Aging Along With John: 20 Years of Hellblazer, Part 2
By David DelGrosso
I ask Azzarello to talk about writing for the Hellblazer audience, and to compare their reactions to fans of other long-lived characters he has written. Are longtime Constantine fans a tough crowd to please? Tougher than, say, longtime Superman or Batman fans? "No, they’re the same," says Azzarello. "And they are gonna hate to read that, but they’re exactly the same. They feel they know the character better than you do. Just like a Superman fan, they have a particular image of that character in their head and if you go off the path, they’ll call you on it. Rather than understanding that the one thing that makes John different from, say, Superman is the way Vertigo has constructed that character to be the perfect writers' character. They want you to bring your voice to him. To take stories where you want to go. Superman’s got a bible. Commandments that cannot be broken. There’s nothing like that with Constantine. I think that is one of the things that keeps him vital. You can go away from the title for a while and you’ll come back to something that’s fresh, rather than, with Batman, you can go away from his title for a while and come back and it’s like you never left."
Mike Carey: A Return to Magic, Family and an Ending? (H. #175-215, 2002-2006)
The next era of Hellblazer would be one of the longest in the title's history to date, a run nearly as long as the Delano or Ennis years. John Constantine is back in the hands of a Brit, this time Liverpool-born writer Mike Carey. Like Azzarello, Carey was already known to Vertigo audiences before he began his run, as Carey's Sandman spin-off Lucifer, where John Constantine has appeared (L. #5), is in its third year.
Picking up after the dark, American road-trip, Carey's first story, "High on Life" (H. #175-176, featuring art by Dillon), returns John to his native Liverpool. Carey reunites John with his surviving family: sister Cheryl, brother-in-law, and niece Gemma, characters that have been absent from the series for years. Carey sets about restoring John to life in England, as he explains: "Because I was coming on after Brian Azzarello’s run, and Brian had taken John in many ways a long way out of his comfort zone, geographically, taking him on an extended tour of the United States and, thematically, I think there was a lot of crime stuff and stories with non-supernatural events, stories with serial killers, gangsters, sexual predators, which was familiar territory for him. Brian had very deliberately and consistently taken the magic away from John.
"What I wanted to do when I came on board was to bring John back to England. The aspect of John’s backstory that has always had a powerful resonance with me is the fact that he’s a Northerner, a Liverpudlian living in London, and that tension between North and South in England, I really wanted to put that into the book. I am also a Liverpudlian living in London, so I wanted to take him back first to Liverpool, to his family. I also wanted to put the magic back in."
I ask him to describe, for those who don't know Liverpool, what it means for John to be a Liverpudlian. How does that show in his personality? "Well, John is kind of like the King of Bullshit, isn’t he? Most often he gets out of his problems by lying, by being tricky and being completely unpredictable when he’s in a corner. The Liverpudlian persona is sometimes a lovable rogue, like The Likely Lads and The Liver Birds and those sort of late-1960s Liverpudlians," Carey says, referring to old BBC sitcoms that I have to look up on the Internet, "and sometimes it's just a rogue and not lovable at all. You wouldn’t turn your back on a Liverpudlian, necessarily, and you certainly wouldn’t buy a used car from one. We’re meant to be a fairly slippery bunch."
In reconnecting John with his family, and showing the reader how these characters have aged and changed since their last appearances, Carey makes connections to the Delano years of Hellblazer, recalling old friends and foes, some not seen for more than a decade, like the demon Nergal, tragic Mucous Membrane bandmate Gary Lester, as well as Chas, and the Chandler family, who go through a harrowing experience that reminds them why they haven't missed John during his years away. With the story "Third Worlds" (H. #184-186) Carey even brings Swamp Thing back to Hellblazer. In an interesting bit of role reversal, this use of Swamp Thing as a supporting character helps to launch the fourth series of Swamp Thing in 2004. Nearly 20 years after launching, the spin-off series has become the parent title.
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