Carnivorous Vulgaris

Hi everyone,

I have a stack of old issues of Hellblazer available for anyone who fancies adding them to their collection.  They're all mostly in very good condition and I'd rather that they went to a good home than a secondhand shop or the bin.  They're available for free* to the good people of this forum.  There are about 67 issues in total, ranging from 2005 (end of Carey's run) to 2013 (the final issue).  DM me if interested and I can provide the full list.

* Minus the cost of postage (I'm based in Ireland)

Oh sweet fucking Christ... (@The imagine in John's opening post)

Just finished reading the Critical Mass TPB, having never read any of Jenkins stuff before. It's fantastic and a it's mystery* why DC left it so long to republish the story considering how it compares to some of what preceded and succeeded it.

* Yes, yes, as Someone upthread mentioned, sales figures of the monthly trades were probably poor.

That was a great season, yes (Season 3/29/30/whatever the hell it is - the one with Simm's Master, basically). Although I remember being very disappointed by both "Last Of The Time Lords" and Simm's performance*. It warrants a re-assessment, I think.

* I'll admit that my disappointment was largely informed by my opinion of Simm as an actor in general - I just don't think he's a particularly good one - and I seem to be very much in the minority on that. Still, horses for courses.

A bus full of extremely ugly people crashes, killing everyone on board. At the gates of Heaven, St. Peter greets the new arrivals.

"My children, you suffered so much in life. Your rewards shall thus be greater than any in Heaven. Come forward and I will grant you any wish you ask of me."

The passengers form a line and the first steps forward to St. Peter. "What do you wish for, my child?", St. Peter asks. "I want to be handsome", the man answers. St. Peter grants his wish and the man is transformed into a tall, muscular god with an amazingly handsome face. As this happens, a barely-perceptible titter of laughter comes from the back of the queue. St. Peter ignores it and the second person steps forward. "What do you wish for, my child", he asks. "I want to be beautiful", says the woman. She is transformed into a staggeringly-beautiful Amazonian goddess. Again, someone smothers a laugh at the back of the line.

St. Peter goes through each passenger, all of them asking to be made beautiful, and grants their wishes. Each time the laughter becomes louder and more obnoxious. St. Peter reaches the end of the line. There is one guy left, breathless with laughter, barely able to contain himself. Somewhat bemused, St. Peter asks him, "What do you wish for, my son?"

The guy stops laughing and says, "I want you to make them all ugly again!"

My friend drowned recently. At the funeral we had a floral wreath made in the shape of a life preserver.

Well, it's what he would have wanted.

Three Irish soldiers, sick of life in the army, come up with a scheme to get out with a nice pay-off. They claim to their superiors that their hearing has suffered permanent damage as a consequence of their proximity to gun and artillery fire. The army grants their request for a medical assessment and soon enough they find themselves in the corridor of a hospital, standing outside a door with "Army Deafness Claims -> Come Inside" tacked to it.

The first guy goes through the door. A sergeant sits behind a table. Very quietly, almost a whisper, the sergeant says, "Close the door, please." The first guy closes the door. The sergeant explodes with rage: "Get the fuck out of here, you fucking chancer! Your ears are fine. Two weeks toilet cleaning duty!" Aghast, the first guy leaves and warns his pals on the way out, "This guy's sharp as a tack! Be careful."

The second guy goes through the door. The sergeant murmurs under his breath, "Close the door, please." The second guy closes the door. The sergeant goes ballistic: "Ah, you fucking bastard, get the fuck out of here! There's nothing wrong with you. Two weeks toilet cleaning duty!"

On his way out the second guy warns his last colleague, "Look, whatever you do, don't shut the door. Whatever he asks you to do just DON'T shut the fucking door, okay?"

The third guy enters the room. The sergeant mumbles, "Close the door, please."

The third guy shouts, "You shut the fucking door, you lazy prick!"

What do the starship Enterprise and toilet paper have in common?

They both circle Uranus, cleaning up the Klingons.

A faith healer visits Ireland, promising to heal anyone who comes to see him. He holds a sermon on a mount and thousands come from all over the country to see him. He stands on a large stage erected at the top of the hill at the back of which is a large black curtain obscuring anything behind it.

"Let the first person who is ill come to me", he announces. A man on crutches stumbles up. "What's your name, my son?", he asks. "My name's Johnny." "And what is your ailment?" "I have polio." "Go behind the curtain, Johnny." Johnny makes his way gingerly behind the curtain and out of sight.

"Let the next person who is ill come to me", the healer says. An ostensibly healthy man walks up. "What's your name, my son?" "My n.... my nnn.... I'm M-M-M-Michael", the guy stutters. "And what ails you, Michael?" "I've a sp.... I... I've a-a-a-a... sp-sp-sp-speech imp-imp-impediment!" "Go behind the curtain, Michael." Michael makes his way behind the curtain.

The healer then asks the gathered crowd to kneel in prayer. He leads them in an incantation and after a few silent moments lifts his arms triumphantly and shouts, "Johnny, throw away your first crutch." A crutch comes sailing over the curtain. The crowd gasps in awe.

"Johnny, throw away your second crutch!". Another crutch is thrown over the curtain. The crowd are delirious with joy.

"Michael, SAY SOMETHING!"

"J-J-J-Johnny f-f-f-f-fell down!"

Andy Diggle's first two issues. The story line called "The Deep End", I think. It's a fine setup and plenty of potential for great dialogue if the chemistry between Ryan and whoever they would cast as Webb was right.

Count me among those that took offence to the Romany issue. "Nothing blacker than gypsy magic" might have some kind of logical consistency with whatever this interpretation of John Constantine knows about magic and the occult but to virgin ears it still comes across as quite racist. It was also pretty obvious that her character was villainous - her inappropriate behaviour towards Constantine was a clanging giveaway. "It's always the wife", as my girlfriend wearily observed while watching it.

I liked the setting for this last episode. A blue-collar mining town with Welsh roots in backwoods America is fertile and unexplored ground, the kind of place you'd expect Constantine to crop up in. Quite in keeping with his first appearances in Swamp Thing and then Azzarello's run on the title.

Is Matt Ryan owning the character? He's a damn sight better than Reeves and he's showing signs of being able to nail the acerbic wit of the character but I'm not sure about his ability to carry the "heavier" moments that he's had to deal with so far. The "You can't have her" scene from the pilot wasn't great. I remain a Matt Ryan agnostic for the time being but there's enough to be cautiously optimistic.

Royal Blood is a bit of a mixed bag for me. It's redeeming features stem more from its artwork (always liked Simpson's style) than its narrative which is quite dull. I can imagine that when Ennis and Simpson first pitched the idea "What if a member of the Royal Family gets possessed by a murderous demon?" it must have seemed funny and ripe with possibility but they quite fumbled the execution and, even within the context of Hellblazer, the story's absurd.

Well, after going on an Ebay binge, I've reacquired the issues of Eagle that I owned years ago, plus a few more besides.

It's been a nostalgic headfuck, to say the least. Just leafing through the pages of each issue again is like stepping back in time. I remember exactly what I was thinking, what I was feeling, back when I read these stories for the first time.

Starting with Survival, one must remark that it grew in stature in my mind during the years since I've read it in inverse proportions to how good it actually is, a consequence of nostalgic longing. It's still interesting fare, with some good ideas, a wonderfully bleak outlook and some stunning visuals. But at heart it is, of course, a children's comic, replete with corny dialog loaded with exposition ("A car! And it's coming straight at me! I haven't got time to get out of the way!"), light characterisation if any and some stupendously poor resolutions to cliffhangers. Ortiz's artwork, however, is worth the admission price and elevates it above mediocrity. Some of it is comparable to Eddie Campbell's work on From Hell. It's similarly striking.

Reading the rest of the strips, one gets the impression that the writers and artists must have been working entirely independent of one another. The artists are serving up a wonderful visual feast of non-corporeal dimensions, gleaming starships, hideous monsters and mutuations, melting bodies and nightmare zones while the poor old writers, no doubt toiling away under the whip of a rapidly looming deadline, are churning out the most basic A moves to B moves to C material imaginable.

I was going to describe The Thirteenth Floor as a laughably right-wing little strip before I realised that it is in no way political or purposeful. Every story is a variation on 'Ne'er-do-well gains access to Maxwell Tower, antagonises the tenants, is transported to the thirteenth floor by Max ("Thirteenth floor? This building doesn't have a thirteenth floor!") where he is tortured for a few minutes before repenting unquestionably and set free. The strip only exists so the reader can vicariously experience giving scumbags a good kicking and the most unusual thing about it is the fact that only one of the victims dies from fright. The mandatory ludicrous dialog gets an outing too, of course ("The shark! It's pulling me to pieces!").

Doomlord, I've since come to understand, has a degree of success outside of Eagle - even getting his own TPB from 2000AD. The story I remember most fondly from the issues I read dealt with Vek fending off an alien invasion of Australia by The Populators Of Pollux (oh, yes). There's a moment in the story where the fictional town of Ellis, Australia is being "sterilised" by a laser beam fired from a hovering alien starship, the beam melting or incinerating anyone or anything it comes into contact with. Alien robots are then dispatched to mop up surivors. One man, evidently hideously burned by the beam and who should be in agonising pain, sees the oncoming robots and loudly remarks, "Knock me down with a platypus! Robots!"

Not that any of this will dissuade me from buying the remaining copies, assuming I can find them. I still remain irredeemably sad.

There's been something of a generic "feisty" quality to her which didn't mark her out as particularly distinctive - almost a return to the classic-series companion template, in fact

See, I've actually been impressed by that portrayal of her, to an extent, given the amount of "classic" series (do long-time Whovians still get offended by calling it that?) episodes that I've watched since The End Of Time. It made a refreshing contrast to the melodrama that's normally been associated with the companions since the series' return - Rose, Donna, etc. It's nice to feel as if we're slowly (that being the operative word) getting to know a character. Obviously it wouldn't work for an entire series and, as you say, it very much appears that we're only now getting to the substance of Amy Pond. But if Moffatt wanted to distinguish his take on who from Davies, this is one of the many subtle ways in which he's accomplished just that.

Speaking of which, I wonder what Davies' reaction to the "A giant Cyberking walks all over Victorian London and NOBODY REMEBERS?!?!" line must have been. I'm not one of those Who fans (Outpost Gallifrey appears positively infested with them) who believes that the satanic RTD was the embodiment of all that was wrong with the show and derives enormous pleasure from Moffatt's supposed pokes at the flaws of Davies' tenure ("Lol! Moffatt pwnd RTD! Hez god! LMFAO!!!" etc). Davies was largely brilliant but there's been a couple of instances this year where there have been subtle jibes at the more ridiculous tropes of the Davies era which makes me want to know a little more about the working relationship between the two writers. If only from a horrible, gossip-y standpoint.

I think we saw more than one Doctor here - or at least, the same Doctor at two different points in his timestream. If I'm right about that, then a couple of other seemingly-minor things from previous episodes may well be a lot more significant than they first appeared, too. I'll elaborate later, but in the meantime I'm curious to see if anyone else spotted the scene I'm talking about.

Interesting idea.

Although I never watched the programme when I was a kid, the theme music alone was enough to terrify me to the extent that I had to leave the room until someone changed the channel. Even today it remains one of the most eerie, disquieting and thoroughly alien pieces of music ever composed. The song's radical, innovative components are exactly what scared the bejeepers out of me. To the ears of a child (and to many adults I'd wager) there's absolutely nothing on there that sounds like a recognisable, human instrument. It sounds malevolent, insistent - almost as if it's in pursuit of you.

What else has he done that you'd recommend?

Ná bac leis

As with many artefacts from one's childhood, time's not been especially kind to Survival's opening chapters, not when considered via modern sensibilities. Perhaps I'm being too harsh - the comic was, after all, aimed primarily at children - but there's an overly expositional nature to the first pages of the strip. A conscious desire to dash through the premise, which is inherently fascinating, and dive right into the action. Shame, really. The haunting artwork, however, has aged remarkably well. You can practically feel your skin breaking out into goosebumps looking at the poor wretches who have contracted the virus.

Stop the Press!

Two working MySpace links -

First blog

Second blog

Wow! Didn't know my thread had been resurrected. I just googled "Eagle comic Survival" again today purely out of coincidence. Thanks for those links, JasonT!!!

Spain - I don't know if the story itself could have been described as famous but the Eagle was a hugely popular and influential comic among English and Irish readers (and evidently Spanish readers too!). Definitely something of a cult phenomenon.

I remember when 28 Days Later's promotional campaign began and all I could think of was "Wow! Somebody's adapted Survival!" (This was before I actually saw the film, mind). I had my mates salivating over the prospect of this unearthed gem of a strip that I've been unable to find. Why, oh why did I throw away all my Eagle back issues?!?!?!

Never seen him before but I like surprises. He comes across as quite intelligent and affable in that interview so I'm quite optimistic. I would have preferred an older Doctor but Smith may well be able to credibly portray the kind of intensity that I'd like to see in the show. Here's hoping.

I'm hoping it's Eijofor more than Joseph now. Only bad thing about the timing of the announcement is that it's coincided with the footy today - it's the Magical FA Cup 3rd Round, for Gallifrey's Sake.

If that was the final episode and that's exactly how it ended it would have been brilliant.

Brooklyn bridge or just some random ruin?

Can't say I agree.

Er...careful with papercuts?

I meant that in a "What stories should I best avoid" kind of way but sterling advice all the same. ;-)

Picked up Dangerous Habits a couple of days ago and, although I have my reservations over Ennis as a writer, loved it. It might turn out to be the only Ennis-authored Hellblazer that I like but it's a worthy, human addition to Constantine's story, I feel. Moving onto Bloodlines now. Any words of warning?