes, that's what happened in Swamp Thing #37 as part of some elaborate plan I don't think is worth discussing in the context of Hellblazer. It's one of those crossover sidestories you don't need to bother yourself with since it doesn't actually affect anything concerning the Hellblazer series. 

So while Constantine is suspended in the astral plane, he decides to find out if his plan about stopping Zed's immaculate conception worked (if you read my review of the last issue, I revealed there that John and Zed had one last shag which was also strategic because John just had spontaneous demon blood transfusion from Nergal so if the recent intercourse with a mortal man won't do the trick, then the additional demonic fluid should, amirite?). There was no doubt in my mind that it would work so when an angel tries to copulate with Zed's vessel to fulfill the prophesy, he ends up rejecting her; and in such a murderous way at that (where the rest of the Resurrection Crusaders were punished heavily for their transgression of gifting the angel a tainted woman). So everyone in that short-lived religious cult (no one gave a shit about while reading) is dead and Nergal and his Damnation Army are in a festive mood with the heavenly carnage around them.

But Nergal found out about John and Swamp Thing's sordid arrangement and was very upset about that. From what I understand, his precious demon blood which he shared with John earlier on in the story was now being used by Swamp Thing for his own mating purposes. That's not cool, apparently. A chase after John via hellhounds ensued so our hero was forced to come back to his body--while Swamp Thing and his girl Abigail are still shagging. That was a humorous moment. Abigail was grossed out when she found out it was already Constantine who was thrusting inside her (which I could not wrap my head around, by the way. I know she loves Swamp Thing, given her immediate repulsion upon discovering that she was shagging John now all of a sudden--but if it was me, I'd bang John Constantine like it's my last meal before death penalty or something. But hey, that's just me. I've always had a thing for damaged goods, you see). BUT I DIGRESS.

After he comforts Abigail, Swamp Thing turns to John and leaves his friend an enigmatic message from Nergal: "Remember Newscastle," he says. The moment those words were uttered, a change has come over John Constantine and it's a dark thirst for venegance that has haunted him for a long time since those fateful events occurred. Personally, I got the chills and the excitement already once I saw these words written in the page. The next issue is the first issue of Hellblazer I ever read and it stayed with me. I'm definitely looking forward in discussing that issue. Be warned that my review won't be spoiler-free at all!

RECOMMENDED: 7/10