Aging Along With John: 20 Years of Hellblazer, Part 2
By David DelGrosso
Andy Diggle: Back in the Game (H. #230-249, 2007-2008)
Hellblazer, at this writing, is in the hands of London-born comics writer Andy Diggle. Diggle comes to the title having already written John Constantine in the fourth volume of Swamp Thing, launched in 2004, as well as the adventures of Johanna Constantine, an ancestor of John's, in the four-part Hellblazer Special: Lady Constantine. Diggle, whose work in comics began as an editor for 2000AD, is best known to Vertigo audiences as the writer of The Losers, and to mainstream audiences for his work on Adam Strange: Planet Heist and Batman Confidential. His era of Hellblazer is made up largely of shorter, leaner stories, in which John is bent on getting cleaned up and back to form. To be the one taking action, rather than being acted upon. Or, as John puts it in H. #231, "I used to be a player. And I'm done being played. It's time to get back in the game... and break the fucking bank."
"I think it's his independence of spirit that makes him such a great character," says Diggle. "The fact that he moves in these powerful circles, tangles with the most powerful beings imaginable, but he's still just an ordinary, bloody-minded bloke at heart. He doesn’t want money and he doesn't want power, and that means you can't buy him off. There's something very appealing about that. He's the voice of the little guy."
The Diggle era starts with John helping a mob boss who is haunted by the spirit of his murdered daughter to get revenge. John leverages this new relationship to get some wealth behind him again, and he pays a visit to the site of Ravenscar, the institution where he was committed after the incident at Newcastle. There, in the place where he was once at his lowest and most desperate point, Diggle has John perform a clearing-out of emotional baggage reminiscent of some of the past eras of the series, like Paul Jenkins' homunculus trick, or the new body that Garth Ennis gives John at the end of "Dangerous Habits." This time, John performs a ritual that takes all the insanity he left behind in that place, as well as the guilt and self-hatred within him for losing his sister, and shapes it into a tangible form. A helpless, seemingly-innocent being. A baby. Which John carries out of Ravenscar and casts off a cliff.
Freed from all of this psychic trauma, John thinks, "A cleansing wind blows through my soul. And suddenly I get a taste of the way it was back before all the shit came down. Back before Newcastle. That cocky swagger. That total confidence. That stupid, blind arrogance. That sense of being totally in control of my own life, my own destiny. Indestructible. I'd forgotten what that felt like. And you know what? It's good to be back." It reads as a sort of midlife crisis. But rather than just buying a sports car and dating a younger woman, John is actually able to recapture the boldness of his youth, returning him to a character reminiscent of his earliest appearances in Swamp Thing. It seems like a step taken to counter the fact that the character is heading towards his 60s, but Diggle contends that the age of John Constantine is not a concern. "Well, to be honest he doesn't look anything like a man in his 50s, but he's kept young by the healing power of the demon blood which was mingled with his own back in Jamie Delano's run. I don't really worry about it, to be honest. It's like worrying about how old James Bond is supposed to be from one movie to the next. Who cares?"
The ritual at Ravenscar allows John to recapture his swagger, and swagger he does through the stories that follow. Diggle's Hellblazer stories are kinetic and unselfconscious. The past doesn't weigh John down as it has before, and he gives himself over to events as they come. Or, as John puts it, he rides the waves of synchronicity. "Constantine has had a long hard look at himself and is trying to get back on top of his game," says Diggle. "But he's gradually coming to realize that acting cocky and confident is not necessarily the same thing as actually being in control. But it's a start. The synchronicity angle is something that Jamie Delano, Neil Gaiman and Paul Jenkins all brought to the character, so I'm really just continuing that thread. The secret is to make sure I don't end up using coincidence as a substitute for solid plotting, which I think has occasionally happened in Hellblazer in the past."
The longest story of Diggle's era, "Joyride" (H. #234-237), is an example of John standing up for the little guy. Like Mina's Empathy Engine story, "Joyride" features another conspiracy involving real estate, and a magical plot to harness the energy of a people. In this case, what is being fed on is the grief and desire for revenge of those who have been the victims of urban crime. With "The Passage" (H. #239), Diggle introduces Mako, a formidable new foe whose history is rooted in African genocides. He is Magiphage, a devourer of magicians. The natural predator to John and his kind. Mako begins tearing his way through the magical community, gaining power, and is on the search for "The Laughing Magician," who he believes to be John Constantine. As has been the case in many stories before, John is key to a threat facing the world.
There is a two-issue story by American writer Jason Aaron, best known to Vertigo audiences for his acclaimed miniseries The Other Side and series Scalped. Aaron joins an illustrious list of creators to fill-in on the series, including Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison. "It's an incredibly exciting milestone," says Aaron, "because of the legacy you mention and the fact that I'm only the second American writer to work on the title. When I was writing the first issue of my run, I came to the page where Constantine himself finally shows up, and I froze. It wasn't the idea of writing dialogue in an English accent that intimidated me. It was the thought that I was about to put words in the mouth of a character created by Alan Moore, who's been a legend to me for decades now. For a creator, Constantine has as daunting a legacy as any in comics, but ultimately I had to put that out of my mind and just tell the best story I could."
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