John Constantine, Hellblazer: Death and Cigarettes by Peter Milligan

Category: 50 Books

death&cigarettesSpoiler alert?

This is the final volume of the Hellblazer comic from Vertigo. This makes me sad because every December my Christmas present to myself would be to buy the Hellblazer collections that came out for the year and catch up on my favorite antihero, John Constantine. And now it’s over.

Peter Milligan is a fantastic author and he always does/did a great job on the Hellblazer story arcs. This last volume is no exception. In this volume I really loved the Suicide Bridge story and of course, The Curse of the Constantines.  I appreciated that they finished out the story of John finding his long-lost nephew.
With this being the final Hellblazer I was expecting John Constantine to die (or “die”, I guess.) because how else are you going to end a 25 year series? Go out with a bang, right? I was expecting some kind of huge, magic battle or something. That was not the case. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate the ending. But it seems like he goes through an awful lot of trouble just to then… give up?

It was a really good book, and if you’ve been a Hellblazer fan, you’re gonna get it; how could you not? The very ending might be a bit of a flatline, but the other stories in it are really great.

Let’s dork out even further for a moment, shall we?

So Vertigo has cancelled John Constantine, Hellblazer. Meanwhile, DC Comics has rebooted the series to fit in the DCU putting John Constantine in their Justice League Dark series. And, they’ve given him his own comic, Constantine, where the story starts out with a much younger John Constantine. I am excited and apprehensive at the same time. I get it, a younger Constantine will be more appealing to younger readers, we’ll get to have more/different adventures, we’ll get to see Constantine interact with others in the DCU. These will all be fun things, yes?

But my concern is, by moving to DC, the Constantine story will lose much of its edge, be dumbed down, and it won’t have him railing against British government/politics. So on one hand, I’m excited for a reboot. I’m excited to start a new comic (it started some months ago, but they’re only on issue #4, so I can catch up pretty fast.) but I’m scared it’s going to be too clean-cut and vanilla. I need my Constantine to be angry, shameless, with a smoke in one hand and a pint in the other.

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