Hellblazer except it's mostly Swamp Thing
Apr. 30th, 2026 06:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI have been reading horror comics all day. I need to remember to stop and do something else more often or it all just gets grimy to think on. Very strong stuff in these stories, skillfully done.
A lot of this first omnibus is Swamp Thing, covering stories I'd seen summarised elsewhere, and now I have read it, it is all so much darker and nastier than the summaries had conveyed to me. John risked a lot but it all went manky, Swamp Thing treated him very poorly, and somehow everyone ends up angry at John about it. The comic even knows what it did to him, with that art. Dark and nasty.
Also I read the bit with the demon blood donation. I didn't know it was on page explicitly compared to AIDS. Or how close John got after that to just sitting still and letting himself be killed.
What happened with Zed was not ideal. John being clever and Consequences happening. I do not know where the TV series was going to go but one can hope it wouldn't be quite like that.
There keep being references to even earlier stories including keywords from the 2014 series, so now I kind of want to go look for those.
Except Hellblazer and Swamp Thing are different enough they're borderline different genres. I can see they've got stuff in common with the weird cosmic stuff running right into horrible ways for horrible people to die, and how things can be about domestic violence and car accidents and also the fate of the planet in a cosmic battle between good and evil, primal forces and the human race, but... I think whenever Swamp Thing goes all trippy I get a bit bored. And it is mostly all trippy.
Constantine wandering into the story, pulling together weird news from a half dozen contacts who need a half dozen ways of being handled, getting them what they need, ish, as swaps for what he needs... interesting stuff, interesting guy. He doesn't just have all thqt knowledge in his head because he's all about the who you know.
I liked him hanging around to play superheroes with his youngest contact, but it's also meant to be creepy that he's talking the kid into doing divination his mum told him not to do.
And so many times he goes back to people for more help just walking them out of what they actually wanted or were willing to do, until they can't be having with him any more.
The whole bit with Ritchie and the computer world was interesting partly because of the temporal specificity and how it contrasts with the TV show. Ten years working in a factory to use their 1988 era computers, which we probably carry in our pocket right now and use to make phone calls, vs being a university professor? Same computer guy contact but the whole class background changes.
On TV he survives though. Very different story, but he was still living it as per the last episode.
John's ghosts chasing him until he jumps right out of the train is another way the comics go darker than subsequent tellings. Like, we've got no reason not to believe they're as real as the rest of these horror comics, but we don't really know either, and the story keeps walking John into asylums and putting him at odds with that psychiatrist. The new and unfolding story of Constantine is making it apparent he has Problems. And it keeps name checking Newcastle, counting down all the people that were involved in it as they joing the ghosts, but the readers don't yet have that story.
When I got to the issue with that story I decided I can take a break for the day.
DC comics theology is as ever deeply weird. It has to make room for so many things. Like there's definitely greek gods and also Heaven and Hell and maybe humans made them all up but importantly they're still the kind of real you can't make go away. Also there's the Green and the Red and the Grey. And Swamp Thing travelled to other planets. And someone mentioned Darkseid.
Basically it's a teensy bit difficult to make a coherent theology of the DCU, even for long enough to make two seperate but overlapping horror stories out of it.
Splitting it out into Vertigo is potentially so much simpler.
And I prefer the Hellblazer stuff so far. Simple, direct, really horrific.
Most memorable image of the book so far is not anything from Swamp Thing.
It might be the thing the demon made out of four football hooligans, that John talked into beating itself to death.
Ingredients you can sum up in a line instead of a paragraph, and a really nasty result.
Proper.
As far as I can tell from skimming the contents page the Swamp Thing stuff is over now, so, onwards to Hellblazer, and Newcastle.
A lot of this first omnibus is Swamp Thing, covering stories I'd seen summarised elsewhere, and now I have read it, it is all so much darker and nastier than the summaries had conveyed to me. John risked a lot but it all went manky, Swamp Thing treated him very poorly, and somehow everyone ends up angry at John about it. The comic even knows what it did to him, with that art. Dark and nasty.
Also I read the bit with the demon blood donation. I didn't know it was on page explicitly compared to AIDS. Or how close John got after that to just sitting still and letting himself be killed.
What happened with Zed was not ideal. John being clever and Consequences happening. I do not know where the TV series was going to go but one can hope it wouldn't be quite like that.
There keep being references to even earlier stories including keywords from the 2014 series, so now I kind of want to go look for those.
Except Hellblazer and Swamp Thing are different enough they're borderline different genres. I can see they've got stuff in common with the weird cosmic stuff running right into horrible ways for horrible people to die, and how things can be about domestic violence and car accidents and also the fate of the planet in a cosmic battle between good and evil, primal forces and the human race, but... I think whenever Swamp Thing goes all trippy I get a bit bored. And it is mostly all trippy.
Constantine wandering into the story, pulling together weird news from a half dozen contacts who need a half dozen ways of being handled, getting them what they need, ish, as swaps for what he needs... interesting stuff, interesting guy. He doesn't just have all thqt knowledge in his head because he's all about the who you know.
I liked him hanging around to play superheroes with his youngest contact, but it's also meant to be creepy that he's talking the kid into doing divination his mum told him not to do.
And so many times he goes back to people for more help just walking them out of what they actually wanted or were willing to do, until they can't be having with him any more.
The whole bit with Ritchie and the computer world was interesting partly because of the temporal specificity and how it contrasts with the TV show. Ten years working in a factory to use their 1988 era computers, which we probably carry in our pocket right now and use to make phone calls, vs being a university professor? Same computer guy contact but the whole class background changes.
On TV he survives though. Very different story, but he was still living it as per the last episode.
John's ghosts chasing him until he jumps right out of the train is another way the comics go darker than subsequent tellings. Like, we've got no reason not to believe they're as real as the rest of these horror comics, but we don't really know either, and the story keeps walking John into asylums and putting him at odds with that psychiatrist. The new and unfolding story of Constantine is making it apparent he has Problems. And it keeps name checking Newcastle, counting down all the people that were involved in it as they joing the ghosts, but the readers don't yet have that story.
When I got to the issue with that story I decided I can take a break for the day.
DC comics theology is as ever deeply weird. It has to make room for so many things. Like there's definitely greek gods and also Heaven and Hell and maybe humans made them all up but importantly they're still the kind of real you can't make go away. Also there's the Green and the Red and the Grey. And Swamp Thing travelled to other planets. And someone mentioned Darkseid.
Basically it's a teensy bit difficult to make a coherent theology of the DCU, even for long enough to make two seperate but overlapping horror stories out of it.
Splitting it out into Vertigo is potentially so much simpler.
And I prefer the Hellblazer stuff so far. Simple, direct, really horrific.
Most memorable image of the book so far is not anything from Swamp Thing.
It might be the thing the demon made out of four football hooligans, that John talked into beating itself to death.
Ingredients you can sum up in a line instead of a paragraph, and a really nasty result.
Proper.
As far as I can tell from skimming the contents page the Swamp Thing stuff is over now, so, onwards to Hellblazer, and Newcastle.