Raising Hell With Our John

If you ignore all the other real life things I did today, it could be said that I spent the day reading Hellblazer comics and reacquainting myself with John Constantine and the creative teams that have been handling him for the last five years.

I've been a Constantine fan for many, many years now but this latest burst of interest started a while back with an urge to see the movie based on the series again. For whatever reason that particular desire was never met despite my owning the damn thing, but what happened in its stead was my taking out a Hellblazer trade collection out of the library to get my fix. I don't recall if it was "Setting Sun" or "Rare Cuts", but whichever it was started a chain reaction that has led me to digging out my old Hellblazer pamphlets and finishing off "Red Sepulchre" and "Good Intentions" (with the latter as a reread) tonight, with "Freezes Over" sitting by my bedside in a holding pattern for when I can next get to it. I'm even considering hunting down other trades or back issues to fill the gaps left when I stopped buying the book monthly.

Most of the stories I read in the last while were drawn by the incomparable Marcelo Frusin, whose Constantine I fell in love with from the first panels of "Good Intentions". Other artists have done the character justice, but there's a strange combination of malevolence and heroism in the way Frusin depicts our John. I also really dig the ensemble he sported during Mike Carey's tenure as writer on the series. The signature trench was almost always there but the tieless, buttonless tops and all black pants and shirts gave John a style on top of his attitude that made him as cool as he is dodgy. Frusin's use of composition and shadows also puts him somewhere in my top 3 artists of the series (the other two being Sean Phillips and...ummm...hmm, I'll have to think about that one a little more).

Tonights reading was courtesy of the aforementioned Mike Carey and American writer, Brian Azzarello. Carey's stuff was just what the doctor ordered with a nice balanced mixture of atmosphere, mysticism and adventure to keep the doldrums at bay. He had all the beats necessary to tell a solid Hellblazer yarn and I can't think of a single issue of his yet that I haven't thoroughly enjoyed (bear in mind I still have only read a quarter or less of Carey's run, mind you). As for Azzarello, his stuff was solid, interesting and moody but slow to unspool. I still like his stuff and I consider his run to be one of the better on the title, but I think I was more in the mood for Carey's John than Azzarello's tonight.

I also snuck in one of Warren Ellis' issues, "Telling Tales", also drawn by Frusin. That went down pretty smooth as well.

Anyway, the whole point of this post was to drop some of my thoughts on the books and sing the praises of Mr. Frusin, which I have, so I'll pop off again into the ether and be back again, hopefully, soon.

Later!

mike