Hellblazer: The End

fear the algorithm.

Some words on this week’s news.

The present run of Hellblazer will end with issue #12. That’s November, I think.

I’m writing this several glasses of wine into an unexpectedly lengthy bout of keyboardery. I’ve composed and reordered these thoughts many times. I’ve written and deleted lengthy accounts of how the project first came to be. I’ve waffled about what Hellblazer has meant to me at different stages of my life, then nixed it all as saccharine arsewater. I’ve written careful categorisations of the five major projects which were scheduled to keep me busy throughout 2020 -- OGNs, Big 2 ongoings and a movie deal -- each of which was torpedoed during the most relentlessly harrowing week of my life, thanks variously to Covid-19 and revelations about the ickiness of an intended collaborator.

I wrote it all down; deleted it. I’m not here for sympathy. This isn’t a sob story, it’s a snarl.

And yes, it’s been a tough write. Partly because I’m trying to arrange this little meander into some shadow of a structure and failing to find the obvious lynchpin around which it ought to coalesce: i.e, someone to blame. There simply isn’t one.

It’s also been a painful little essay to birth, in part, because I’m still utterly fucking furious, and my own poisonous steaming rage keeps tripping me up.

I am not ready to let Hellblazer go.

Everyone in my team has done the work of their lives. Aaron Campbell, Matias Bergara, Jordie Bellaire and Aditya Bidikar; not to mention editors Maggie Howell, Mark Doyle and most importantly Chris Conroy, without whose advocacy and determination the series wouldn’t have launched in the first place. We need books like this.

Without a trace of arrogance (nor, screw it, false modesty), I’m going to flat-out state that the stories we’ve told possess genuine value and importance, especially in these strangest of times. They’re good, and I’m not just saying that. By any metric, up to and including the fanciest online review aggregate, which at time of writing considers our Hellblazer work to be the best-reviewed series presently on shelves, this book has been the proudest project of my career. It has felt at every stage like the one pre-existing I.P. that I was naturally best calibrated to write.

It ends in November. I’m not ready.

A lot of you are angry about this. Many of you don’t understand why a book that seemed to be flying high should be culled at an early stage. I hear you. So. Rumor control, here are the facts:

It didn’t make enough money.

That’s it, actually. That’s all. It didn’t make enough money to persuade the right people, whoever they are, to keep it running. To take the risk. To let it grow. To wait - as conventional wisdom might once have dictated - for the first arc to be collected as a trade.

That’s their right. That’s the business, that’s comics in 2020.

Doesn’t mean we can’t be pissed as all hell about it.

Hellblazer sold at least as well as The Dreaming, my previous book with DC’s Black Label imprint, in monthly form. That was greenlit through issue #20. I stepped off that series with great sadness because the allotted hour had come. The story was told, a new project had been offered; it was time.

With Hellblazer: no. Wasn’t time. Isn’t time. Covid-19 arrived and set our funny, fragile little industry on fire. The margins shifted. The risk/reward relationship changed. Someone, somewhere, decided that, trade sales be damned, it’s last orders at the bar. No lock-ins. No takeouts. Bones were cast, presumably an algorithm was consulted; that’s that.

I’ve had books cancelled before, of course. It’s part of the game, especially with franchise characters. You go into it with your eyes open. You make sure you ask up front how many issues you’ll get, minimum, and you plan your ending so it can be deployed at any point. That’s not a relaxing way to tell stories, but it works. Mostly. Sometimes it even results in art.

Frankly, I’ve been lucky. Whenever the axe has fallen in the past I’ve tended to be on the verge of itchy feet anyway. New ideas, new worlds, new stories. I like endings. Whenever I’ve received the instruction to wrap-up, it’s felt Right. Or at least: it’s never broken me.

John Constantine, by main interior artist Aaron Campbell

THIS HAS.

This has broken me because… ah, fuck. ..

Because it’s 2020 and the bastards are in charge and the world’s on fire and goddam it we’ve tried -- haven’t we? -- giving the heroes a chance to stand up and lead the way and show us how it’s done, on the page and on the screen and at the debating lectern, and all it’s got us is an argument over what it means to be a hero, and shouting matches between this lot’s notion of a good person versus that lot’s notion of a good person, and they’re all filthy rich and dead in the heart, and the shadows are oozing with unrealised myth and the workers are hoodwinked by the lords and ladies to misdirect their hatred towards anyone Different, and there’s unfairness in every life, real or imagined, injustice that you can’t fix with laserbeams or super-punching, and fuck! me! these are NOT the stories that get told about capes and science-wizards and rolemodels, they’re the stories that get told about real people, the people who know what it’s like to have nothing but your wits and your words, what it’s like to be selfish and scared but still do the right fucking thing, what it’s like to live with monsters in your mind and in your home, and I thought, I really thought, we were tuning-in to those vibrations with every word and every panel, and you’ll forgive me indulging a moment’s breathless black bitterness to discover that these are the stories that get culled, these are the extremities of the great pop-culture I.P. emanation-factories which are the first to be tossed overboard when the storm rises on the horizon.

We are the lizard’s tail.

It didn’t make enough money. It didn’t make enough money.

I suppose the bottom line is this: you can’t write a story like Hellblazer without taking it personally.

That’s a problem when it’s basically work-for-hire.

But oh, god, we had some plans. We were greenlit for 6 issues then we were greenlit for 6 more. In my naivety I assumed the head of steam we were building would see us through to 18 or 20. Less a cancellation than a failure-to-be-renewed, if you want to split hairs, but it hurts all the same. The places we were due to go… the dark waters we were due to explore…

Blame Covid, blame preservative risk aversion, blame the algorithm. For the first time in my professional career I was writing a book that I could truly imagine continuing forever. No hint of the creeping boredom. No danger of the ideas running dry.

So what now?

In the short term: stay with us. There are four issues still to come (the last one’s supersized) with both regular artists doing extraordinary work. I’m probably supposed to make gnomic referencs here to character deaths and Nothing Will Ever Be The Same Again. But we’re all grownups: let’s just assume it’s all great material which will snip clean almost all the catgut threads we’ve been delicately drawing forth since we started last year. Plenty Of Surprises, and all that jazz.

I say ‘almost’ all the threads, because, again - let’s not dwell - we were all working on the assumption of at least one more arc. So whereas #12 closes the tomb on all the major plots, it also springs open a few big twists we’ve been diligently breadcrumbing since the start. Those were, and are, intended to lead into the next chapter, with a genuinely killer hook.

A hook which will not, it would now seem, be catching any fish.

Perhaps if we’re lucky we’ll get the chance to circle back and pick up those threads someday. A series of miniseries, maybe, or OGNs -- that would be nice. We will be pushing for it, you can be sure.

Assuming not? Let the cliffhangers stand. I won’t pretend these delicious surprises weren’t being carefully prepared this whole time, whether we’re allowed to explore the fallout from them or not. They’re fertile ground, and if we can’t plant our unnerving crops there let someone else. Stories gotta story.

I wish I could say the publisher has whisked my extraordinary collaborators and I onto bigger, bolder, less hazardous titles. Sadly, even before the personnel cataclysm at D.C. last week, and the radical downsizing that followed, opportunities were scant. It’s not through lack of trying, believe me. The company’s full of wonderful, bright, talented staff, and I’m hugely grateful that many will advocate on my behalf. But there’s nothing certain. No gimmes in 2020. I’m hopeful for a new project, and there’s never a shortage of ideas. But this has been a year of near misses and wipeouts. Our industry is bleeding from its eyes and there’s still a lot of dust in the air. Where once a well-received run or an Eisner nod might be confidently predicted to lead to more work -- now? Not so much.

I am absolutely not the only writer or artist on the ropes. So please: give love to your favourite comics. Spread the word. Buy what you can. Don’t be a fucking pirate. Because more so than ever, the titles that matter to you are only a gnat’s whisker from the abyss. Support the creators whose work you admire. And if you want to see more Hellblazer from Aaron, Matias, Aditya, Jordie and me: say so. Tell your retailers, tell D.C., tell your friends. Be angry. Be disappointed. Be bewildered (we certainly are). But please, be polite.

It’s a year of shitty decisions being made for the right reasons, no matter how much they hurt. And if that’s not the quintessence of John Constantine I don’t know what is .

— Si, Margate, August 2020

ComicsSimon Spurrier18 August 2020Simon Spurrier, DC Comics, hellblazer, John Constantine, Aaron Campbell, Matias Bergara, JP Leon