Aging Along With John: 20 Years of Hellblazer, Part 1
By David DelGrosso
"I guess the underlying point is simply that it is intrinsic to the human condition that all experience has a cost. The more extreme the experience, the higher the price to be paid," says Delano of the tone he set for the series. "Constantine is nothing if not human: he is cursed/blessed with a deep desire to see, do, and feel things that most of us would prefer to vehemently avoid. Turning over all those psychic rocks and revealing the nastiness scuttling from the light, he 'suffers' on our behalf. And gets a buzz both from the activity and the air of 'martyrdom' it confers."
Delano's stories were usually quite dark, very contemporary, and often political in a way that most DC titles were not at the time. In this respect, the success of the title would continue to prove there was an appetite among readers for truly adult stories, ones that were not afraid of incorporating real-world political issues into the fiction. This, in turn, helped pave the way for more mature-readers books at DC, and later, for a whole line of those titles with the Vertigo imprint.
Editor Berger recalls, "That was always our mission, and our goal: to not do what was typically done in the regular DC Comics. Hellblazer and Swamp Thing dealt with reality more than any books that were done at DC. That really started that whole aspect of what has made Vertigo so distinct in comics--even though we were publishing against a genre fiction backdrop, we were always very well-rooted in contemporary world politics and social issues. The characters were ones you could relate to and connect to, and the times in which this all took place were very much of the times and of the world."
Regarding his incorporation of 1980s politics into the title, Delano recalls, "The Thatcher/Reagan era represented, to me, a wheel-screeching acceleration of free-market economics. The furious engines of capitalism unleashed to roll heedless over the aspirations of the individual in a reckless race for global profit. Suddenly I was living in Great Britain PLC, under coercion to operate as a cog in some national corporate entity, not as a citizen of a society concerned preeminently with enhancing the well-being of its citizens. Hellblazer stories offered me a tiny, obscure opportunity to obliquely address the reality of my environment through the subjective medium of fiction. To be more grit--however inconsequential--than cog in the gears of the ugly machinery. If I didn’t have Constantine to write, I may have had to blow shit up. Of course, those days seem almost cozy in comparison to the 21st Century they spawned."
Delano's stories often expressed their politics and contemporary anxieties by his choice of who was creating the horrors that John would encounter, as well as by the choice of who the victims in these situations were. In these stories, it is often those who are selfish or reckless in their pursuit of power who release destructive forces that sweep over helpless bystanders in waves, rolling over them like the engines and machines of Delano's earlier metaphor, and leading to montages of horrific scenes. And not all the stories are magical; there are stories about nuclear war, the vulnerability of the environment, and the real-world horrors of famine. The victims in many of these stories are children, which seemed to be a recurring theme throughout the Delano era of the title, perhaps thematically connected to John's greatest guilt, and "original sin"--the child he lost at Newcastle.
After four years on Hellblazer, Delano left to take over Animal Man (where he would continue with many of the same ideas of natural magic, and political stories), but he has returned to Constantine a number of times over the years. He did this first with a single-issue story in the main title at the end of the Ennis era (H. #84), then with a two-issue, prestige-format story in 1995, The Horrorist, in which John crosses paths with a spirit that is able to redistribute suffering, and who has come from Africa to America to do so. Delano also wrote the four-issue Hellblazer Special: Bad Blood in 2000, which imagines a 72-year-old Constantine living in the England of 2025 and getting involved in a Royal scandal.
Delano will return to John's life again soon with the upcoming original graphic novel Hellblazer: Pandemonium. Delano has often set John against the backdrop of current events, letting him guide us into some of the most terrifying places of the now, and this book sounds like it will continue that tradition. In Pandemonium, intelligence specialists believe that elements of the Iraqi insurgency may be possessed by a demon, and they suspect a connection with an ancient Babylonian legend. Out of their depth, they coerce into service the only person in their databases that they believe can help--John Constantine--and compel him to come to Iraq as a private contractor.
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