Hellblazer Volume 1: Sept 29 2020
Cover art by Bilquis Evely
The first collected volume of my work with John Constantine, Hellblazer, is on general release from September 29th. And there is much to say about it.
[Edit to add: We’re getting reports that it’ll be available before then at comic specialist stores.]
[Edit to also add: …and is apparently on some shelves already. So, yeah. That escalated quickly.]
It collects:
- the Sandman Universe special which launched the project (with art by Marcio Takara);
- a tie-in issue of Books of Magic (co-written with Kat Howard, art by Tom Fowler);
- and issues 1-6 of the ongoing Hellblazer series (with artists Aaron Campbell and Matias Bergara).
A pleasingly chunky slab of occultism, bastardliness and nicotine-streaked guilt. And one of my proudest achievments.
It would be simply swell if you’d preorder for yourself, and the comics fans in your life, a copy.
In general I’m averse to the icky shill, so apologies for that, but in this case there’s more than just a quarterly royalty pittance at stake.
It will likely not have escaped your attention that I’ve been harping, wailing and gnashing about this title for some little time. The character means more to me - as a fan and reader - than, I think, any other fictional individual from a shared universe, for a host of reasons I shan’t wax upon too heavily just here. Something to do with the internal, painful honesty of a person who knows they’re imperfect and suffers all the guilt of that self-knowledge, but carries on being imperfect anyway. Demons and mysticism notwithstanding, that’s a level of emotional earnestness - of adulthood, frankly - I’d never encountered in comics before.
I grew up reading the best of Hellblazer - the Delanos, the Ennises, the Careys - and at the back of my mind always distantly imagined I’d someday get my own shot. When the series folded with issue #300, many years ago, I thought I’d missed my chance. And although the character was folded into the shared DC Universe, that world of tights and capes always felt to me something of a Procrustean bed to John: necessarily adjusting his psychology and modus operandi to accommodate a far less tortured existence in a far brighter world. Still a lot of fun, still valuable, but not quite the character I remembered.
Hence, being invited to relaunch the series in its original non-spandexy guise, as adult-centric and cerebrally vicious as ever, has been a highlight of my career.
...And one of the most crushing. As I’ve explained elsewhere, the fiery circumstances of this most shitty of years - and the risk aversion it’s induced in the publishers - have called time on our run. The team and I are still working on it as I write this now, but with the core dictat that we wrap-up with issue #12.
Obviously we’d love the series to continue - or at least to transition into a more modular form of storytelling. A series of graphic novels or somesuch. We have so many more stories to tell. As I write today, I simply don’t know how plausible or possible that is. But the one and only thing that would conceivably oil those tracks would be a very healthy sales figure arising from this first collected volume. So: buy. And buy again.
Please and sorry and thankyou.
Reading it through now, it’s a strange tonal journey through this book, and through the memories of putting it together. We took the decision early on to attempt some sort of organic transition, letting readers acclimatize to the complicated, haunted, messy protagonist as he was first envisaged by his creator Alan Moore, by easing into his world. We used as our starting point, tonally speaking, the most recent iterations of the character (by which I mean his DCU self, and the broadly similar live action version memorably portrayed on TV by Matt Ryan). Hence the collected volume opens in media res with some overblown dramatic magical spectacle, then segues bit-by-bit into the grimy, no frills breed of cynical occultism readers will recognise from the heyday of Vertigo-era Hellblazer.
I’m dreadfully fond of the first couple of chapters in the book, but I think it really hits its stride, or at least discovers its own quiddity, with the arrival of main series artist Aaron Campbell for the first mini-arc of the ongoing series (A Green And Pleasant Land). Aaron really was born to illustrate Hellblazer, and I think this volume confirms that, when it reaches issue 6: a oneshot titled Quiet. That one issue really stands as an apogee for all of us behind the scenes, and a high water mark we’ve insisted upon maintaining in everything that follows.
For Aaron’s sake as much as my own - and for everyone on the team, all of whom adore this project - we’ll keep fighting as hard as we can to continue the journey. Your support means the world.
Interior art by Aaron Campbell
Interior art by Matias Bergara
ABOUT JOHN CONSTANTINE, HELLBLAZER VOL. 1: MARKS OF WOE
One of DC’s most iconic characters–John Contantine, Hellblazer–is back the way you remember him, and now a part of the Sandman Universe, in this brand-new series!
John Constantine is back in London, back to his old tricks–and just in time, as things have become very dark indeed in his old stomping grounds. A small-time gang lord has found himself dealing with a big-time outbreak of supernatural weirdness…and, without any allies to call on and nothing left to call his own, John doesn’t have much choice about taking a paycheck from one of London’s worst, or accepting the help of one of the gang lord’s would-be foot soldiers. But what should be an open-and-shut exorcism turns out to be nothing but…and madness is just getting started!
The original Constantine is back in this series from Si Spurrier (The Dreaming) and Aaron Campbell (Infidel), with nothing to his name but decades of bad memories and an unearned second chance. How, exactly, will he squander it? There’s only one way to find out…