Comic review- Constantine: The HellBlazer #4- Sad John Goes On a Bender

Writers: Ming Doyle & James Tynion IV
Artists: Vanesa Del Ray & Chris Visions
Publisher: DC Comics
Released: 16th September 2015



If you’ve read any of my previous reviews then you’ll be aware that I reserve my best ratings for comic books that deal with real world concerns. Constantine ‘The Hellblazer’#4 doesn’t do that, but it’s a decent enough distraction for those uninterested in the world around them.

I can understand why people would want to hide, at least for a while, and this book gives you ample opportunity to do just that. The story is about the individual, not the world around him. John Constantine is on a bender, drinks and magic, and he’s doing what a lot of people do on benders, going around at night, annoying people and being all smart-arse with it, thinking that everything is funny when inside he is screaming with loneliness and self-hatred.

The book is a decent portrayal of a man alone, drinking too much, and refusing to address the issues from his past that have caused him so much emotional distress. The book has wonky, whirly, messy, disorganised art, and it’s perfect for a book about a man on a bender.

The story zips between now and then, and is set in comic book nowhere land. There are no mobile phones, no computers, no recognisable landmarks and the clothes that people are wearing don’t really connect it to any particularly time or place either. John is seen, bottle in hand, annoying a clerk in a record shop, the kind of shop that hasn’t existed in my own town for over ten years now. From there he goes to a generic ‘club,’ and onto a Gothic looking library.

It’s supposed to be England, but I live in England, and it could be anywhere. I saw nothing in the book that gave it any relevance to the world of 2015, it was nowhere, it was about John, it is a distraction book that is all about his personality, and everything else is secondary.

In that sense Constantine #4 is your typical DC comic book. It’s all about personalities, and has nothing to say about reality. The book is refreshingly free of identity politics issues, so it has that going for it, and for a personality book, a book about a man unable to deal with the mistakes of his past, it makes for a slightly above average ten-minute distraction from real world concerns.

I enjoyed the book, but don’t expect anything particularly memorable or game changing from it. I like the character of John Constantine, but he needs to be updated in order to make him relevant to the post 9/11, surveillance state world.

John as a ‘conspiracy’ guy would be fun, it would be controversial, and it would be relevant, but would it be allowed in a mainstream comic book? Probably not, so for the time being all you are going to get is John on a bender. It’s not bad, but is it saying anything about the world that we live in? No, it’s not even trying to.


Rating: 6/10 (Bloke on a bender, with a bit of magic thrown in)

Comic review: John Flood #1- Edward Cullen + John Constantine + Dr Who = John Flood

Writer: Justin Jordan
Art: Jorge Coelho
Colours: Tamra Bonvillain
Publisher: Boom! Studios
Released: 5th August 2015



If you like John Constantine and tales about supernatural serial killers, then you’ll probably enjoy John Flood #1.

However, for anybody looking for something original, subversive, creative or contemporary, there’s not a lot going on in this book that will appeal to you.

This debut issue concentrates on establishing the world, the characters, the villain and the plot.

The world is a comic book anytime. The characters use computers and iphones, but they could easily be replaced with libraries and payphones, and it wouldn’t have made any difference to the direction and flow of the narrative.

The characters themselves are not very memorable. John Flood looks like Edward Cullen and acts like a quirky Doctor Who. He is generically eccentric, but not real, and not interesting to me.

His sidekicks are more straight-laced, as you would expect them to be, and the villain is a generic movie serial killer type, an evil genius who just wants to see the world burn.

The plot is entirely unremarkable. It’s disappointingly dull, routine and lacking in a big central idea, or hook. Here it is: A serial killer is doing what (movie) serial killers do, and it’s up to John Flood to use his wacky supernatural powers to stop him. He can’t do it all by himself though, so he has a chirpy young girl and an ex cop to help him out.

This first issue establishes the help, and ends with the serial killer being all evil and coming to get John and his buddies, or something. That’s not a lot of plot, but that’s all you are going to get if you pick up John Flood #1

The art is actually pretty good. The backgrounds in particular stood out to me, with otherworldly whirls and hints of far off galaxies and realities. Some of the characters are a bit too square jawed and muscular to be real people, but that’s a minor point. I enjoyed the art. It’s the rest of the book that lets it down.

I hate it when I read #1’s and they are not very good, especially when they come from publishers like Boom! Studios, a publisher I want to support, just because they are not Marvel or DC. But what can I do?

John Flood #1 isn’t going to set the world on fire, so I have to be honest about it. The book is very generic, reads like Constantine, and I can’t really see it doing a lot, or getting anybody out there in the comic book world particularly excited. Sorry, but it’s blah. I don’t want it to be blah, but blah is what it is.


Rating: 5/10 (Blah book, nice art)

Blitz Review: Constantine-The Hellblazer #1- Soft John the Hipster

Writers: Ming Doyle & James Tynion IV
Artist: Riley Rossmo
Publisher: DC Comics
Released: 10th June 2015


If you want to read about a fresh-faced, boyband looking hipster John Constantine showing off to a generic comic book cool pink haired girl, flirting with a big bearded man (he's bi-sexual, I know) and having casual sex with a trustafarian girl, then this is the book for you.

The tone is cosy and safe, the art has grit that the story lacks, and there are demons and cigarettes in it. John looks cool in comics, dated on television, so he’s probably best left to the comics. If you want to see him do the usual stuff, here he is.

I can’t be bothered with it. I don’t really see the point. The book isn’t trying to do anything other than be cute. The story was predictable, and the twist at the end was no twist at all.

There’s no edge to the book, no sense of urgency, and no connection to anything that is happening in the real world.

Playing up the bi-sexuality of Constantine in 2015 isn’t edgy, controversial or interesting. It’s tiresome, predictable and extremely politically correct, and probably not even worth me commenting upon here.

Constantine-Hellblazer #1 is a comfortable comic book with an entirely forgettable main narrative. It’s not going to offend anyone, and I guess that’s the entire point. There’s nothing here to get excited about, so it’s one and out for me.

I’ll come back later and check out on John, just to see if anything new, interesting, exciting or relevant is happening. At the moment, he’s just another cute and cuddly character in a mainstream comic book.


Rating: 4/10 (Unthreatening, soft and redundant)

Constantine- (TV Series)- REVIEW: Stale cigarette smoke lingers.

Available on: Amazon Prime

Original run: October 2014- Present

Starring: Matt Ryan- (As John Constantine)

Website:
http://www.nbc.com/constantine


I’ve been wasting my time on Amazon Prime, and trudging through the hypnotic, poisonous dross that is mainstream entertainment. Whilst there I stumbled across the new Constantine television show, and after watching almost six episodes of the programme I feel that I should at least say something about the experience.

Old Contantine look, needs updating for post 9/11 world

To me the character of Constantine is a rebel, but he’s a rebel stuck in time, and he has yet to be updated for the post 9/11 generation, probably for the same reason that many other characters haven’t been updated. That reason being that the post 9/11 world cannot be portrayed in the mainstream media without the mainstream implicating itself and admitting that it has been subjecting the masses to wave after wave of propaganda and disinformation ever since that false flag event was allowed to take place.

The corporate whore distraction and disinformation system (aka ‘the mainstream media’) fears mirrors more than anything else. If it puts up a mirror to it’s own face it will be disgusted, so no mirrors are allowed. To quote Kurt Cobain:

‘I’m so ugly, that’s okay because so are you. We broke our mirrors. Sunday morning is everyday for all I care.’ 

Kurt Cobain looked at himself in the mirror, saw the world, hated it, complained, hid in addiction, didn’t try to change it, or himself, took a gun and checked himself out, for good.

Kurt’s lyrics advocate living in blissful, doped out ignorance rather than facing an uncomfortable truth. The junkie wimps out, preferring to anaesthetise him/herself from reality in the soothing cocoon of addiction. The mainstream media viewer is living the same life, the only difference being that it’s ‘programming’ as opposed to heroin that is shielding addicts/viewers from the painful mirrors of reality.

More smoking in actual show please?

The Constantine television show is not as strong as Nirvana. It’s a weak drug, not very addictive, but it offers the same cocoon of non-reality that all drugs offer. It took me almost six episodes to get fed up of it, and that’s quite a lot for me.

The main actor (Matt Ryan) is a bit wobbly, sometimes good, sometimes not so good. His accent isn’t really Constantine, it’s a Welsh guy trying to sound like he comes from the 1970’s London of old Sex Pistols documentaries. I know he’s supposed to be a con man, but this con man wouldn’t fool anybody. His con fails because he’s out of date, he hasn’t updated his schtick for the I-generation, and he looks and sounds like a character from the 1990’s pretending that it’s the late 1970’s, but actually living in 2015.

Occasionally he slips into something that resembles authenticity, but he doesn’t stay there for very long, especially when he interacts with the younger characters on the show.  He’s too old to be considered ‘cool’ by teenagers, and he wears strange clothes, a uniform that looks completely out of place in a contemporary context. He looks like a character, not like a real-life character, more like somebody who is dressing up for a television programme or stage show about a detective.

X-Files

I can’t imagine any guy dressing like that today, perhaps a hipster, but even then it would be a hipster at a comic-con, and not a guy who actually goes to pubs and clubs looking like that.

Constantine would scare women, not attract them. His clothes make him look like a sexual deviant, and I can’t image any man wanting to put out that message, especially a man who is supposed to be the ultimate con man.
I know it’s the Constantine look from old comics, but it needs to go. No man of his age these days wears what he is wearing, so change it.

As for the script, it’s pretty much identical to your average, statist cop-show, but with added ‘supernatural’ elements, so rather than tracking a serial killer they are tracking a supernatural serial killer. There’s no criticism or questioning of the status quo and societal norms as programmed through the deceptive lens of the mainstream media. Constantine chases ghosts with his team of cute girl and quiet helper mate. He bumps into old friends, they help out, then it’s back to the beginning just in time for next episode and the latest ghostly serial killer, or whatever.

It’s not all bad though. If it were terrible I wouldn’t have sat through almost six shows. I would have seen one, and been done with it. So what did I enjoy about it?

Constantine's outfit looks very fake outdoors

Perhaps it’s because I am old, and I remember when Constantine was a super cool cutting edge character as written by Watchmen icon Alan Moore. I watch the show and get occasional glimpses of that old rebel, but he’s not as tortured, not as dark, not as interesting, and certainly not in touch with the zeitgeist of our times.

Yeah, it’s that smokey old memory that keeps me coming back. I want something to be there, and I get occasional flash-backs to fond memories of the comic books that hooked me into the genre over twenty years in the past.

It’s that memory that has me. It’s the memory of reading about a fascinatingly tortured and complex man. That’s the key to Constantine, he felt like he could actually exist. This television character feels constructed, it feels false, but occasionally, just occasionally it gets tantalisingly close to the old comic books and a feeling that this bloke is not Batman, he's not Iron Man, he’s living in something that resembles the real world, and yes, he could be real.

Hair looking too perfect

I watch the show and it’s fake, and it’s silly, and I know that this man does not exist. The spell is broken, Constantine is just an actor with carefully coiffured hair, in an old-man detective/flasher mac, and he’s talking in a weird Welsh/London hybrid accent, and it’s a bit ridiculous.

But then I get a look, a moment of dialogue from the character and he’s real again, and I’m reading a comic book, and it’s raining outside, and it’s 1992. I get a whiff of cigarette smoke, Alan Moore is writing him again, it feels real, but almost as soon as I get the feeling, the scene changes, and it’s gone.

What must contemporary American television audiences make of it all? I guess to them it’s just another television show with a funny accented ‘British’ character that makes them think that living in the UK is more eccentric and fun than it actually is. I can watch the show in short blasts for the nostalgic promise of bittersweet old memories, but I have to be honest and admit that it’s kind of crappy. It’s a bit blah, very mainstream, and just another heroin laced brick in that blood encased corporate sponsored wall of non-reality, compliance to authority, go to work, sleep away your lives, avoid mirrors, don’t question, vote for war and pay your taxes. Constantine still smokes, but he’s forever stubbing them out. Danger lurks, memories linger, but so far, after six episodes, this has been a predictably tepid affair.

Rating: 4/10

Blast Review: Justice League Dark #32- Oh crap, this one is usually quite good.

Writer: J.M. DeMatteis
Artist: Andres Guinaldo
Publisher: DC
Released 25th June 2014

So, here we go again. Can anybody in contemporary superhero comics write a satisfying conclusion to an arc these days? Okay, so this one wasn’t as soul destroying as some of the Jeff Lemire duds he’s lazily dumped onto the comic book reading public recently, but this conclusion to the recent JLD story arc was very damp and very squibby.

 I’ll do spoilers here by the way, not that this book deserves kid glove treatment, because it doesn’t. In the past few issues Nightmare Nurse got a little bit interesting. Was she good, or was she bad? Turns out she was some kind of soul sucking parasitic demon, but that’s okay apparently, because she’s a good soul sucking parasitic demon, even though that very concept makes absolutely zero sense to me. Since when did a creature that possesses your body and traps your soul in limbo become a bloody hero?

I’m not being stupid here am I? Perhaps Nightmare ‘Soul Sucking Parasitic Demon’ Nurse can get back into nursing and be put in charge of one of the New World Order’s eugenics, ooooops, sorry I meant 'vaccination’ programs? That’s the only way that this could make any sense, but no way is any mainstream comic book writer going to go anywhere near that one, are they?  The corporate career bloody cowards.

This book is stupid. People die, but don’t die and kisses happen, but they don’t mean what kisses mean. And it’s all a waste of time, and why the Hell am I talking about it? And why does Constantine have to call every single magic trick ever used by a villain a ‘cheap parlour trick?’ Hasn’t he got anything else to say? He’s supposed to be a witty man, isn’t he? Not somebody who just goes through the same old rubbish time after time after time until you remember that he is 1980’s character and everything about him, including his look screams late 1970’s, not 2014.

Oh crap, reality has busted the bubble again. What a shame, this book is usually okay, but this month it was awful, barely readable. I didn’t see the point in any of this. It offered nothing, and I’m surprised that I’ve managed to say so much about it. What a waste of my bloody time that was. Rating: 3/10

Blast Review: Thomas Alsop #1- American Constantine

Writer: Chris Miskiewicz
Artist: Palle Schmidt
Publisher: Boom Studios
Released: 18th June 2014

My initial impression on reading the preview for Thomas Alsop was, ‘Oh, so they are going to try and launch an American version of John Constantine then.’ Now after reading the book I can confirm that my initial impression was 100% correct. That’s all I really need to say about it. It’s Constantine, but in Manhattan New York. The titular character is from an old American family that protects Manhattan from supernatural stuff. He drinks a lot, thinks it’s very cool to do so, does some reality television and blogs (to make him seem contemporary) and that’s it.

If you want to see the glorification of degenerate alcoholism with some ghosts thrown in, and echoes of the recent past of native people’s and slave ships then you might be interested in picking up this book. The art is okay. I liked it. It’s a bit scrambled, smudged and loose, and it fits the character of Alsop himself. A man who drinks, smokes and acts like John Constantine with an American accent.

This brings me to the reason why I can’t really be arsed with the book. It’s all very corporate focus group and box-ticking fake ‘rebellious.’ It feels second hand and forged, and there's something very unappealing about it all. Perhaps it's the smugness, perhaps it's the insistence that the main character is interesting, when he really isn't, but there's something really unlikeable about the whole project. And just because you talk about reality television and a blog it doesn’t mean that your mindset isn’t still stuck in the early 1990’s.

There is nothing new about this book, nothing exciting, nothing cutting edge and ultimately there’s no reason to buy it. If you want Constantine then get some of the old Hellblazer books, the good ones from 1988 that you can still get on Amazon in trade paperback. Thomas Alsop needs to be kicked out of his too cool for school drunken lethargy. He also needs to be told to stop pretending that it’s the early 1990’s, and to stop play-acting like he’s John Constantine. Constantine was good, back in the day (as none of the kid’s say), but generations have come and gone since, and an American clone in 2014 just doesn’t cut the mustard. This is derivative, and ultimately, pointless. Oh, and being a drunken celebrity really isn’t cool. Never was, never will be. Rating 4/10

Review: Justice League Dark #31- Guess who’s back?

Writer: J.M DeMatteis
Artists: Andres Guinaldo, Mark Irwin and Walden Wong
Publisher: DC
Released: 4th June 2014


I was a bit worried that the most interesting character in the Justice League Dark was no longer involved with the team of magical misfits, and relegated to his own (lazily written) title by Ray Fawkes. Thankfully though, and I hope this isn’t just a one-off, our main man, John Constantine makes an extremely welcome appearance in JLD #31, getting drunk with two prostitutes (classy move John) and reluctantly finding himself on the side of the Nightmare Nurse in her psyche/psychic battle with John’s ex beau, Zatanna. That appearance by John Constantine is obviously the highlight of JLD #31, but there are other points of interest as well. Nightmare Nurse becomes interesting, for the first time since her addition to the team. Deadman and Swamp Thing finally has something to do that makes them more than just spare parts, and there’s some basic philosophising about the nature of consciousness with emptiness not really being empty at all.

Constantine, “How the Hell can cosmic nothing have consciousness?”
Nightmare Nurse, “Let’s leave the questions to the philosophers and get our adorable asses out of here.”


That sounds like a challenge, so here’s my answer:

There is no emptiness, there is no death, so stop worrying about everything, and give your criminal masters/government a kick in the pants whilst you are on this merry go round of temporary existence where nothing ends, and death is only a new beginning, Why am I talking about philosophy now? Because it’s my blog, and I want to. That’s how it works around here you see. Did I mention the art in JLD # 31? Nope, okay then, quick mention. Big panels of whirling patterns and bubbly consciousness forming itself out of its base, reaching out to attach itself to the experience of humanity, living in this realm of existence just for something to do. Like Constantine and his prostitutes. Well, it passes the time, doesn’t it? Rating 7.5/10