As an avid comic book reader between the ages of around six and sixteen (after that, oh what a falling off was there... I guess I just drifted away from the whole scene in the mid to late '90s; There was a lot of crap around at the time), one of the best things - in my humble opinion o' course - was the DC Vertigo imprint and it's late '80s precursors. Comics such as
Swamp Thing,
The Demon ("Etrigaaaan!"),
Blue Devil, Neil Gaiman's feted
The Sandman,
Shade: The Changing Man and others piled up upon my adolescent-to-teen self's shelves alongside other favourites like
Web of Spider-Man,
Ghost Rider and
The Incredible Hulk - but one of the firm faves in the firmament of Vertigo's vertiginous variations was
Hellblazer.
Created by comic book/graphic novel (delete as per snobbishness) doyen (I was going to attempt a "doyen of comics"/doyenne du comice joke, but I think i've been found guilty of more than enough misfiring gags over the years, so we'll leave that particular partridge in a pear tree alone) and full-time maniac Alan Moore during his legendary run on
Swamp Thing, the character of John Constantine soon span-off into his own title: a daemonic noir saga of the trenchcoat-clad investigator transplanted to the rainswept concrete mise en scene of Thatcher's late Nineteen-Haties Britain and tackling less the standard gumshoe tropes of marital intrigue and petty murder and more the extrusions into our dimension of primal evil forces from the Outer realms. Which is pretty cool work if you can get it. With a litany of writers over the years including, but not limited to: Moore, Garth Ennis, Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman and artists numbering among them John Ridgway, Simon Bisley and Dave McKean,
Hellblazer was a spellbinding and spell-casting monthly addiction for young me and quite possibly shaped my tastes/warped my fragile young mind (again, delete as per opinion). The character of Constantine - cool, shifty, and dangerous to know - was visually modelled upon Gordon Sumner aka Sting (of not very good songs and Dune's "I WILL KILL YOU!" fame) and his iconic spiked hair and long trenchcoat possibly contributed to my squee-ing when David Tennant was unveiled as the new Doctor Who in late 2005 and had opted to portray another fantasy hero of mine with spiked hair and a long trenchcoat. Shame that he opted to play it with an Estuary accent. If he had to forsake his native Paisley, why not a Scouse twang? It didn't go wrong for Paul McGann.
Still, we have Matt Ryan these days, so all is right with the world. (No, of
course Keanu Reeves doesn't count. Tilda Swinton ws the only thing even remotely of interest in that non-canon abortion of a film [which is almost exactly what I thought about the
Suspiria remake, to a slightly less vehement and venomous extent. At least that film had the grace to do something interesting with its source material]).
Oh, on a slight
Doctor Who note: as a child it irritated me to look up the titles of previous Who stories and note that there were two stories titled 'The Seeds of Death' and 'The Seeds of Doom' respectively. The similar-but-different dissonance betwixt the twain irked me. Similarly, the redolence of the titles of
Hellblazer and Clive Barker's horror franchise
Hellraiser got on my nerves, especially when Marvel's Epic imprint began a series of
Hellraiser comics that could be found right next to
Hellblazer on the alphabetically-arranged shelves of comic stores. If anyone was ever in the Newcastle branch of Forbidden Planet circa 1992 and saw a twelve or thirteen year old boy standing with a comic book in each hand and a scowl upon his face, consider the conundrum of a couple of decades confirmed. Apologies: I can't help having always been an anal fan. By which I mean both a fan who is anal, and also a fan of...
Anyway. Let's get on with the review, shall we?
When NBC commissioned the sadly short-lived (only thirteen episodes, we hardly got to know and love thee: though thirteen's a good occult number I suppose)
Constantine TV series in 2014 starring Matt Ryan as the eldritch sleuth things seemed to be looking up only to be foiled by network cancellation. Our hero, however, transcended the axe of death and appeared in the CW's
Arrow before becoming a fixture in the Arrowverse as a permanent crewmember of the Waverider in the delightfully unhinged
Legends of Tomorrow, as well as transferring to animated form (still voiced by Ryan) firstly in
Justice League Dark and then in the web series
City of Demons, later re-edited into a full length feature.
When Constantine is contacted by his old cab-driving pal Chas Chandler (Damien O'Hare taking on voicing duties of the character named after the bass player of Newcastle's own The Animals - my ma was asked out on a date by the real Chas, she reckons. That's my rock 'n' roll claim to fame) after many years with the news that his young daughter Trish has suddenly lapsed into an inexplicable coma - driving his marriage with wife Renee (Emily O'Brien) onto the rocks - John feels the need, weighted mostly by guilt, to try to help. Attending the hospital bedside of the insensate child he summons the aid ("I'm calling in a specialist") of the Nightmare Nurse Asa the Healer (Laura Bailey) - a demon who takes on the rather fetching form of an alluring fetish nurse replete with PVC uniform. Which is nice.
(I now have Genesis' 'Here Comes the Supernatural Anaesthetist' stuck in my head for reasons unknown - which is slightly less nice)
With their only lead being the address of '1247 Enstrom, L.A.' Johny and Chas leave Trish and Renee in the hands of Asa who vows to guard the soulless Trish from any malevolent spirits or demons who might try to inhabit her shell, and take the night flight to sunny California where they spot news headlines of a 'coma plague' spreading through Los Angeles as more and more people are being mysteriously stricken. Making their way to the address, they find a mansion wherat they are greeted at the door by a pig butler (I've always wanted a monkey butler myself) who quotes Dracula's "Enter freely of your own will" before amusedly chuntering "I've always wanted to say that". Entering the enchanted edifice, Constantine meets the demon Beroul (Jim Meskimen) - a hellspawn crossbreed of Sydney Greenstreet and Zero the Hutt who admits to being responsible for the wave of comas and taking the souls of its victims inclusing Trish, and seeks to make a deal with our Scouser warlock in exchange for the child's essence. Leaving Beroul's ghoulish pool - a literal swimming pool filled with dismembered body parts - they make their way through the house to the ballroom wherein the demon has arranged a musical soiree: humans being tortured and their essences torn from them to the sound of music played by a band straight from Pandaemonium itself. Some call it witchcore.
Agreeing to the terms of the demon who he unflatteringly but accurately refers to as 'Mr Blobby' - that is, to eliminate five demons Beroul sees as rivals to his scheme of reaping the souls of the city - Constantine informs Chas that Trish and the other comatose patients' "souls are fuelling the engine of Beroul's magic, like batteries" and that the deal must be fulfilled quickly. This arrangement is, however, like many a devil's bargain not all as it seems: for 'Beroul' is but a skin suit ("a convenient mask") for the high demon Nergal - Constantine's nemesis who was summoned fifteen years prior in a Satanic ritual in the basement of Newcastle upon Tyne's Casanova Club. This Luciferian liturgy 'neath a Geardie goth den resulted in the young child Astra Logue being taken into the bowels of hell by the beasts of Nergal, an event which sent Constantine to an asylum in Ravenscar and set him on his path of magical warfare against the darkness.
After being mysteriously guided to Guadalupe's Bar, John makes an intimate encounter with a seductive being named 'Angela' (Rachel Kimsey), the self-titled Queen of Angels and living embodiment of the psyche of the city itself who asks for his help against Nergal but has in fact made a pact with him and is willing to allow his schemes so long as the five competitor demons are slain. Constantine finds himself having to summon the aid of Mictlantecuhtli (Rick D. Wasserman), the Aztec death god, as part of a stratagem to wipe out the daemonic quintet before having to make a huge sacrifice in order to free Trish's soul from Nergal's clutches. I don't want to go too in depth with spoilers or anything - I highly recommend that anyone interested in the character and/or subject matter check it out themselves. For a comic company who've spent years floundering behind Marvel on the live action big screen, DC have been working absolute wonders in the animated medium. This is another good 'un.
In summation - much better and far less disappointing than
Penny Dreadful: City of Angels as far as franchise revisits go.
