5 out of 5

Having just reread Garth’s True Faith, I gotta say: there’s something absolutely grabbing about the guy’s early work.  And I commented the same on TF, but there was a point when every story didn’t have to involve war flashbacks or gross-out gags or – as in later in his career – long-winded rants on whatever.  And the writing was better for it.  Preacher still mostly works because it was the first time Garth really indulged in a lot of those later habits, so it felt more natural and surprising in context; pre-Preacher seems to offer one further element that Ennis would shift away from: a character focus.  The Constantine of Garth’s Hellblazer run is an amazingly fleshed out character, all the more impressive given that the young writer was stepping into a pretty renowned title with some writerly heavyweights already in its past.  That might seem like a shrug-worthy statement: doesn’t it mean that Garth just carried forward what came before?  …But if it were that easy, we’d have titles that remain great permanently, and we know that to not be the case.

No, with Dangerous Habits, Garth took a character with a lot of otherworldly potential and turned it all inward, with a simple – but effective – ploy: what if the cigarettes for which John was known to smokestack-smoke very humanly were responsible for his downfall?  What if John Constantine got lung cancer?  And with this ironic and brilliant setup, Garth is able to immediately dig to the core of our flawed lead, taking him through stages of grief of struggling against his fate, of acceptance, of saying goodbye – in his John way – to those he’s known.  And even more impressive is that the reversal of this doesn’t sacrifice the emotional stakes Garth had planted.  It was inevitable, of course, that Constantine would survive, but the manner in which it occurs – and the aftermath – is so fitting for the character, and for Garth’s bleak – but carefully hopeful – take on things, that it results in the type of writing that far supercedes its comic booky roots.

There are some light flubs in the setup – a bad guy is dispatched easily early on but then is meant to instill ultimate fear later, and the main confrontation drags on a bit with the jibber-jabber, but the overall gutpunch of the tale (a descriptor I use often for Garth’s better works) leaves you dazed and not caring about these issues.  Will Simpson’s art – a haggard line – is a great match for our battle-worn Constantine, and combined with Tom Ziuko’s definedly dreary coloring, the mood is downright perfect, despite the zillion different inkers disrupting the consistency of things.

This book is a classic.  Reading Garth’s modern stuff, a fair share of which I still enjoy but am admittedly very critical of, it’s easy to forget the work of his – like Hellblazer – that made him into such a name.