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beccaelizabethI stopped reading for the day because I reached the Sandman issue and went blergh in my head at the author, then realised it was past 11pm.
... I have been reading horror comics all evening. I am sure this was an excellent idea that shall have no adverse consequences whatsoever...
I read Newcastle, the original telling of the whole Incident.
In a Mature Readers horror comic it goes darker and more explicit than in any other medium I've seen, including the 18 rated one. Nothing is left to implication, and the worst bits aren't done by or because of demons, they're just people doing evil. And John's mistake is, in this telling, pretty explicitly because he tangles up sex and magic and Wants magic, which is held up in comparison to other people in this story. He used his friends, set them up, didn't look after them. And also stepped into Hell to try to help Astra, it just... went about as wrong as it could have.
It's interesting the way this failed ritual with carefully prepared instruments done according to ancient books is compared and contrasted with the times magic actually works for him. Tradition he can read about is basically a trap and thinking the tools matter or that it's about the recipe is walking yourself into the trap. So we see a sort of origin story to the John of earlier issues winging it and making it work, as ten years later he's sure which bits are for the... kind of people he used to be, tricked too easily.
I think the other tellings make it seem like Astra is innocent in the sense she didn't do anything, rather than just being a little girl who wanted something to protect her. This one had her summon the Thing as the worst thing she could imagine, and then it keeps assaulting people after the protecting her part. Darkest, but also a window on who ends up desperate for magic, for power. Illuminates other characters, from certain angles.
The people these stories aren't sympathetic to are the ones in systems of power like government or big business or police. The looming threats that people can't do anything about. The sort of thing that comes up in headlines and nightmares in the back of other bits of story.
And then it has people say, what can we even do about that?
Magic.
... and then it is a horror story so guess how well that goes?
But there are occasional wins.
So there was an issue of Newcastle.
Then tbe big confrontation with the demon.
Fun how part of getting John desperate and backed into a corner is messing with his looks.
The story is frequently clear about his tool kit very much including how people react to him.
So the demon makes him ill and lumpy and difficult to be charming.
Several characters would not consider that a depowering arc but with John it kind of is.
Mostly isolating him from his friends leaves him very few options.
But then he got a surprise friend from earlier. Dead and still not pleased with him.
... these stories are not really about people getting what they deserve. They get what they get, and sometimes that is manipulated into getting dragged to Hell after John gets free and clear, and that is a bit much. Even if his friends do try and get power and then get consequences, still too much.
Messy.
Using the computer world as New to Hell and showing it connecting people to Heaven is... a set of imagery that is a tough sell now. It connects people to *everything*. Visualising it as maths and lines just doesn't cover it. It isn't a strange new space any more, it's just what people use to be people. One suspects demons have become very familiar.
I can see how the story pulls together what it has used so far to create an answer, but that answer seemed a bit abrupt. Like the pacing in the omni is weird because of how much time it spent in Swamp Thing anyway, but, it started a bunch of big things and then tidied them all up and then spent an issue doing a dream sequence, and it felt a bit odd.
But now Fear Machine is rebuilding momentum and has a lot of horrible gruesome terrors in, and the fear thing links it back to Newcastle as does the magic little girl, so it is drawing me on to the next issue handily.
Hellblazer stays very specific and political. Not just the demons on election night, but the things that keep the problems from any conventional means of solution. There have been incidents not reported to police either because the ones that beat them up *were* police or because the thing happened to a community that needed discretion ie gay men. John went on the run and moved in with some Travellers because the tabloids declared him a murderer, then discovered the police didn't believe it anyway, just wanted the papers to go away. It's a lot of layers of reasons these people could end up looking for last resorts, even Constantine.
The story is also a lot more queer even than I remembered. The assertions around the 2014 series that John being queer is a new and minor part of his story are simply not plausible, these are his communities, the people he feels comfortable with, and the story shows over and over that it isn't a safe place to be, but it is still where he goes for safety. We might be short of an on page declaration yet, but it isn't an aspect of the story you can take out and still have it make sense.
His pop culture references also went from Newcastle punk to the Shamen in a few pages, which was weirdly... like the temporal equivalent of when the camera does the zoom and pull thing. A lot of time happens on these pages and I'm too used to comics letting it slide, so having it be relevant actually feels weird.
I keep comparing the temporal specificity here to the sort in Legends of Tomorrow. It's a time travel show so it is all about the specifics of how then isn't now. But it uses it for a compare contrast on how things are better, often. And they can travel out as easily as they got in. Sometimes to the point that the plot calling them trapped plain doesn't make sense. It keeps reminding me of Pulp's Common People, you know? Any given time is optional and they can party in the past and create a new future and it's very freeing.
Hellblazer is not doing that. It is taking the hard road through the late 20th century.
And this story arc takes John from someone who keeps popping over to the USA to keep up with the plot or nipping down to Africa for a magic lesson, to being someone getting anywhere at all by walking or running for a while, and that takes him througb thorns and into ditches. It stays with him through the travel time in a way that makes him seem trapped in wide open countryside. Bad trips surrounded by green grass and standing stones and no more chances to call Swamp Thing about it. Makes England seem bigger and more claustrophobic at once.
I think the craft of this storytelling is going to be well worth a slower closer look.
Also the splash pages and complex layouts in this one seem far more aware of staples and the difficulty of seeing the middle details. Also that we're probably not reading with a magnifying glass.
The art seems more intelligible to me than some of my recent reading.
Also while JLDark will put big glowy symbols all over the place so we see magic users doing impressive glowy things, that isn't the style here. Hell does gross shapeshifting and Heaven is glowy to burning and Swamp is all kinds of trippy, but if people are seeing glowing things it is usually because of some degree of chemical alteration, or because of an out of body thing. I'd have to double check to be sure of any sweeping statements, but my feeling is it changes the status of magic. Glowy tells us the magic user is Doing Something Powerful. No glowy and all they're doing is giving orders to a universe that may or may not care.
... glowy also got easier with more computers involved in the art, but, different impacts ensue.
I am enjoying this omnibus and kind of relieved I find it Quality reading after all these years.
The character on the TV is related to this guy but... whenever the story gets revisited it gets tidied up for a wider audience, and I'm glad the original is going to be around in high quality.
... I have been reading horror comics all evening. I am sure this was an excellent idea that shall have no adverse consequences whatsoever...
I read Newcastle, the original telling of the whole Incident.
In a Mature Readers horror comic it goes darker and more explicit than in any other medium I've seen, including the 18 rated one. Nothing is left to implication, and the worst bits aren't done by or because of demons, they're just people doing evil. And John's mistake is, in this telling, pretty explicitly because he tangles up sex and magic and Wants magic, which is held up in comparison to other people in this story. He used his friends, set them up, didn't look after them. And also stepped into Hell to try to help Astra, it just... went about as wrong as it could have.
It's interesting the way this failed ritual with carefully prepared instruments done according to ancient books is compared and contrasted with the times magic actually works for him. Tradition he can read about is basically a trap and thinking the tools matter or that it's about the recipe is walking yourself into the trap. So we see a sort of origin story to the John of earlier issues winging it and making it work, as ten years later he's sure which bits are for the... kind of people he used to be, tricked too easily.
I think the other tellings make it seem like Astra is innocent in the sense she didn't do anything, rather than just being a little girl who wanted something to protect her. This one had her summon the Thing as the worst thing she could imagine, and then it keeps assaulting people after the protecting her part. Darkest, but also a window on who ends up desperate for magic, for power. Illuminates other characters, from certain angles.
The people these stories aren't sympathetic to are the ones in systems of power like government or big business or police. The looming threats that people can't do anything about. The sort of thing that comes up in headlines and nightmares in the back of other bits of story.
And then it has people say, what can we even do about that?
Magic.
... and then it is a horror story so guess how well that goes?
But there are occasional wins.
So there was an issue of Newcastle.
Then tbe big confrontation with the demon.
Fun how part of getting John desperate and backed into a corner is messing with his looks.
The story is frequently clear about his tool kit very much including how people react to him.
So the demon makes him ill and lumpy and difficult to be charming.
Several characters would not consider that a depowering arc but with John it kind of is.
Mostly isolating him from his friends leaves him very few options.
But then he got a surprise friend from earlier. Dead and still not pleased with him.
... these stories are not really about people getting what they deserve. They get what they get, and sometimes that is manipulated into getting dragged to Hell after John gets free and clear, and that is a bit much. Even if his friends do try and get power and then get consequences, still too much.
Messy.
Using the computer world as New to Hell and showing it connecting people to Heaven is... a set of imagery that is a tough sell now. It connects people to *everything*. Visualising it as maths and lines just doesn't cover it. It isn't a strange new space any more, it's just what people use to be people. One suspects demons have become very familiar.
I can see how the story pulls together what it has used so far to create an answer, but that answer seemed a bit abrupt. Like the pacing in the omni is weird because of how much time it spent in Swamp Thing anyway, but, it started a bunch of big things and then tidied them all up and then spent an issue doing a dream sequence, and it felt a bit odd.
But now Fear Machine is rebuilding momentum and has a lot of horrible gruesome terrors in, and the fear thing links it back to Newcastle as does the magic little girl, so it is drawing me on to the next issue handily.
Hellblazer stays very specific and political. Not just the demons on election night, but the things that keep the problems from any conventional means of solution. There have been incidents not reported to police either because the ones that beat them up *were* police or because the thing happened to a community that needed discretion ie gay men. John went on the run and moved in with some Travellers because the tabloids declared him a murderer, then discovered the police didn't believe it anyway, just wanted the papers to go away. It's a lot of layers of reasons these people could end up looking for last resorts, even Constantine.
The story is also a lot more queer even than I remembered. The assertions around the 2014 series that John being queer is a new and minor part of his story are simply not plausible, these are his communities, the people he feels comfortable with, and the story shows over and over that it isn't a safe place to be, but it is still where he goes for safety. We might be short of an on page declaration yet, but it isn't an aspect of the story you can take out and still have it make sense.
His pop culture references also went from Newcastle punk to the Shamen in a few pages, which was weirdly... like the temporal equivalent of when the camera does the zoom and pull thing. A lot of time happens on these pages and I'm too used to comics letting it slide, so having it be relevant actually feels weird.
I keep comparing the temporal specificity here to the sort in Legends of Tomorrow. It's a time travel show so it is all about the specifics of how then isn't now. But it uses it for a compare contrast on how things are better, often. And they can travel out as easily as they got in. Sometimes to the point that the plot calling them trapped plain doesn't make sense. It keeps reminding me of Pulp's Common People, you know? Any given time is optional and they can party in the past and create a new future and it's very freeing.
Hellblazer is not doing that. It is taking the hard road through the late 20th century.
And this story arc takes John from someone who keeps popping over to the USA to keep up with the plot or nipping down to Africa for a magic lesson, to being someone getting anywhere at all by walking or running for a while, and that takes him througb thorns and into ditches. It stays with him through the travel time in a way that makes him seem trapped in wide open countryside. Bad trips surrounded by green grass and standing stones and no more chances to call Swamp Thing about it. Makes England seem bigger and more claustrophobic at once.
I think the craft of this storytelling is going to be well worth a slower closer look.
Also the splash pages and complex layouts in this one seem far more aware of staples and the difficulty of seeing the middle details. Also that we're probably not reading with a magnifying glass.
The art seems more intelligible to me than some of my recent reading.
Also while JLDark will put big glowy symbols all over the place so we see magic users doing impressive glowy things, that isn't the style here. Hell does gross shapeshifting and Heaven is glowy to burning and Swamp is all kinds of trippy, but if people are seeing glowing things it is usually because of some degree of chemical alteration, or because of an out of body thing. I'd have to double check to be sure of any sweeping statements, but my feeling is it changes the status of magic. Glowy tells us the magic user is Doing Something Powerful. No glowy and all they're doing is giving orders to a universe that may or may not care.
... glowy also got easier with more computers involved in the art, but, different impacts ensue.
I am enjoying this omnibus and kind of relieved I find it Quality reading after all these years.
The character on the TV is related to this guy but... whenever the story gets revisited it gets tidied up for a wider audience, and I'm glad the original is going to be around in high quality.