Something Spooky — ‘Hellblazer’ #50 : Remarkable Lives

Welcome to the table,

I discovered Hellblazer in the longboxes of my favorite comic shop over 30 years ago. While Battlechasers and Crimson from the Cliffhanger imprint delighted me, and Ghost Rider and Elseworlds were standards in the rotation, Hellblazer became a fixed point for me as it was a seedy, dark yet powerfully human story about a person who was, for lack of a better term, an absolute bastard.

When I use that turn of phrase, I mean it in a derogatory way. A strange thing to say about someone whose comic series I painstakingly collected and have a full run in both single issues and in the trade paperbacks … at least until the original 300 issue run came to a conclusion. We could be here all day talking about Hellblazer if I had my way, but right now I am here to meet a challenge put up by our man Tony. For Comicon.com’s Something Spooky this year, he asked me to do a “spooky story” that was contained in a single issue, and my mind, after weeks of deliberation, landed on Hellblazer #50.

Let’s get into it…

The first fifty issues of Hellblazer, are a moody occult story where very little traditional (at least for the time) comic book things happened between the pages. Hellblazer had, and continued to be, for at least this original run, a story about stories, a story about the power of words and being sly and cunning in a way that matched the impact of a Kryptonian’s punch or the “World’s Greatest Detectives'” gadgets. John Constantine, rhymes with wine, not green, is a magus who wanders from moment to moment, finding himself in strange situations that he typically has to get himself out of, often at the cost of others’ sanity, safety, or souls.

Issue fifty, written by Garth Ennis with art by William Simpson and published in 1992, sees John waking up in the early evening next to his girlfriend at the time, Kit. He gets out of bed to use the bathroom and finds flesh and blood in his bathroom sink, inviting him to Hampstead Heath. For those not familiar with London, it’s a large public park and woodland area located in Northern London.

John, not wanting to alarm Kit, tells her he is stepping out for a bit and dons his iconic trench coat before lighting a cigarette and walking boldly into the night.

John keeps his normal tone of irritation at supernatural happenings as he wanders through the dark woods on paved paths, though specters, strange creatures, and wolves with human eyes begin to appear at the treeline in numbers great enough that they give the magician pause and begin to make him worry about what exactly he has charged into.

A strange entity beckons John to follow it off the paved path, and John, through curiosity and his sense of twisted self-importance, follows the thing into the dark woods only to meet the King of Vampires himself.

In this particular version of the DC Universe, the origins of the King of the Vampires have never been explained, although in this issue of Hellblazer he tells John he has lived on other worlds before he arrived on Earth and fed on the first human somewhere in ancient Africa.

 This issue becomes a horror story, both in the immediate threat to John as a vampire, much less the King of Vampires, is an understood threat to any mortal, what with their thirst for blood and supernatural abilities, but it also drops threads of a larger, even more existential dread that looms behind the scenes. A vampire is already something to worry about, but a space-faring species of blood-drinking entities that can withstand entrance and exit from an atmosphere, survive the harsh conditions of the void, and live for countless aeons takes the typical vampire mythos we know from folklore and modern media to something far more unsettling.

Where did it come from? Are there more? Are they also coming to Earth? Are they already here? The questions my very young mind wrestled with while reading these pages were vast, and the answers, much like the ancient histories of Howard or the cosmic dread of Lovecraft, came with few answers and multitudes of questions.

The King of Vampires revealed he had summoned John because he was collecting all the “outcasts” and horrors from society to make an army to serve him, and he wanted John to join him. He offered him a seat in his court of monsters, murderers, and madmen, and John, being John, turned him down.

 This, of course, happens after the King of Vampires catches an unlucky human who happened upon his meeting with John (this is a public space after all) and rips the human’s head open, feeding on his brain and blood as a display of power and fury to seemingly unnerve John.

John, however, has left a sea of bodies in his wake. Friends and enemies, lovers and family members, the innocent and the damaned have stacked up in his wake, so a display of death and destruction does very little to unnerve him. John is a broken, yet functioning, man with a throughline of raw nihilism that is frankly worrying in its own right.

The King of Vampires tells John he can offer him eternity, and if John does not take it, he will, of course, kill him, unless John can give him a reason that his life as a mortal is better than a life as a vampire in the service of the King of Vampires.

John calmly, and with a titanic level of charm and bitchy-guile, fires back at the King of Vampires, reminding him of the things he can’t have, the things a life bound by immortal rules, endless hunger, and the fear of the sun can’t offer.

It’s what John does. He uses his words, telling his stories, untwisting knots and plots and threads of thought in ways that infuriate the powerful and elevate the disregarded. John is not a hero. I’m not sure in the 300 issues of Hellblazer, that there is a point he is not actually self-serving. He does things that benefit others, he does wonders to be sure, but he also leaves the world a worse place than he found it most of the time, and he does it with very little flash or flair. There are moments where he does something that would stand out as “superhero-like” or “comic book-like,” but for the most part, Hellblazer is a story about stories and John, the center of the corrupt and melancholy web of occult happenings, demons, monsters, and mortals, sits like a fat spider at the center of the web sucking up all the air in the room and feeding on the choice bits while the bones and broken dreams of others fall around him.

 I love a story about monsters, I love a world hidden in the shadows of our own, the mood and melancholy of Hellblazer fuels me, or at least did when I was a younger, more melancholy man. The dread of entropy and the looming darkness beyond mortal understanding that Hellblazer manages to touch on is a special kind of fear, and one I think, if you like to tackle thoughts bigger than our mortal minds can manage, you could get a kick out of this spooky season.

 Until next time, enjoy your Spooky Season. I am wishing the majority of you reading this my very best.