Aging Along With John: 20 Years of Hellblazer, Part 2
By David DelGrosso
Carey gives great importance to John's family throughout this era. He particularly focuses on his niece, Gemma. Gemma, whom John saves from ghostly children in one of the earliest stories of the series (H. #4), and who has shown a potential sensitivity for magic, such as when she is haunted by the spirit of her murdered grandfather (H. #31), is now grown into a young woman. Her interest in following her uncle into the "family business" puts her in danger yet again. "Gemma is very keen to take up the mantle and become the next Constantine," says Carey. "In stories before, it had sometime been indicated that there wouldn’t be any more sorcerers in the Constantine line, so I kind of made a U-turn there. I like the relationship with Gemma because he feels a kind of paradoxical sense of responsibility for her, but he’s also very impressed by what she can do, but at the same time he wants her to not make the same kind of mess of her life that he’s made of his and to not get involved in this stuff, because it always runs off on you and leaves you in a worst place than when you started. It’s a nice contradiction."
Carey's recall of past characters is not exclusive to Delano's and Ennis' creations. Carey makes use of some of Warren Ellis' creations, such as Clarice and Albert, with their Tate Club, and Map, the mage of the London Underground. And while he draws upon the past years of the title, Carey also creates powerful new foes. In "Staring at the Wall" (H. #189-193) John faces one of the most ancient foes of mankind, and must gather and lead a group of allies, including Swamp Thing, to save the world. John takes charge on a scale not seen since the days of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing. Unlike earlier eras, when John might best the Triumvirate of Hell with a daring trick, Carey often has John facing challenges head-on. These are cinematic stories, with a level of action that keeps pace with Vertigo titles of the time, helped by the kinetic art of Marcelo Frusin, and later, by another Argentinian-born artist, Leonardo Manco, who becomes the series regular with issue #200.
As with the end of the prior major eras, the Carey years culminate in a story wherein John faces a great threat, and must pay a terrible price to survive. In "Down in the Ground Where the Dead Men Go" (H. #207-212), a series of tragedies leads to his sister being killed, and her soul being claimed by The First of the Fallen. The life that John leads has cost yet another member of his family. With the magical aid of Gemma and Angie to tether him to the world, John goes into Hell to get his sister's soul back, with his old foe the demon Nergal, reduced to a shell of his former self, as his guide. John's longest journey through Hell to date, this is a remarkable, highest-stakes story that really allows artist Manco to shine. Thematically, it brings to a head the central question of the Carey run, and, perhaps, the largest question of John's life overall: Are his many amazing experiences worth what he has lost? Have his attempts to intervene for good, which have led to the deaths of allies, friends and family, been worth the cost? Does John Constantine do more harm than good?
"It depends on whether you’re talking about what he does for other people or what he does for himself," says Carey. "I think John is, in the language of 1066 And All That, a Good Thing, with a capital ‘G’ and a capital ‘T’. It’s just that all of his victories have to be Pyrrhic ones. He can never come out entirely on top. If he does, then I think, to some extent, you’ve compromised the character. That story was pretty hard to write, the one where he goes down into Hell to retrieve Cheryl’s soul and then comes back with nothing. In a way, he succeeds in everything he set out to do, but in the last moment he is frustrated by The First of the Fallen, who steps in and says, ‘I just can’t let you have a happy ending. I can’t let you win on this one.’ In the original pitch, John does succeed. But as we were working through the story, I realized you can’t do that, you can’t do it that way. It kind of makes the whole thing a sort of cheap stunt, because Cheryl is restored to life and no harm done. It just seemed out of keeping with Hellblazer as an ongoing narrative.
"Back in Jamie’s run you had that visual of the group of ghosts that surrounded him, that burden of guilt, because it is often the people next to you that take the bullet, but I think you get a sense as the series goes on that John never walks away from an encounter unscathed, he’s got so much scar tissue on him now, you definitely get the sense of him as the walking wounded, and he never walks away clean. You sometimes see him having to do terrible things. You wouldn’t want to be him."
The very end of Carey's era, "R.S.V.P." (H. #214-215), traces the fallout from John's failure to save his sister, and his crippling guilt over the loss of even more friends and allies. For the first time in the series' history, John feels truly finished with magic. He has concluded that he has done more harm than good, and he's through. He crashes a party at The Tate Club, renouncing magic and showing the guests the sort of despair that is ahead for them. He then steps outside, only to be faced with his ghosts again. It is a resounding finish, and it reads like the end of the series. Says Carey of his finale, "I guess I was writing it as if it was the last Hellblazer story. I wanted it to have a sort of final feel. I talked to Denise Mina about where she wanted John to be when she took him up, and she said, ‘I’d like him to have no friends, I’d like him to be disillusioned with the life choices he’d made, disillusioned with magic and at a very low ebb.’ And it chimed in with all of my own instincts. So I just cut loose and wrote it as if it was the actual end of the series. I think that last issue is one of the issues I’m happiest with in my entire run, particularly the final pages where he runs the gauntlet of all his old friends, all the people he’s betrayed and allowed to die and let down in the past and you leave him standing in the rain and there’s a final pullback, and he becomes a smaller and smaller figure and the rain makes it look as though he’s crying but he assures us that he’s not."
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