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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