Constantine: The Hellblazer Collection

Hellblazer Collection 

By various (Vertigo)
ISBN 1-84023-979-4

When the movie was about to leap on us at any moment, DC were banging out huge amounts of Hellblazer material, which was of course only sensible. This collection continued the procedure created for the dire Catwoman movie by producing a bookshelf version of a recently released film adaptation padded out with a selection of reprints from the characters’ back catalogue.

I haven’t seen the movie yet, and after reading the frankly appalling adaptation reprinted here, I’m unlikely to. But in case you intend to, I’ll just say that Steven T. Seagle, Ron Randall and Jimmy Palmiotti have obviously done the very best they can, and if we’re all lucky they worked from an original script rather than a final cut of the movie. If they have, there’s an outside chance that the movie actually made some sense. By the bye, in case you haven’t heard, you shouldn’t have to suffer Keanu Reeves’ Scouse accent as Constantine’s a Yank here.

Filling out the book is “Hunger” from the first issue of the Hellblazer comic by Jamie Delano and John Ridgway, “Hold Me” from #27 by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean and “The Beginning of the End” by Garth Ennis and Will Simpson from #41. These are of course fine examples of the character at his best from some of the industry’s most talented creators, but that doesn’t make up for the fact that the stories are incomplete and if you wanted to find out how they ended, you’d have to get hold of the Original Sins and Dangerous Habits graphic collections which is, as you are also probably thinking, a bit of a cheek.

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