http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-devil-you-know/long article on Hellblazer.
The first issue of noir horror comic John Constantine, Hellblazer — which Detective Comics announced it would cancel and reboot starting February — is arguably the most socially situated issue that the company ever published. Over forty subtext-soaked pages, occult detective John Constantine travels from London to New York via southern Sudan, rehabilitates and hypnotizes a druggie friend, and trades jokes with a Haitian witch doctor in a midtown high-rise — all while tracking a demon that’s landed in New York from Tangiers. Behind such post-colonial fantasia, John also finds time to clean his apartment, get yelled at by his landlord, kill time on public transportation, buy insecticide from a South Asian bodega, and sexually proposition his ex-girlfriend, who happens to be dead. The comics blogosphere has reacted to Hellblazer’s cancellation by writing eulogies to a certain generically “cool” mascot version of John Constantine: a handsome, exotically British rogue who chain-smokes Silk Cuts, always “knows the score” and has a lot of sex in squalid little horror stories. But this slick, atavistic, frat guy incarnation is undoubtedly exactly what’ll be preserved when DC relaunches the comic — once a trenchant critique of consumerism — as a PG, family-friendly quasi-superhero product ready for the imminent Guillermo del Toro movie reboot.
This essay serves as a eulogy for what will be lost — specifically how uncool the book was, how virtuously unpleasant, how vitriolic, melancholic and spiteful, how negatively charismatic, how difficult to read. The biggest loss will actually be something that really only survived the first twenty or so of the comic’s 300+ issues: its leftist politics and countercultural ethos. Out of all the comics written for Vertigo — the most writer-friendly mainstream comics imprint of the 90s — Hellblazer was the title most interested in the real world, as opposed to, say, twee faerie kingdoms. Its best (and most disproportionately unpopular) writer was Jamie Delano, who wrote the comic’s first 40 or so issues after spending most of the 80s unemployed and smoking pot. His oppositional commitments were never really carried forward by subsequent Hellblazer writers (many of whom I love) and his run on the comic, which has only recently been collected. The comic, which now sells a third of what it did in the 90s, gradually shed its political allegiances, perhaps leading writer Warren Ellis to hold a symbolic funeral for John Constantine a few years ago in his own comic, Planetary.
