I don't object to its cancellation in itself, even if it is weird to mark the Vertigo imprint's 20th anniversary by cancelling its flagship title. 300 issues is a lot, most of them were good to great, and it was definitely better to end on a high rather than drag it out and potentially squander what had been good about it. Plus, given that John Constantine ages in real-time, even if his ageing is slowed down somewhat by his demon blood, he was still 60 years old when Hellblazer ended, and it was probably time to hang up the trenchcoat. Death and Cigarettes, the final story, may not have been one of the all-time classics, but it was still a great one and a very fitting end to the series.
I do object, however, to the fact that Hellblazer, one of the most important comic books in recent memory and Vertigo's longest running book, was cancelled so that John could be rebooted and brought into the DC Universe – especially since the New 52 is, by and large, awful. Yes, he originated in the DCU in the pages of Swamp Thing, but even back then those characters were more or less cordoned off from the wider universe. Hell, John considered the Crisis on Infinite Earth to be basically a sideshow to the return of the Original Darkness, the great threat that he and the Swamp Thing faced together.
Even if we leave aside the problematic, One More Day-esque erasure of 25 years of character development, it doesn't make sense from a business perspective or from a creative one: cancelling a big-selling horror comic in order to put John in what basically amounts to yet another superhero comic. They risk losing the dedicated Vertigo readers who might not be interested in superheroes, as well as losing all the actually mature (as opposed to the New 52's superficially mature) content, urban fantasy and social commentary that made Hellblazer so special. I'm told the current Constantine title isn't all that bad, but I'm of the opinion that John simply doesn't belong in a superhero universe. There was an issue of his current title when he had a run-in with Captain Marvel (I refuse to call him Shazam) and ended up stealing his powers, which pretty much sums up my problem with that comic.
Hellblazer's colours were revealed as early as its third issue, a bitter satire of stockbrokers and yuppies in the Margaret Thatcher era. And there's the rub: what made this comic so interesting and unique was that, even with the presence of magic, zombies and demons, it was clearly taking place in our world, and the themes and subject matter reflected this. John was a magician, but he was still just an ordinary working-class man from Liverpool, and tended to use wits to con his enemies far more than he actually used magic against them. The story Pandemonium, written to commemorate the 25th anniversary of John's first appearance in the pages of Swamp Thing, epitomises this: it's a brilliant, savagely angry condemnation of the Iraq War in which John thwarts the demon Nergal's plans by winning a game of poker. It encapsulates everything important about Hellblazer, and it's one of my favourite Constantine stories.
The current situation is kind of ironic in a slightly depressing way. DC has basically returned its superhero comics to the mindset of the '90s, and dragged John down into it as well, whereas the actual '90s, when superhero comics were in the toilet, was Hellblazer's heyday. That was Vertigo's golden age, Hellblazer was the flagship, and it remained the flagship for the next 20 years. It just depresses me that such a great, important comic book has been replaced by another disposable superhero title.
I guess we just have to hope that the TV series will do the character justice. And if nothing else, they've nailed John's look perfectly: I'm pretty sure the only way to get someone who looks more like him would've been to go back in time to 1988 and actually cast Sting.
Seriously, credit where it's due: this guy is John Constantine. Well done, NBC. There's talk of him not being allowed to smoke in the show, which would be irritating. Apart from the cigarettes being as indelible a visual aspect of the character as Superman's cape, they're a constant reminder of John's addictive, self-destructive personality, and one of the classic stories, Dangerous Habits, couldn't exist without his smoking addiction. Still, I'm allowing myself to be cautiously optimistic about this TV show. It can hardly be worse than the Keanu Reeves movie, at any rate.
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