Eruditorum Press

The bodies on the gears of the culture industry

Last War in Albion

Today I Stop Being Real (Book Three, Part 57: V for Vendetta at DC)

, 1

British police on horses, both in riot gear, as described by Alan Moore in the quoted passage.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: The entire Grant Morrison half of the book happened.

“Today I stop being real. No one’s going to listen to a boy genius. No one’s going to listen to a philosopher or a traveler. No one cares about an orphan, or a rich man, or some grown up grinder kid from Heavenside. All the things I’ve been: no one’s ever been interested. Weird little Johnny from the big house on Scartop; who ever really gave a shit? People like listening to characters. Characters are safe, because they’re not real.” – Warren Ellis, Doktor Sleepless

And what of their opponent, the self-exiled king? At first, a settling of accounts—the tying off of old obligations, so that the first phase of his career could be buried in full. Mostly this meant the completion of V for Vendetta for DC. This was not going back to the absolute start of his career, but it was close—the strip had begun serialization in the March 1982 debut issue of Warrior, at a time when Moore’s other work was The Stars My Degradation, occasional Future Shocks, and a couple Star Wars backups—before even Skizz or Captain Britain, so far back that it was able to influence the tail end of Morrison’s Captain Clyde run. The double header of Marvelman and V for Vendetta in Warrior were where Moore had revealed himself to be more than just the clever writer of things like the Abelard Snazz stories or “Tlotny Throws a Shape”—one capable of serious, penetrating work. It had been the first time Alan Moore’s public persona made an appearance—the first time he was not merely a name in the credits that, to a particularly attentive reader, might signify a basic level of quality that other writers lacked, but an auteur to be actively paid attention to—a creator of major projects who might plausibly serve as the sole reason someone picked up a comic. Warrior #1 began a coherent sense of a career that extended forward to the vast edifice of Watchmen. Now, in that project’s totemic wreckage, Moore returned to the beginning to draw the curtain down on the first phase of his career.

This was fitting. What remained to write of V for Vendetta, after all, concerned the final fate both of the visionary terrorist V and of his schemes to bring down the fascist Norsefire regime. Moore was perhaps less a visionary terrorist at this stage than a visionary artist, or, perhaps, a visionary con man, but Moore was also not the sort to get hung up on the fine distinctions between these three classes. But Moore was someone who would, in some strange cousin to self-effacement, describe himself (or at least his female author-insert character Alma Warren) as “a super-villainess” who “sits in a swivel chair amongst the shifting screens and contemplates deranged agendas. These include affecting the development of culture by the subtle introduction of extreme ideas, which, if pursued, will almost certainly precipitate widespread apocalyptic psychological collapse,” and how he chose to resolve the story of V would have obvious parallels for his own story, especially in the still pulsatingly magical aftermath of Watchmen.…

Continue Reading

No Way Forward (Book Three, Part 56: Really and Truly)

, 2

Grant Morrison, bald and in sunglasses, in front of a graffiti mural

Previously in Last War in Albion: Morrison did the worst work of his career with the recklessly offensive and bullying Big Dave.

A nervous breakdown. There is no way forward. We must set the action in reverse. -Alan Moore, The Birth Caul

Whatever its moral flaws, Big Dave, along with Maniac 5, were the two most popular strips of the Summer Offensive, and so like Maniac 5 it saw itself trotted out for return engagements. This began with the one-off “Young Dave,” a story of Big Dave’s childhood, which appeared in the 1994 annual, followed by two more four-part stories in 1994. These stories moved away from the sheer and over the top big concept premises of the original two strips, finding their humor instead in putting the title character in juxtaposition with iconic parts of British lad culture. The first, “Costa Del Chaos,” sees Big Dave holidaying in Tenerife, while the second, “Whole Lotta Balls,” sees him storming the World Cup to win it for England and defeat the Germans. Tonally both are similar festivals of cynical and calculated offense to the original, but there’s a creeping sense of desperation and trying too hard, as if Morrison and Millar were simply trying too hard for something that neither deserved it nor, truth be told, wanted it. Morrison validates this sense, admitting that  “Big Dave clearly had to die. Mark and I were goading each other on every day to break some new bad taste taboo, We both have pretty fucked-up notions about what’s funny and what isn’t. It got to the point where we wouldn’t be satisfied with a Big Dave pitch unless one of us was really badly shocked. We were barely aware that our audience didn’t necessarily want to go as far as we would have liked.”

Mercifully, 2000 A.D.’s editors eventually grew to blanche at their enfants terrible, and pulled the plug later that year. Morrison has suggested a variety of ideas that might have come out otherwise—“Planet of the Darkies,” which Morrison described as “Dave gets sick on a bad kebab and imagines returning from space to a world taken over by immigrants,” “Battleground Bulger,” which saw miniaturized Dave and Saddam Hussein fighting inside the body of a dead toddler, and a story for the 2000 AD Yearbook called “Cheryl-Anne’s Big Night Out,” which saw Big Dave trying to kill Salman Rushdie. This story, which apparently got as far as Steve Parkhouse drawing it, was the one that actually served as the breaking point, with Fleetway head Chris Powell rejecting the story, which largely coincided with both Morrison and Millar ceasing to work with the company, with Morrison going so far as to suggested that he was “blacklisted at 2000 A.D.”

And indeed, their future treatment at 2000 A.D. largely bears this out, at least in the short to medium term. Perhaps the most striking example comes with the strip Janus: Psi-Division, featuring the psychic judge they introduced in Inferno.…

Continue Reading

Nobody Cares About Anything Anymore (Book Three, Part 55: Big Dave)

, 1

A still from South Park featuring the show's typical homophobic humor

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Having failed to jump immediately to the US market on the back of his early Trident and Crisis work, Mark Millar found himself writing Sonic the Hedgehog comics.

You just like offending people, don’t you? Nobody cares about anything anymore. – Grant Morrison, Multiversity: The Just

Millar’s Sonic the Hedgehog work consisted of eleven self-contained stories across eleven issues, mostly in 1993 but with one in 1994 and two—presumably inventory pieces—in 1996. None are extraordinary, and if they did not bear Millar’s name they would seem wholly unremarkable. They are not cynical and nihilistic in the way that Millar’s work for older readers is. And yet looking at them in the context of his career, some of Millar’s trademark obsessions do begin to emerge. Most obviously, Millar leans hard into the idea of Sonic as an egotistical jerk—admittedly a savvy move that acknowledges part of the character’s core marketing appeal. But there are subtler issues too—a running theme of sidekicks and secondary characters who are defined in part by their inadequacy compared to the hero, especially in his first strip, which features Tails, Sonic’s sidekick from Sonic the Hedgehog 2, captured by Doctor Robotnik and turned into an evil cyborg brimming with vocal resentment. This would be a trope Millar would return to, and one it’s hard not to read in light of his own status as a sidekick within the War. Also obviously notable is the comedy “A Day in the Life of Doctor Robotnik,” a strip whose ending, which reveals Robotnik as a fan of romance comics, is difficult not to read in light of Millar’s broader fondness for homophobic jokes.

Something closer to an unfiltered version of Millar appeared in his other strip for Sonic the Comic, Streets of Rage. Based in a beat ‘em up style game in which vigilante ex cops try to rid a decaying American city of crime, the strip was by some margin the most adult strip in the comic. The nature of its setting, with its failed institutions that can only be saved by vigilante violence, lent itself to Millar’s cynicism, but also showcased the kind of innately conservative aesthetics that would come to dominate Millar’s work. The comic was also simply a venue for an only mildly toned down version of the nastiness that pervaded Millar’s other work, however. His first arc culminated in the villain being dumped alive into a vat of molten steel, a barely sanitized version of the resolution of Purgatory, while his second features a scene in which a character researches on a computer while narrating about how “There’s always one jerk in every class who’s into computers. One specky wimp with rich parents who drive him to school. I should know—I’ve got one pinned under my skate shoe right now,” a bit of bullying nastiness that evokes Insiders. In both cases the work is tamer and less confrontationally offensive than Millar’s other work, but the underlying attitudes are viscerally clear.…

Continue Reading

Living Under a Bridge and Doing Drugs (Book Three, Part 54: Mark Millar’s Sonic the Hedgehog)

, , 0

The box art to the first Sonic the Hedgehog game, featuring Sonic looking cool af

Previously in Last War in Albion: Grant Morrison met a bad influence.

It’s clearly an entirely legitimate product from Sega, and in a Modern-Warfare-2 piece of relevancy, the eponymous spiked-creature is now homeless, living under a bridge and doing drugs. – Kieron Gillen, Rock Paper Shotgun 

On the one hand there’s nothing wrong with this. Moore deftly wielded provocation plenty of times in his rise, and Morrison’s enfant terrible persona was a well-crafted and effective attempt to do the same. What’s notable is not the extremity of what Morrison said, but simply the degree to which Millar brought this side of Morrison out, eliciting jokes about how “ I really would like to expire in some dramatic motoring accident.  There’s nothing like travelling at high speed without a seatbelt and no thrill like the possibility of hitting a wall at a hundred miles an hour.  Anyway, what I’d like is to be cremated and leave instructions for my ashes to be thrown in the face of some perfectly innocent passerby.  Someone I never knew or had any remote connection with.  It would be such a lovely gesture” and anecdotes about how “my classmates and I were responsible for the nervous breakdowns of two teachers.  One of them, a kindly and inoffensive old gentleman was subjected to a campaign of sustained psychological torture that would have brought Patrick McGoohan to his knees in no time.  After a spell in psychiatric care, this dear old character bravely returned to teaching and lasted only a few months before being driven completely round the bend..  He lives quite near me actually and I often see him wandering about with a walking stick and an air of tragic bewilderment.  You shouldn’t laugh really but sometimes it’s impossible not to.” This was a version of Morrison who was more instinctively disposed to stylized meanness and transgressive jokes. They were perfectly capable of this on their own, it’s true, and there’s no shortage of examples of them indulging in it, but the fact remained: when Millar was in the picture, Morrison could inevitably be found playing the most cartoonish version of their public persona. 

Of course, this was very much the sort of thing Millar did. He was, after all, the writer of Insiders and Purgatory, for whom a nihilistic transgressiveness seemed the only aesthetic goal of any interest. In a comics scene increasingly defined by performative edginess, he offered the purest expression of it. And Morrison was open about this being the appeal, noting that “We both have a very ghoulish sense of humor.” This is clear in all of the joint interviews they did in the period, which positively brim with casual homophobia and puerile attempts to shock and offend. A 1992 interview saw Morrison complaining about how “We’re both sick of the way 2000 AD is full of poofs these days. Judge Dredd’s turned into a poof and so has everyone else. All the stories are about Buddhists, Feminism and Ecology – it’s a real drag” while Millar railed about how “I’m sick of listening to them bleating on about how bloody great they are.…

Continue Reading

A Good Year For Bastards (Book Three, Part 53: Morrison and Millar’s Judge Dredd, Maniac 5)

, 2

1586

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Morrison’s Judge Dredd story Inferno was set up by a Mark Millar story called Purgatory.

It’s going to be a good year for bastards, Spider. And their running mates. – Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan

Tellingly, it opens with a light rip-off of Rorschach’s jail cell murder in Watchmen #8, with guards coming up on a dead guard who’s been pulled through the bars of a cell and murdered, which serves as the introduction to Grice. Going on, the comic continues in a vein that gives a clear sense of Millar’s takeaways from Watchmen. We see a man being held down to a surgical table as his nose is burnt off without anesthesia, a vegetarian being brutally force fed his (still alive) pet rat, and people being agonizingly burnt alive. In the instances where the violence can’t quite live up to this standard—a simple panel of a man raking spiked knuckles across another man’s back—the dialogue serves to juice it up with lines lie “Feel thet, boy? Feel yore skin peelin’ back? Tearin’ inta l’il strips o’ confetti?” It is a comic of unrelenting, ugly cynicism—the same thing Millar had already done with The Insiders only blown up to the parodic extremes of the Judge Dredd universe. And this was clearly the pleasure Millar wanted out of it, describing it enthusiastically as “hard as nails.”  This was of a type with what Morrison was doing, yes, but it was not the same thing.

Nevertheless, the pair were close enough to work together, and indeed went on to do two more Judge Dredd stories. One, Book of the Dead, ran a few weeks after the end of the Summer Offensive, and slotted into the traditional Judge Dredd format of having Dredd go and do a tour of duty in another Mega-City, which is to say in an over the top parody of another country. But where Millar’s predecessor had done a “Judge Dredd in Ireland” story that stuck to territory he knew, Morrison and Millar did an Egypt-themed one, which is to say a straight up Mummy riff. This carried all the casual imperialism one would expect from this premise, with Egypt treated as a place of brutality and superstition (although not so brutal that the Egyptian judge sent to Mega-City One can’t be shown up as an arrogant fraud who gets himself beaten within an inch of his life on his first night on patrol), but by and large its worse sin is simply a sort of bland tedium—a sense of unreality that this is really the product of two of the most successful comics writers of the late 20th/early 21st century. 

This sense only deepens in Crusade, the pair’s third Judge Dredd story, which sees Dredd sent to retrieve a crashed space pod containing an astronaut who was lost in space before being recovered and claiming to have met God. Published in 1995, a year after Millar left Dredd and was replaced by a returning John Wagner, the story puts Dredd opposite Judges from every other nation on Earth, all of whom also want the pod.…

Continue Reading

I Knew I Would Be Judged (Book Three, Part 52, Inferno)

, 1

Figure 1579

Hey all. Just wanted to remind you all that the entire remainder of Last War in Albion Volume 3 is available for Patrons. And last night came the first part of Volume 4, a whole volume on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, a fact I’m definitely not mentioning because some highly visible piece of Sandman media launches today.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Garth Ennis handed off the reins on Judge Dredd to Mark Millar shortly before Millar began the Summer Offensive.

I knew they’d learn my secrets. The way they find out everything—I knew I would be judged—but not like this! Not like tonight! – Garth Ennis, Helter Skelter

The Summer Offensive was an eight issue run of 2000 A.D. in July and August of 1993 in which the magazine was effectively turned over to Grant Morrison and Mark Millar, who between then wrote four of the five strips for those eight weeks, with the fifth being by John Smith. For Morrison, this in practice marked a farewell to their run in the British market and a capstone to the phase of their career that included things like St. Swithin’s Day and Dare. Save for “zzzzenith.com” and a single issue Janus: Psi Division strip, both in 2000 A.D., the Offensive would mark the last time Morrison was the sole credited writer on something for the UK market. More to the point, the Summer Offensive fit into the aesthetic tradition of the UK comics renaissance that was in 1993, down to its dying embers, with its name making clear that it was wholly committed to an aesthetic of shock and taboo breaking. 

Being 2000 A.D., one of the five strips was Judge Dredd, which Grant Morrison took on as one of their two solo strips for the run, penning a twelve issue epic called Inferno (which ran for four weeks past the end of the Offensive). This is, on the surface, an enticing combination—one of Britain’s greatest comics writers on the country’s greatest comics property. But Dredd has proven an idiosyncratic challenge for plenty of good writers, as Garth Ennis can attest. Morrison’s approach to the challenge was, in some ways, surprising. Their reputation, after all, was built on their visionary reinventions of American properties like Animal Man and The Doom Patrol—radical reworkings that in many ways went further than even Alan Moore’s trademark reworkings of characters. Now, after more than 850 installments between 2000 A.D. and the Judge Dredd Megazine, Dredd was surely ripe for such a reinvention.

Instead, however, Morrison took the strip in an aggressively lowbrow direction. As they put it, “Dredd’s just a big bastard with a gun, never anything else. There’s nothing under the mask. So I thought long and hard and then just wrote him as a one dimensional bastard with a gun.” This is not to sy that Morrison did not attempt to leave their mark on the character, taking time to damn Ennis’s run with faint praise (“I did make a definite decision not to do a kind of quirky ‘isn’t life strange in Mega-City One?’…

Continue Reading

Gandalf’s Crap Understudy (Book Three, Part 51: Ennis’s Judge Dredd)

, 0

Figure 1570

Previously in Last War in Albion: Judge Dredd in the late 80s and early 90s did an extensive arc concerning Mega-City One contemplating the restoration of Democratic rights. Late in that arc came another 2000 AD featured called The Dead Man, revealed in a late twist to be a secret Judge Dredd story, featuring the eponymous Judge walking the Cursed Earth aroudn Mega-City One.

“I notice bein’ Gandalf’s crap understudy doesnae stop you bein’ a condescending prick ’n’ all.” – Simon Spurrier, John Constantine: Hellblazer

At this point the main strip began depicting the backstory of how Dredd came to be a badly burnt body out in the Cursed Earth. This began with “A Letter to Judge Dredd,” a thematic sequel to “Letter From a Democrat” written in the form of a missive from a young boy questioning the efficacy of the Judge system. The boy dies horribly at the end of the strip just before his letter is delivered to Dredd, and this confluence prompts Dredd’s resignation. In an attempt to hide this fact a clone of Judge Dredd is given his badge and put on the streets in his place, which precipitated another epic, the twenty-six part Necropolis, which featured the return of the Brian Bolland co-created Judge Death. The story culminated, of course, with Dredd returning and saving the day, but still resulted in a massive death toll in Mega-City One as Judge Death and his Dark Judges spent months ruling the city. In the fallout of this, Dredd, his faith in the Judge system restored, concludes that the only way to reestablish order is to allow a referendum on the judge system and the restoration of democracy, setting up the culmination of the years-long arc.

This took place in a pair of short arcs towards the end of 1991, beginning in issue #750. The first of these, “The Devil You Know,” was penned by John Wagner and took place on the eve of the referendum, with Dredd arguing passionately against the restoration of Democracy (“When some creep’s holding a knife to your throat, who do you want to see riding up… me—or your elected representative?”) as the ordinary citizens struggle to even understand how to vote in the first place. The plot concerns a conspiracy by a group of judges to assassinate Dredd and prevent the referendum, which they (along with the rest of the city) are convinced will spell the end of the judge system. 

The second arc, meanwhile, depicted the referendum itself. Called “Twilight’s Last Gleaming,” it was unexpectedly written not by Wagner, who had written virtually the entirety of the Democracy arc, but rather by the incoming regular writer of the Judge Dredd feature in 2000 AD, Garth Ennis. As Ennis explains the handoff, “at that point John had enough American commitments and was writing the lion’s share of the Megazine. He had enough outside commitments that handling the Dredd strip in 2000 was too much work.” And so the opportunity passed to Ennis, who was of the up and comers the one with the deepest affection for Dredd, and, with his clear love of transgressive and boyish humor, one of the two most obvious fits for the property.…

Continue Reading

The Whole Damned Brazen Con Of It (Book Three, Part 50: Judge Dredd)

, 2

Figure 1557

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Garth Ennis was a writer who could pen incredibly moving and succinct portraits of human emotion, and who could just as easily pen the most self-indulgent edgelording crap imaginable.

“The trick was that none of his spells, none of the words, meant much at all. What did mean something was the presentation. Putting on a face. The whole damned brazen con of it.” – Pete Milligan, Hellblazer

Nor does his career divide neatly into some narrative of the talented early years vs the self-indulgent later years—at almost all stages he finds himself producing both types of comics at the same time.

Like most writers from the British scene who were breaking out in the US, Ennis continued doing work in the UK scene until he’d fully established himself. In the face of the market collapse that happened in the early 90s, however, this meant that his UK work was essentially focused entirely on one publication: 2000 AD. But just as Ennis had ridden his breakout work in Crisis straight to a top job in the proto-Vertigo scene, Ennis was not left to toil on Future Shocks, and instead slotted in as the regular writer of the title’s marquee feature Judge Dredd, at first with a series of fill-ins starting with Prog 711 in December of 1990, three months before his first Hellblazer issue and eventually becoming the regular writer from late 1991 through the summer of 1993, just over a year before he wrapped on Hellblazer.

Remarkably, this makes him the first significant participant in the War to take on what is arguably the most iconic British comics character ever created. Moore had an early Judge Dredd script rejected, and Milligan had written a story featuring spinoff character Judge Anderson back in 1987, but for the most part Dredd was a character who existed in parallel with the early years of the War. He had been around since 1977, debuting in the second issue of 2000 AD, but always having been imagined as a key feature of the magazine. The concept had several origins. On one hand, Pat Mills had been considering a horror strip named after the British reggae artist Judge Dread, but ultimately discarded the idea. Separately, he had approached writer John Wagner, with whom he’d helped create Battle Picture Weekly, to do a strip in the vein of his earlier One-Eyed Jack, a Dirty Harry knockoff for IPC’s by then defunct Valiant. Wagner took the title from the abandoned horror strip, changing the spelling on the suggestion of Kelvin Gosnell, and developed the familiar lawman of Mega-City One. On art duties were Carlos Ezquerra, who modeled Dredd on David Carradine’s character in the trash-cult classic Death Race 2000, and whose decision to move the setting into the far future was crucial in the development of Mega-City One.

In the course of this process Wagner dropped out of the project, and Mills cycled unsatisfyingly through a number of freelancers, resulting in the delay of the strip past the first issue.…

Continue Reading

Eyes Full of History (Book Three, Part 49: Hemingway, Ennis’s Returns to Hellblazer)

, 0

Figure 1554

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Ennis’s Hellblazer concluded as it began: Constantine cornered, desperate, and tricking the Devil himself.

“Here, I’m John Constantine and loving it, bastard terrifying with my eyes full of history and my head full of secret things, here in one of London’s collapsed veins, feeding off it.” – Warren Ellis, Hellblazer

Astra, it turns out, is actually a disguised Ellie. The raid at the beginning of the arc that killed Header was to steal some old pages, which turn out to have contained the lore that Ellie/Astra revealed to the First of the Fallen at the beginning of the outset, prompting him to murder the other two demons to whom Constantine sold his soul and begin his final attack on him. All of this was part of Constantine’s plan, set up to allow Ellie to fashion a weapon that would kill the First of the Fallen and to get into position to do so. And so Constantine tricks the Devil, turns his own scheme back on him, and kills him, a final triumphant escalation of the basic pleasure he’d been offering since his second issue.

This was the heart of what Ennis offered on Hellblazer. And it emphatically served as the definitive take on the character. This was no mean feat given that Constantine was created by Moore, had been written by both Morrison and Gaiman, and had already had an iconic run at the start of his ongoing series. He was not a character who seemed in dire need of a reinvention, nor one who even straightforwardly appeared to have room for one. And yet going forward it was Ennis’s Hellblazer that would be the template. Any other writer working on Constantine would now be reacting to Ennis, whether to follow his lead or rebel against it. This was simply how the character worked now. 

Implicit within that was a larger vision. It has already been discussed how Moore and Morrison found their success by bringing techniques from more literary fiction to the genres associated with pulp fiction. Crucial to this, though by no means the whole of the story, were the techniques that arose out of modernist writing. Ennis’s approach squares the circle to an extent, adopting both a pulp tradition and a modernist technique that were largely neglected by Moore and Morrison. But unusually, in this case the pulp and modernist traditions were never entirely separate in the first place, and their fusion, and the innovation came purely in the form of fully porting this process over to the medium of comics.

At the center of this is Ernest Hemingway. Unequivocally one of the primary figures of literary modernism, Hemingway, like Ennis, sat at a strange aesthetic remove from his contemporaries. Where writers like T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and James Joyce became famous for starkly difficult and complex prose, Hemingway’s prose had the by now familiar halmarks of terse directness. The beginning of his novel A Farewell to Arms is apropos: “In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across  the river and the plain to the mountains.…

Continue Reading

Trenchcoat and Cigarette and Arrogance (Book Three, Part 48: Late Ennis Hellblazer)

, , 0

Figure 1548

Previously in Last War in Albion: Garth Ennis’s take on John Constantine drew heavily on the noir genre for influences, and largely fit into the structures suggested by Raymond Chandler’s classic essay “The Simple Art of Murder.”

“I’m the one who steps from the shadows, all trenchcoat and cigarette and arrogance, ready to deal with the madness.” – Garth Ennis, Hellblazer

Ennis’s approach, it’s clear, is much closer to the one Chandler lays out than is convenient for Ellis’s point, even as his eventual conclusion that Constantine is the enemy of abusive authority in the general case clearly works.

Central to this is the unspoken ethical foundation of Chandler’s manifesto and the fundamental difference between detective fiction and what Ennis is doing in Hellblazer. At the heart of Chandler’s notion of realistic detective fiction is, ultimately, the perspective and worldview of the police. This is in some ways natural; murder is the domain of the police, just as war is the domain of soldiers. One cannot tell a realistic story about something without relying on the worldview of the people who deal with it. But a consequence of this is a worldview that is shaped by the police and their worldview, with all the innate conservatism implicit in that.

The occult, however, is not the domain of any real-world job, and so Ennis was left with considerably more freedom in how to tell his story. But Ennis’s clear focus on making sure the magical solutions within his stories made sense and were adequately set up is a clear embrace of Chandler’s ethics of realism, and a clear rejection of the sort of thing Chandler criticized British mysteries for,. On a larger scale, meanwhile, Ennis put much effort into grounding Constantine in his own experience of the real world. As he explained, Constantine “was a bloke who lived in contemporary London and did contemporary London things.” And with this wide mandate to shape his hero and his moral worldview, Ennis substituted the realism of cops with the realism of a man who grew up in Thatcher’s Britain amidst the Troubles, who drank a lot with his mates. And so his Constantine took the basic framework of the noir protagonist and shaped it into something more anarchic and engaged. This was a savvy understanding of Constantine—an unearthing of threads that were implicit in the character since his creation that wove them into a form that was well-suited to the landscape of the early 1990s.

Constantine’s post-breakup collapse marked the beginning of Ennis’s endgame, although he had more than a year left to run on the title. First came a phase featuring an unshaven, drunk, and homeless Constantine. This only featured three actual issues—a two-parter that resolved the lingering King of the Vampires plot from Hellblazer #50 and a one-shot in which Constantine is spooked by the ghost of a crashed World War II pilot that inspires him to get back to his life. This marked the first instance of Ennis directly engaging with the war comics that he grew up reading, But this issue, with its mawkish and Churchill-quoting title “Finest Hour” and its moral lesson about how the dead pilot “never gave up” and “clawed and fought to the last drop of blood for life” that leads Constantine to decide he owes it to him to try to live, is far from the best instance of it, landing closer to the jingoistic pap published in Commando and War Picture Library than to the stuff like Charley’s War that Ennis was clearly trying to approach.…

Continue Reading

‹1234›»