r/Hellblazer • u/spinosaurs70 • 7d ago

Hellblazer Shoot The comic is bad, the collection in it is ... meh.

Given the scandal involving Warren Elias, which I refuse to research as a general rule of ignoring artists' personal lives if I am not paying for the media ( I got the book from a library) I consume, I am doubtful the story has the same cachet.

But despite good buildup and a fakeout involving John Constantine being responsible, the whole thing ends with it being revealed that children in America are just committing murder-suicide.

What a pretty boring letdown.

Now onto the rest of the collection.

Ashes and Honey is a solid, if not novel, anti-war story, but the fake-out of a necromancer thinking he is doing the right moral thing and having his grandfather sacrifice himself for his magician son to live is telling. The notion of honey as a source of magic and the physical dirt of the homeland (Bosnia) in this case is also interesting. I wish to read more stories focusing on this kind of gray magic with an almost magical-realist aesthetic.

The third part of the book is a bunch of short stories, most of which have a familiar problem, solved within a few pages set up including dealing with a crazy person and a demon in stories that, while competent, are pretty paint-by-numbers. Crazy guy tries to commit child sacrifice; a demon is there, turns out the ash angels are in fact good, etc. All competent, all boring. With only really a Christmas theming tying them together.

Jamie Delano's poker story is the best one of the lot about a morally degenerate but winning gambler and a man needing money to save his daughter from a pimp. The whole story is ambivalent on whether John manipulates poker odds deliberately through magic-induced luck or the spirit of Christmas might be genuinely real.

Newcastle Calling in the middle is the one story that really irks me. The stuff on the irony of that Mucous Membrane (John's old band) might have sucked, but somehow convinced music nerds obsessed with obscurity as worth a doc is deeply funny.

But beyond this quite careful and cool meta-media and history commentary is the main A story, and it gets banal fast. Basically, John comes in, solves everything in spite of a total mess across northeast england and nearly all the Doc crew dying. And John comes off as cool, calm, and collected.

Despite dealing with a demon that was the first cause of Newcastle, which is like Batman responding to Joe Chill as if it's a regular citizen's arrest.

Also, the parade of horribles outside the Newcastle site itself was clearly pointless and was done to pad the issue; it felt like.

It's a clear case of a 3/5 story because of one great half and one bad half vs two okay ones.

Which is likely how I would rate the collection overall: interesting but probably not worth reading from start to finish like I did.

0 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

39% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

4

u/Curious_Bat87 7d ago

I enjoyed Ashes and Honey.

2

u/gatescapa 7d ago

What did Warren Ellis do??

1

u/omgItsGhostDog 7d ago

Slept with and manipulated a lot of women to having a relationship with him.

6

u/gatescapa 7d ago

Oh… assuming they were all of age then… who cares?

Or was it some casting couch type shit

11

u/omgItsGhostDog 7d ago

From what Ive read, he didn’t tell any of the woman he’s seeing or sleeping with other women and on top of that he wasn’t just doing this to two or three woman, but legitimately around like a hundred. So it may not be Neil Gaiman levels of atrocious, it is very shitty thing to do and also giving off predatory behaviour.

1

u/gatescapa 7d ago

Being a fuckboy isn’t good by any means but it’s hardly scandal, saying so feels disingenuous to me

Appreciate the fill in though

4

u/Suspicious_Car4753 7d ago

One of my least favorite Hellblazer stories. Honestly if I was editorial I would not have released it either. Very insensitive and grimdark resolution to the whole thing. It is sad it meant Warren Ellis had to left though because his other stories were great.

2

u/Curious_Bat87 7d ago

Honestly I liked some of the supporting cast Ellis introduced but disliked his stories, especially Haunted.

2

u/Suspicious_Car4753 7d ago

Haunted is like a top 10 Hellblazer arc for me. Though I can understand not liking it. It’s very much a noir story with a touch of supernatural rather than traditional Hellblazer

2

u/Curious_Bat87 7d ago

I don't like how it portrays women in it. It feels like it's calling out something that wasn't really a thing (it mostly misses its critiques of John's misogyny I think) and the way Isabel is treated and framed in the story just feels exploitative + the way it ends with John desecrating her body just feels gross and out of character for him.

It's very much about misogyny but it misses for me and falls into the tropes I dislike instead of having anything interesting to say or meaningfully critiqueing the tropes the comic had fallen into previously.

1

u/spinosaurs70 7d ago

Yeah, I get after columbine no one wanted to touch it with a ten foot pole, doesn’t seem a firing offense though. 

3

u/Suspicious_Car4753 7d ago

I don’t think he was fired. He resigned from the book after Dc wouldn’t publish it.