chapter six

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.…

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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.…

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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.…

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Garth Ennis was eventually joined on Hellblazer by Steve Dillon, whose simple expressiveness was a perfect fit for Ennis’s style, and who would go on to be the most significant collaborator of Ennis’s career.

“Yeah, well, that’s me, ennit? Enigmatic.” – Grant Morrison, Hellblazer

This arc wrapped in November of 1992, and with the arrival of Vertigo on the horizon Ennis wisely decided to do a pair of one-offs. The first of these saw him return to Constantine’s family with a story about his niece Gemma unwisely deciding to begin playing with the occult. This mostly served as a small showcase for Kit, who gets a four page scene in which she tries to talk Gemma out of continuing with the occult, noting her firm rule that Constantine keep his occult life away from hers, pointing out how “he’s been all over the world, he’s seen incredible stuff, he’s had the time of his life, and he’s cause a terrible, terrible lot of pain while he’s been at it,” and finally suggesting that the next time someone messes with Gemma she should just “chin the wee bitch,” It’s a succinct demonstration of the character, perfectly capturing why she’s an interesting counterpart to Constantine.

For his first Vertigo issue, meanwhile, Ennis penned a comedy issue about John Constantine’s surprise fortieth birthday party, thrown for him by the Lord of the Dance with a cross-section of Constantine’s supporting cast attending. This allows Ennis a change of gears, demonstrating the basic fact that he can do comedy. And indeed, the issue is tremendously funny, taking advantage of the oddity of the transition to use the permissiveness of Vertigo, which would soon become a siloed entity, to comment on the DC Universe it was in the midst of parting from. And so Ennis pulls gags like having the Phantom Stranger visit Constantine while he’s outside taking a piss, causing Constantine to surprisedly turn and pee on the Stranger’s shoes. “I had hoped we could ignore the cold facade that our kind deems so necessary, if only at this time of celebration. But I see there will be no hands clasped against the dark this night. I see I must remain a stranger,” he intones with sublime pretension before vanishing into the night. The issue is a charming bit of irreverence, if a stange sales pitch for Ennis’s run. Nevertheless, it worked; as Ennis describes it, the Vertigo launch meant that “The sales tripled… Just for one issue because there was a massive publicity push, which died away instantly the next issue, but it did us a lot of good. Even when the sales died down again they were still not quite double what they had been, so that was pretty good. A bigger audience got into Vertigo, and into that kind of comic.”

The first proper arc to take advantage of the book’s newfound readership was Fear and Loathing, which saw Ennis return to one of Jamie Delano’s best tricks, albeit with his own distinct spin on it.…

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Previously in Last War in Albion: Ennis wrote a blistering satire of the Royal Family featuring Prince Charles being possessed by Jack the Ripper.

“There was a smell of magic somewhere, like the blue sparks smell of ozone at a funfair.”  – Neil Gaiman, Sandman

The climactic realization—that the guy who asked for Constantine’s help had in fact summoned the demon into Prince Charles—is framed in blunt and power-mad terms. “I wanted to restore the monarchy of this country to its rightful power. I wanted a king who would have the iron will to rule absolutely. And believe me, he was willing. He would be backed by the military and advised by me. There would be no parliament. No opposition. Nor radicals. No liberals. No thinkers. No immigrants. There would simply be the rulers and the ruled.” When Constantine raises the obvious objection to putting Jack the Ripper on the throne as absolute monarch, namely that “the bastard eats people, you headcase,” the reply is blunt and incisive: “What has our royal family ever done except feed on the blood of the people?” It’s brilliantly incendiary stuff, aggressive and angry and to the point—the political fury of the Delano era crystalized into brutal and clarifying effectiveness.

Perhaps the most crucial thing to understand about Ennis is the way in which he both clearly fits into the larger British Invasion scene and feels fundamentally different from all of his peers. Were one to create an aesthetic geneology the bulk of the British Invasion scene would branch off from Alan Moore. Some of these branches imitated and built on Moore—most obviously Neil Gaiman, of the early crowd—while others like Morrison and Milligan had more complex and contested relationships. Nevertheless, all of them arrived in the US market ready-made to be compared to Moore. Ennis did not. Instead, Ennis was a parallel branch from the generation before Moore, branching off from a common influence in a direction as distinct from Moore as Gaiman and Morrison were from each other. This common parent was Pat Mills, and nowhere is that influence clearer than in Royal Blood.

Mills has come up several times already. This is inevitable—he was, after all, the star of the British comics scene prior to the great Moore-led explosion. And he was a star with a long-lived career, producing major works in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. These later works such as Marshal Law and World War III, written after Moore had revolutionized the industry, revealed a writer wholly capable of thriving in the auteur-driven world of post-Moore comics. His best attributes in that period were a sense of utterly uncompromising political ferocity—a willingness to just go for it that led to comics with a sense of purity of vision entirely unmatched by his peers. But the bulk of his career had existed in a world where British comics were aggressively low-rent and grubby things.

Even in this period, however, Mills stood out. He was at the forefront of three separate magazines that could fairly be described as transforming the landscape of British comics, beginning with Battle Picture Weekly in 1975 and continuing with Action and 2000 AD, where he co-created the flagship Judge Dredd.…

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Previously in Last War in Albion: Garth Ennis tore onto the American comics scene with an arc in which John Constantine gets lung cancer and pisses off the Devil.

“Day after fugitive day; footstep after shuffling footstep; heartbeat after anxious heartbeat, my enemies hunt me down. Down to the rocky bottom of this sunken city’s ruined heart. I am an underwater man.” – Jamie Delano, Hellblazer

This provides the cliffhanger into the final part of Dangerous Habits proper, in which Constantine’s scheme is revealed: he’s sold his soul to two other demons with whom the Devil (now named as “First of the Three,” eventually to simply become First of the Fallen in an effort to reconcile Ennis’s take on hell with what Gaiman had been doing in Sandman) is endlessly feuding, kept from open warfare by an extremely tenuous alliance, meaning that for anyone to claim it would start a war that would destabilize hell completely. And so the demons are left with no choice other than to keep him from dying. The issue ends with a splash page of Constantine gleefully showing all three of them the middle finger, wholly cured of cancer at their expense.

It is difficult to seriously contest the claim that this is the single most definitive moment for John Constantine as a character. It takes the core pleasure of the character—that he’s a cunning bastard one step ahead of everybody else—and puts it in a context that’s at once audacious and simple. “Selling your soul three times so the demons fight over it” is an eminently straightforward concept that explains itself, but cheating the Devil to cure your cancer is staggeringly gutsy. To pull off both at once while he flicks the demons off and says “up yours” is utterly perfect—a plot beat that literally anybody who is inclined to like John Constantine will enjoy.

Ennis followed the conclusion of Dangerous Habits with an epilogue issue in which Constantine runs into Kit, Brendan’s ex-girlfriend who he’d spent time setting up a few issues before. The effect of this is to set up a new and unusual status quo for Constantine, in which his life both has a bigger source of instability (in that he’s made a mortal enemy of the Devil) and a newfound anchor that made that instability more of a threat. Perhaps more to the point, however, it established a fundamentally delightful character; Kit was a no nonsense character who was at once unimpressed by Constantine and sympathetic to him. (As she explains over coffee following their reunion, “I used to watch you bullshitting loads of people and I had to admit, you were bloody good. I think you could have foxed me completely if you wanted to, but you didn’t. You always came to us because you wanted a break from all that, didn’t you?”)

It is clear, looking at Dangerous Habits, that Ennis was not merely a singular talent within the British Invasion but that he was operating from a fundamentally different set of influences than those more directly caught in the escalating Moore/Morrison dichotomy.…

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol concluded at the end of 1992, and was followed by a run by Rachel Pollack published under the new Vertigo imprint.

“I’m a nasty piece of work, chief. Ask anybody.”-Alan Moore, Swamp Thing

The conclusion of Morrison’s Doom Patrol run and the concurrent creation of the Vertigo line marks a clear transition point in the War—an endpoint to the initial wave of British comics writers making their name in the American market, and the de facto establishment of a core of books that make up that wave’s canon. Among those books, of course, was Hellblazer, the spin-off of Moore’s Swamp Thing run. Like Swamp Thing, the book spent an initial period after the job of being Alan Moore freed up in a nebulous transition towards the British Invasion, written by Moore’s friend Jamie Delano in a run that is iconic but deeply uneven. By the time of the transition to Vertigo, however, the book was in the hands of the person who was effectively the final person to get in as part of that initial wave, Garth Ennis. Ennis serves in many ways as the transitional figure between the wave that Morrison inaugurated and what came after. He is notable as the only figure whose American debut wasn’t edited by Karen Berger, although she was involved in his hiring to replace Jamie Delano on Hellblazer. He’s also notable as the only one whose professional debut came after the British Invasion had started; Crisis #15, which featured the first installment of Troubled Souls, came out in April 1989, more than a year after Morrison had made their debut in the American market.

That Ennis should be a liminal figure within the chronology is fitting, however, as he is also a liminal figure in terms of the larger aesthetic of the British Invasion writers. For one, as mentioned, he is not actually from Britain, but rather from Northern Ireland. More to the point, however, the sorts of comics he writes were vividly unlike those being written by Morrison, Gaiman, or Milligan at the same time. The differences were not so stark as to render classification within the tradition impossible, but they always made Ennis be an odd man out—a frequent exception to any generalizations one might draw. 

Another way of putting this is that Ennis stood out as having a clear style that was distinct from writers who more straightforwardly followed in the Moore tradition. This was clear from his first issue, Hellblazer #41, which began the six-part Dangerous Habits arc. In an era of comics where the shockingly bold reinvention of titles was the coin of the realm, Dangerous Habits stood out. For one thing, this was not a reinvention of some crusty old relic of a concept, nor of a derelict title on the brink of cancellation. John Constantine had only debuted six years earlier, and while Delano as a writer could be obscurantist and undisciplined his Hellblazer run was a beloved classic in its own right.…

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