Aging Along With John: 20 Years of Hellblazer, Part 1
By David DelGrosso
To illustrate the contrast between these first two eras, Delano had John celebrating his 35th birthday with a story titled "Shot to Hell" (H. #9), in which John, tortured by the ghosts of Newcastle, and having had to take demon blood into his system as part of an infernal bargain with the demon Nergal, is despairing and contemplating suicide. By contrast, in "Forty" (H. #63), Ennis gives John a 40th birthday party surrounded by friends and colleagues from his magical life. Even Swamp Thing makes an appearance (and provides the party with a particularly potent, herbal gift). It is an issue without any peril or outside threat, just a story of John reflecting on his life and enjoying the company of friends. That is also the first issue published under the Vertigo imprint.
A number of times during the middle and later Ennis years, magical threats and the battles between Heaven and Hell would give way to more human-scale stories. The issue in which Kit leaves John as a result of his failure to keep his promise of never bringing the dangers of his work home with him, and in which John falls out with Chas (H. #67), has no magic in it whatsoever: just moments of character drama, and the consequences from the prior story. These personal events break John in ways that his most powerful enemies never could, sending him into a downward spiral that would leave him alcoholic and homeless. There is even a story in which John does not appear at all. Rather, the issue looks in on Kit in Belfast months later, as she settles back into life without John Constantine (H. #70). The idea of whole issues without genre elements, or even an issue without magic or Constantine at all, probably would not have been possible before the Vertigo imprint launched, and further challenged readers to think of these dramatic possibilities in a new way.
However, those genre elements of horror and magic are never away from the title for long. A homeless John Constantine runs afoul of the King of Vampires (H. #68-69). Only by communing with the spirit of a World War II fighter pilot, a ghost that has held on so desperately to the impulse to survive, even when his plane was going down, does John regain the will to live (H. #71). A real strength of the Ennis era is how grounded the stories feel, particularly once he is joined by British artist and 2000 AD veteran Steve Dillon (as of H. #62). Dillon's skill at portraying emotion and character in conversation, or even a look, is an asset to the tumultuous arc of John and Kit's relationship. And the realistic, gritty look of Dillon's art makes the intrusion of supernatural beings into the world all the more dramatic and the moments of shocking violence all the more horrifying.
It was during the Ennis era that the young, British cover artist Glenn Fabry started his work on Hellblazer. His painted covers during this time are some of the most remarkable, and most reprinted, images of John Constantine. The team of Ennis, Dillon and Fabry would leave Hellblazer at the end of 1994, to famously launch a new title at Vertigo, Preacher. Fans of that series may take particular interest in one of Ennis's last Hellblazer stories, "Damnation's Flame" (H. #72-77), which foreshadows some of the themes that the team would explore in their later series. In the story, John, ambushed in New York by his old foe Papa Midnight, is sent on a psychedelic journey through American iconography. Having survived that experience, and having dispatched Papa Midnight, Ennis's final story brings John full circle to face the revenge of The First of the Fallen, whom he had humiliated years before.
This time though, it will take sacrifice for John to scrape by again. The story has him calling in markers, burning bridges and, back to being a nasty piece of work, sacrificing friends to survive. By the end of the Ennis era, John had been brought as close to happiness as the series has seen him, and down as low as he'd ever been. And Ennis, having grabbed hold of the opportunity to show the Hellblazer audience what he could do, had established himself as one of comics' most exciting new voices, with a popular and prolific career that continues to this day.
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