John Constantine Hellblazer: Rare Cuts

"[W]hat led a poor boy from Liverpool to become a magus powerful enough to take on the Devil and emerge triumphant? A new window onto Constantine's unique and harrowing life is now open with rare cuts, collecting six never-before-reprinted issues of thisgroundbreaking Vertigo series and showcasing some of the pivotal episodes in the working-class wizard's bloody history." -- p. [4] of cover.

This selection of six issues from one of Vertigo's longest running series brings together a few of the morally ambiguous stops on John Constantine's journey through the bleak heart of humankind. The episodes, originally published from 1988 to 1994 and reprinted here for the first time, begin with Constantine's bitter memory of a time "before hell impaled and toasted us, writhing over the roaring fires of our own inadequacies." The series is legendary for its combination of political cynicism, magical exploration and occult horror. Constantine bends demons to his will at times, gets trounced by them at others, and always wonders if he and the rest of humanity are worth the effort. Marvelous storytelling from three of the series' best writers-Delano, Ennis and Morrison-will make the collection hard to resist for fans and a great way in for new readers. Morrison's two tales, "Early Warning" and "How I Learned to Love the Bomb," are especially riveting as a parade of suppressed human desires released by a combination of nuclear frequencies and pagan ritual threaten Constantine. Hyper-realistic art by Lloyd, Philips, Rayner and Buckingham gives powerful expression to the varied horrors of demonic force and human weakness. A timeline and map of "Constantine's London" at book's end is an appealing bonus.
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In anticipation of the big-screen adaptation of Hellblazer, tarring Keanu Reeves as roguish British mage John Constantine, DC Comics has been flooding the market with titles featuring Constantine. This one is an odds-and-sods collection of short tales that haven't previously been collected. Which doesn't mean that they're unworthy--as the work of some of comics' leading writers, notably Grant Morrison and Garth Ennis, and artists including Sean Phillips (Sleeper) and David Lloyd (V for Vendetta, far from it. Several are succinctly effective horror tales, such as Morrison's depiction of a pagan festival in a downcast northern English town and Ennis' account of a man haunted by the diary containing his dirty secrets. Of greater interest to Hellblazer fans are the episodes scripted by Jamie Delano that offer glimpses of Constantine's first, childhood stab at magic; his teenage friendship with Chas Chandler; and, especially, the horribly botched exorcism at Newcastle that haunts Constantine to this day. Although the collection is aimed at longtime Hellblazer readers, its contents' uniformly high quality makes it good for newcomers, too. Gordon Flagg
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