Patsboy101

It's kind of funny. Throughout most of the original Hellblazer, Gemma was typically just the kid niece of John who got into incredibly sticky situations that John rescued her from; from Jamie Delano's story of a Damnation Army fanatic strangling underage girls to Garth Ennis' story of her being pressured by this bully to do a blood ritual. Gemma as a child I didn't find really interesting (she still had her good moments in the comics as a kid), and it wasn't until Mike Carey's run on Hellblazer that the character became interesting in my eyes.

One of the reasons why Mike Carey's Hellblazer is my favorite run of John Constantine other than how Carey could balance the magician and the conman sides of John was the work Carey put into making adult Gemma into a compelling character. No longer was she the little girl that had to be rescued by her uncle. She was an adult who could stand on her own two feet and who was someone who didn't tolerate the bullshit of her uncle. Hell, under Carey, she became a competent magician in her own right. The adult version of Gemma is my second favorite character of the Hellblazer mythos (you know who's first). I would totally read a Hellblazer mini-series with her as the star.

Probably my favorite moment of adult Gemma had to be in the Reasons to be Cheerful story when she went clubbing with this dude who was being forced to serve one of Constantine's demonic children; who used the guy's lust for Gemma to make him his servant. The guy was going to rufie her, but she discovered his scheme and switched their drinks at the club. The best part of it was when Gemma said to the guy that she was going to have sex with him until she found the drugs he planned to use on her. The irony of it just made me laugh. 

But enough about that. One of the key concepts that is driving Spurrier's Hellblazer is that John is in a very unfamiliar world. And as weird as it was to how Spurrier dealt with the continuity of Hellblazer in The Sandman Universe Presents: Hellblazer #1, I really hope that an older and wiser Gemma eventually appears in the series. Perhaps she has her own family now. What we know about Gemma's age by the time the original Hellblazer series came to an end was that she was 34 years old and if we account for the years that have passed since then, she would be 40 or 41 years old. Maybe it will happen or maybe it won't happen. I think I really just miss Gemma.

13 hours ago, JohnMcMahon said:

How did you first cross Constantine's path?

Well, I was in a pub, drinking a stout at the bar and I noticed this old bloke in his mid 60’s from the corner of my eye in a trench coat sitting in the corner alone just drinking and chain-smoking from a pack of Silk Cuts. He had a very distinctive scar over his left eye. There was this look in his eyes that told me that I should avoid him at all cost, but there was undeniably some deep pain he was carrying around in those eyes. I believed he noticed me looking at him and I looked in a different direction, pretending like I never saw the man. He got up from his seat and started walking towards the entrance. But he stopped where I was sitting and put his right hand on my left shoulder. There was something about his touch. It was like the Devil had touched me and I couldn’t move until he allowed it. The words that came out of his mouth were, “Don’t you worry, old son. I don’t bite.” He had this grin on his face. He removed his hand from my shoulder and left the pub. I didn’t move until the door had closed and I got out of my seat when it had. I opened the door and I was looking in every direction for the man himself, but he had disappeared. I carefully walked back into the pub and sat back down to enjoy the stout I was previously drinking. I asked the barkeep, “Do you know who that man was?” He said to me, “Oh, that would be John Constantine. My advice: best keep your distance from him.”

Well in actual reality, I first met John in the pages of Saga of the Swamp Thing #37 by Alan Moore. I found John intriguing because he was this mystery man who messed around with Swamp Thing as a way to train his powers in the Green. I loved Moore’s Swamp Thing and his Constantine so much that I had to check out Jamie Delano’s Hellblazer. I really started loving John’s character during the Family Man storyline and the aftermath of that event.

3 hours ago, Lou K said:

Anyways, I am currently going through Azzarello's run. It is a lot better than I recall it being but it has it's bad moments too. Of course, I am not at Ashes and Dust yet.

The Azzarello run although weird, I interpreted his run like John wrote a really bad fanfiction about himself. John while writing, "So, I went to prison, escaped, went on a journey across America, I might had or not had sex with a dog, killed all the skinheads, and got into some really kinky stuff with SW Manor." The stories I enjoyed the most out of the Azzarello era were Freezes Over along with Lapdogs and Englishmen. After Ashes and Dust, I really needed Mike Carey's High on Life where Cheryl gives John the smackdown about giving everyone the scare about being officially dead on paper.

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Finally! I found a forum site to discuss all things Hellblazer. Yeah, if this reaction didn't give it away, I was absolutely dying to talk about Hellblazer. I've been a Hellblazer fan for a few months and in those few months, I've read up to Milligan's run just before John gets married and stopped there due to not enjoying what I was reading.  

This is a character I found so interesting and he's so three-dimensional. It's why I find it really depressing that Johnny boy doesn't get the attention he deserves. It's oddly fitting considering how normal and insignificant John is, but that's why his story is so compelling. Putting him in a world of capes takes away the sense of realism which is funny of me to say because Conjob interacts with mythology and uses magic, but he deals with some very real life issues that he can't always magic or con away. It also means the man can never age again being part of the world of capes, and I find that part really relatable. As John aged and changed, I age and change. Maybe some people want try to escape the fact that they are aging and going to die, and they go to superheroes because they are never changing in a sense. Maybe I'm just fine with the fact that I am going to get old and die eventually. Perhaps that's why I drift towards a character like Vertigo John. I want to see characters develop, get older ,and die and stay dead because real life is just that. There isn't a Lazarus Pit to resurrect your loved ones, becoming part of the Speed Force, or a Kryptonian Regeneration Matrix to make everything all better. Don't get me wrong, I love superheroes, but I'm finding that I'm starting to prefer stories about the everyday joe. Even a godly being such as Morpheus I find more interesting than most capes.

I've been reading some of the posts around here about Diggle's run and I am starting to understand why making John's guilt manifest into a baby that he could kill off or attributing all of the bad ordeals John went through to the Golden Boy by the power of coincidence are hurtful to John's development. And I do like the interpretation of the end of Delano's run that it was the last story of DCU John and everything after that was an alternate universe story. There are some really thoughtful people around here.