Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Hellblazer: Original Sins

Written by Jamie Delano

I never saw the 'Constantine' movie, because I heard that it stank, but what I heard about the comic series it's based on (that's 'Hellblazer') sounded pretty cool. 'Original Sins' collects the first 9 issues of the comic, which is a spin off from Alan Moore's 'Swamp Thing' (another comic series I've been meaning to check out). Hellblazer stars John Constantine, who is a kind of magician/con-man, and follows his adventures as he continually gets into trouble with the infernal powers of hell and ends up saving the world.

There are a few things I didn't like about this book, firstly the art is pretty generic and not especially good, but then again maybe I've just been spoiled from my reread of 'Sandman'. Secondly the dialog is pretty atrocious in places, especially the sex scenes:

“Like scientists we fall to our experiment. Exploring complex tactile formulae. Tasting the arcane chemistry of sex.”
Yecch, give me a break! Lastly, the political overtones are far too explicit. While it's somewhat relieving to read rants directed at Thatcher and Bush senior that could apply to their counterparts today, since it reminds us that the world has seen all this sort of thing before and came through it OK, but the spittle flecked invective is still not pleasant to read so overtly in a work of fiction. I think Delano is trying to emulate Alan Moore's 'Watchmen', which made similar political statements but did so with a lot more grace and subtlety, mainly by not directly addressing it's targets and instead making arguments against the philosophies of the right wing governments of the day. It gets particularly bad in the Vietnam themed issue, but fortunately the rest of the stories mostly keep it to a tolerable level.

Having said that the plot is fairly good (although a few of the standalone stories are a bit weak, namely the aforementioned Vietnam issue and the first two issues in which Constantine fights a demon that feeds off hunger, are not particularly engaging). Constantine himself is a pretty appealing character, as a rogue who never confronts trouble head-on, preferring to use trickery and mind games. I'm of two minds as to whether I'll keep going with this series, but I guess it'll come down to whatever tickles my fancy the next time a shopping spree takes me to the comic book store.

1 comment:

Joel said...

Well, I have to say I think the movie is pretty good... but then I haven't read the comic. I guess I did watch the movie with low expectations tho, and when that happens things can often seem quite good.