3 out of 5

I’ll cop to not really being a Hellblazer fan.  I’d given some of the Ennis stuff a chance, and I still need to give it a chance, but, oddly, he seems like one of those characters who is conceptually perfect for adventures but a bore to read.  A cranky, smoking magician who communes with demons thanks to a botched suicide attempt?  Good roots for some dry British humorous fantasy stuff.  I know each writer has bit a slightly different spin on Constantine, dirtying him up more or less, making him more or less charming, but I suspect that – and this is having not read it, mind you – I suspect that the specter of Alan Moore’s hand in Constantine’s creation has hanged over all the incarnations that follow.  I dig Moore but I didn’t dig his swamp thing, as it was a bit too poetic and dreary to hook me… Moore obviously waxes poetic often, but this is loosened up when he’s dipping into the well of his own creations.  On Swamp Thing, limited or weighed down by the world of DC, he dug around in his more comicy booky bag of tricks to bring out the sappy and overwrought.  How this translated to Constantine at this point I don’t know, but I can only imagine.

Still, when he spun off into Hellblazer, there was some spark to him that made him an iconic, cult character that’s somehow lasted for hundreds of issues.

Nice pointless intro, yeah?

What I’m trying to say is that so many big names have worked with John, big names I love, and it sounds great, and yet it’s a character I never much care about.  Peter Milligan got to feature Constantine in his Shade, the Changing Man series for a couple issues, and it was a high point to the book, an outlet for Milligan to escape the over-seriousness that plagued that series from start to finish.  Millie had also had somewhat of a resurgence in comics when his HB run started, so I was plenty excited.  And you know what?  The charm remained for about 20 or so issues.  I was even recommending the books to others.  But, as often happens with such ‘expectations high beforehand’ reads, eventually something in the comic makes me realize I’m putting it at the bottom of my weekly stack to read it (not looking forward to it, in other words), and then I’ll go back and re-read the series and see some pretty telling flaws when there’s not a month delay between reads.

Though Milligan’s Hellblazer actually started off great, the opener “scab” focusing more on a weird and gross story that let Milligan explore his favorite concept of guilt in a super sarcastic and funny fashion thanks to using John as a voicepipe for all things aging and disgruntled.  The art by Giuseppe Camuncoli was so perfect a match, angular but detailed, funky and energetic panels that really drew you into the story.  It all wrapped up in a typical too-quick way, and I could spot Milligan’s planting of story seeds too obviously, though, again, month to month it worked fine, and this could just be because I’ve read enough of the guy’s comics to get his tricks.  As his run progressed, his love for the character and the character’s history was apparent in the way he started messing with it – marrying John off felt like a big deal even to me, a non Constantine reader.  But that aside, the book is troubled by a simplicity that the over-wrought storyline can’t really conquer.  Peter finds some fun tales to poke in there – a trip to India looks and reads great – but it makes you wish you could stick with these more isolated magic one-offs instead of the building romance troubles and whatever else Peter purposefully points out in the story so we know it’ll be involved later.  It looks fun, but it ends up feeling empty and sort of stupid.  Like a lot of big name comics, unfortunately.  It’s really tough to write someone else’s property, even at a liberal publisher like Vertigo.

What ended up causing me to go back a read it?  Well, Camuncoli’s pencils started to feel less emotive, and that’s because he started only doing layouts, the bastard.  Taken out of the book a step by this slight shift in art, I realized I just didn’t care about the story.  Each idea was cool – John’s trenchcoat possessing people, his cousin turning against him, the Shade reunion – and had some great Milligan moments, but the push toward some kind of larger character evolution wasn’t involving, and dribbled out the fun of these ideas.

I think Constantine fans are digging the run, and rightfully so.  I still haven’t read anything that’s really made me want to get with the character, but I’m realizing more and more that, although HB is published by Vertigo, he’s just another comic book character, and thus linked to the same problems as a lot of big name books.  (And wow, DC is “rebooting” the series after years to incorporate John more into the current DC world, so… yeah.  Feeling confirmed.)