Some Endings and Beginnings

John Constantine Hellblazer Volume 5: Dangerous Habits: written by Jamie Delano and Garth Ennis; illustrated by Will Simpson, Steve Pugh, Sean Phillips, Dave McKean, and others (1991; collected 2013): Brit Jamie Delano was the first full-time writer for occult detective/punk mage John Constantine, a character created by Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, John Totleben, and Rick Veitch over in the pages of Saga of the Swamp Thing in the mid-1980's. Constantine got his own adult-oriented book in the late 1980's, with Delano tapped to write it.

Delano wrote 40 issues and a few annuals and miniseries entries before passing the baton to the up-and-coming Irish comics writer Garth Ennis. This volume collects Delano's last handful of regular Constantine issues and Ennis's first six-issue arc.

Constantine, hardest of the occult hardasses, is in something of a downward spiral in Delano's final issues. The psychic cost of fighting evil -- and inevitably getting one's friends and lovers killed during the battle -- has taken its toll. Delano probes Constantine's childhood in a striking horror tale, "Dead Boy's Heart," before turning to the incandescent wrap-up to 'his' Constantine.

What a wrap-up! Issue 40 of Hellblazer contained rare interior artwork by Dave McKean (probably still best-known today for his covers for Neil Gaiman's Sandman). I think it's one of the artistic highpoints for nominally mainstream comic books during the 1980's, dense and detailed to go along with a dense, detailed prose look at Constantine's life and works. This could have served as a fitting end to the series had it been cancelled, but Ennis came aboard with issue 41.

Under the circumstances, Ennis wisely went with the tactic of briefly mentioning the events of issue 40 and then never, ever mentioning them again. DC's decision to put Ennis on the book was something of a stroke of genius. He and Delano are both gifted horror writers, but of almost completely different stylistic modes. Where Delano is baroque and intellectual, Ennis is visceral and bleakly comic in a punk sort of way. To some extent, splatterpunk had come to Hellblazer.

Delano did benefit from some lovely, horrifying artwork at the end of his run, other than McKean. Steve Pugh's grotesques worked perfectly for the Grand Guignol two-parter he illustrated, while the cooler Sean Phillips meshed perfectly with Delano's writing on their issues together. Ennis wasn't quite so lucky early on -- Will Simpson, who pencils Ennis's first six issues, is not a gifted artist when it comes to horror, though he rises to the occasion at points.

Anyway, the first five volumes of the re-edited and re-compiled Hellblazer are marvelous, though why this series didn't get the hardcover treatment the second time around is a puzzle. Unless DC is about to scrap this reprint series and start another one in hardcover. Which, given the mercurial nature of DC's publishing habits these days, is entirely possible. Hidey ho! Highly recommended.

　

The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Ship That Sank Twice: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross and a host of others (2013): Brilliant companion piece to the equally brilliant, ongoing comic-book series The Unwritten delves deeper into the backstory of the series while also offering the reader a dead-on pastiche of Young Adult fantasy novels.

Indeed, the world Carey, Gross, and other artists conjure up for the first volume of the imaginary Tommy Taylor series is filled with more wonder and interest in 60 pages or so than the entire Harry Potter series. And it comments on the sinister implications of a separate race of magic users walking among the powerless mundane. A great work on its own, and a great and rich expansion of the series, which has about 12 issues left to run in its storyline. Highly recommended.

 

Shelter from the Storm

The Graveyard Book, written by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Dave McKean (2008): After a run of stinky book and comic-book projects, Gaiman returned to form with this riff on Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book that won several major awards, including children's novel honours the Carnegie Medal and the Newbery. Rather than being raised by a forest of animals like Mowgli, young Nobody Owens is raised by the mostly dead inhabitants of an English graveyard.

He doesn't start off as Nobody Owens. Instead, an 18-month-old toddler fortuitously wanders into a no-longer-active graveyard on the same night his parents and sister are killed by a mysterious, knife-wielding man called only Jack. The ghosts of the graveyard and the mysterious Guardian we know only as Silas -- supernatural but not a ghost -- band together to protect and raise the baby they christen Nobody Owens (or 'Bod' for short) over the next 13 years or so. The killer continues to look for Bod, so the child remains for the most part inside the graveyard at all times.

Thankfully, being granted The Freedom of the Graveyard by its inhabitants also grants Bod a number of supernatural powers, though he does have to practice to perfect them. Eventually, he can walk through walls while in the graveyard, fade from sight almost anywhere, and induce a certain measure of fear in others if he concentrates.

Needless to say, all these powers will be needed by the end of the book. Jack's still out there, and he has friends. In a subtextual narrative reminiscent of Clive Barker's Nightbreed (though much, much more child-friendly), The Graveyard Book pits the mysterious supernatural "monsters" of horror fiction's long history against the knife-wielding maniacs of horror's more recent past.

The ghosts of the graveyard are a lively bunch from throughout history -- the graveyard has been active in one form or another for several thousand years. A mysterious but strangely pitiful magical being that calls itself a Sleer guards a treasure cache and a grave hidden within a mound; one of the tombstones is a "Ghoul Gate" (every cemetery has one) through which carrion-eating ghouls come and go from their strange, red-skied land; adjacent to one part of the graveyard is an unhallowed, unmarked grave area in which witches and others were interred. Bod's Guardian Silas has physical form outside the graveyard, and so he can fetch food, clothing and books when necessary.

Gaiman portrays Bod's journey to being a teenager with a lot of zing, sentiment, and cleverness. Homages and references to other works of the supernatural abound, either obliquely in the persons of Silas and the stern but helpful Miss Lupescu, or slightly more noticeably with the episode that involves the ghouls and pays homage to H.P. Lovecraft's odd, dream-like narrative The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. All in all, this is a jolly, engaging book from the writer of The Sandman and Stardust and Coraline, suitable for anyone above the age of 8 or thereabouts. Highly recommended.