James

Just when I thought I was out...

My thoughts pretty much echo Mark's. What problems it has are largely focused on its quality as a pilot rather than an adaptation, particularly the lumpen exposition that was all over the place, and unnecessary explanation of what happened in Newcastle. What happened to a bit of a mystery in the arc plot, eh? Constantine's dialogue seems to be channelling Delano and Carey, but their brands of oblique phrasing and baroque wit don't really work once you put them in the mouth of an actual human being - would've been better to look to Ennis for inspiration.

But my biggest complaint was with Liv, who lacked any kind of personality, interests, agency or drive. If she's making up one third of the regular cast, I'd hope for a bit more to her character (they could've taken out two of those 'here's what happened at Newcastle' scenes and replaced them with a bit of background for her instead). Thankfully the news that they're ditching her for Zed suggests that they're aware of at least some of these problems, and bodes very well indeed for the future.

Aside from that, the Judeo-Christian worldview (which will hopefully expand once they have more eps to play with) and magical Chas (though I can see why they'd need to change the character to fit the format of the show - a non-magical bloke who's based in one city isn't of much use in an episodic action-horror show that roams the US), it's so much better than I could possibly have expected. Given the awfulness of modern DC John (as far as I'm aware; don't bother with comics any more) I'm grateful that this show is getting it so very, very right.

Very promising quote from one of the producers to Entertainment Weekly:

The nice thing about Swamp Thing, when he first teamed up with Constantine, was that Swamp Thing had abilities, Swamp Thing had skills. Constantine needed those skills. One of the coolest things about Constantine he doesn’t have any ‘powers.’ He came out of a time with all these superheroes with their garish colors and flashy powers, and he just comes out with a rumpled coat, wearing browns and greys, and he just knows a lot magic and spells, but it’s all knowledge-based. Anything he can do is based in knowledge and his own studying. Zed is actually one of the first women Constantine meets in the comic books, and she has various psychic powers. We felt ultimately she’s going to service the first season better as someone to pair Constantine up with. She can get in his face a little bit and have some of her own realizations and skills and really push him. But if whoever Constantine is working with is constantly on her heels, that just wouldn’t service the show really well.

Liv's complete lack of character or agency was one of my biggest gripes about the pilot, so I'm very happy to hear this.

Now if they can start pronouncing 'Constantine' correctly...

QUOTE (andy @ Feb 21 2005, 01:04 AM)

Let "Hellblazer" run its course and then re-start the title after about a year and just call it "John Constantine"

I won't be in the UK until June, so it's all by-the-by for me. Hope you all have a good one, though!

We're gonna need more Yorkshiremen.

You called?

I dunno, Hellblazer's been dying slowly for me ever since Mike Carey called it a day. At this point it feels like a mercy killing. I'm more upset that I'm not upset, if you know what I mean. Shame it had to go out like this, but the writing's been on the wall for a while, I think. Hey ho - I'll always have my OGNs, and my memories of the Bristol and London cons. Big love to StH, the first forum that made me actually meet people from off the interwebs.

Not as bad as last month, but last month's was genuinely offensive on multiple levels, so it'd be hard to top it. Bisley's art looked half-arsed, except when he was drawing Epiphany, who was 100% fully arsed, with a bit extra on top. Not sure why a Brit would draw a cricket bat as a baseball bat, and even less sure why the error wasn't ironed out at the lettering stage.

The story, though... it's just a series of things happening, isn't it? Nothing of import happens and nothing is achieved. Well, I suppose on a meta level it serves to add to the Epiphany/John relationship, but it doesn't add much of anything, and after 30+ issues of those two slobbering over each other I'm not sure why we needed to know that they met 10 years ago. Is it to bolster the readers' faith in the relationship? To prove that it's not actually a love potion thing at all? Does anyone other than me even remember that speculation?

It's fine. Hellblazer died at issue 213. It just doesn't know it yet.

I doubt it's anything as adolescent as that. Possibly the opposite: middle-aged slump.

Bit late to the party, but I'm finding it hard to bother to read this stuff, even though I get it for free.

Is Milligan just trolling at this point? Or does he think that what he's coming up with has some (any?) redeeming features? Does he look at the talking trenchcoat and Gemma and her sex gun and think, 'Ah-ha! I'm taking Hellblazer in crazy new directions that nobody has ever dared explore before!'? I'd be genuinely interested to know what goes through his head these days.

Ah well. Problems as outlined above, the most obnoxious of which being - as Adrian says - a rape victim tarting herself up to lure in her attacker. Closely followed by Angie's out-of-character* pity-fuck request** and John cold-bloodedly killing some poor fucker***.

Even Gael Bertrand's usually excellent art seems half-arsed and lacking in inspiration.

Never mind. Hellblazer ended with issue 213. This is just its poor, confused ghost.

* No surprise there, then.

** Has anyone made a list of the weird misogynistic shit that's surfaced in Milligan's run? It'd probably take a while but might be interesting. Hard to believe this stuff is edited by a woman.

*** Oh yeah - fella's a wife-beater. A bit of self awareness/flagellation from Milligan regarding the dubious sexual politics of his run?**** Still shit and out of established pre-Milligan character though.

**** I assume that 'runs' originally came from a metaphor about a creator physically running a long distance; starting to wonder if it had a more fecal origin.

Oh, yeah, the issue. It was all right. For the most part I don't really care what's happening in the comic any more, and only read it out of a vaguely masochistic sense of completeness. Angie's sudden reappearance was jarring; wonder if the next issue will basically be an apology to Mike Carey? Mostly I just wish Milligan would wrap it up, but the business with John's lost nephew and The First's big plans suggests he'll be around for a while longer yet. I also want him to pay off the thing with Cathy in Hell from 'The Cottage' back in Milligan's first (or was it second?) year. It'll annoy me if that's left dangling.

Not the "HellblazerEnders" thing again, Ade? Come on, you're better than that. For one thing, the book is certainly no more EastEnders-y now than it was under, say, Mike Carey (long-lost relatives! Troubled love affairs! London gangland shenanigans! Sudden, rather convenient amnesia! Dadshock! Betrayed friendships! Of such stuff are cockernee soap operas made).

Structurally it's exactly like a soap, though, with each closing storyline overlapping with a new one, while (usually) a third one continues in the background, bridging them together. And in terms of story and focus, being almost entirely London-bound, using strictly small-scale events, and mostly basing its events on the interactions and relationships of an incestuously close group of regular characters.

As for Carey, his storylines require far much more reductive thinking to be EastEndersy than Milligan's (his 'London gangland shenanegans' were between a pair of magic-using groups fighting over an ancient relic; Milligan's are of the traditional 'strippers and protection rackets' variety; Carey's 'troubled love affairs' were between a couple of fuckbuddies who didn't really seem to have too many troubles but just drifted apart and, later, between John and a vengeful demoness; Milligan's involve rape, petty revenge and familial fighting - proper EastEnders stuff).

Secondly, and rather more importantly, you seem to keep using the implication of "soap" as though it were synonymous with "not very good".

Actually he's using EastEnders as though it were synonymous with "not very good", which is fair enough, I think.

The problem with Hellblazer right now isn't that it's soapy, it's that it's crap. Paper-thin characters, clunky dialogue, uneven pacing, and a weird, inconsistent tone.

Sounds pretty much exactly like EastEnders to me.

So you have the first arc with them already in operation and reveal how they all came together in flashback a little way down the line. Although as I said, I think it's working fine here, because we're being given plenty of interesting mysteries and oddness to draw us in. If the team were comprised of more mundane superheroes - an oxymoron, I know, but you get what I mean - then I don't think it would work.

Well, that was actually pretty good fun. I was a bit sceptical when I found out that the various members doesn't even meet up until issue four, but there's enough going on here to suggest that we do need a proper run-up to the team's formation.

Constantine doing a pretend medium bit to pay his rent is actually more in-character than most of the stuff Milligan has him doing in the comic, oddly enough.

Cracking art, too. The CGI poser models were a bit too obvious occasionally, but for the most part this was a lovely-looking comic with some fantastic, arresting imagery.

Also: for the people complaining about the Superman/Batman scenes... you do know that this comic is called JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK, right?

Has anyone read Swamp Thing #1 by Scott Snyder yet? Against all the odds, it's actually rather good. Snyder appears to be doing an old-school horror comic rather than aping Moore's kookier elements, and Alec Holland actually makes for an interesting protagonist, unlike Swamp Thing myself. Hope this isn't just heading for him becoming Swampy in issue six.

It's a shame it's tied to that shitty Search for Swamp Thing mini, because it's not terribly useful as a proper 'issue one', but if you know the background - and I think most of us here do - it's a decent read.

Oh, and Paquette's art is lovely.

Ade's made a few excellent Hellblazer-themed mixtapes in the past - as a result, Eels' 'Cancer for the Cure' and XTC's 'Dear God' always remind me of Hellblazer.

I'm sure that in six weeks' time we'll look back and realise how clever and entertaining that was, right? I mean, presumably that's how this is supposed to work.

 

Some good jokes and a handful of half-decent ideas (most of which we've seen before, but a few of them were new-ish) aren't really enough if you don't come up with an actual story to hang them off, and there was nothing even approaching a story to be seen in 'Let's Kill Hitler'. It was just a handful of reveals and a rather larger handful of questions, tied up in a big bag of "we'll explain later". Bit of an anticlimax, all told.

 

Or perhaps I missed something. I'd love to have the appeal explained to me by someone who really enjoyed it. Please?

Funny jokes, constant and satisfying escalation of danger, and some nice fleshing out of Amy, River and Rory's backstory? Also, while the 'plot' was distracting everyone with with Hitler in a cupboard, Captain Kirk piloting the T1000 and River giving some hilarious lip to a Nazi, Moffat neatly tied up a whole bunch of tricky narrative conundrums.

We had to have The Doctor find River - how could he do that? By having River find The Doctor. We knew that Rory and Amy would have to raise their child offscreen without aging - how could they do that? By having River grow up alongside them - also giving them a semi (though not entirely) plausible reason to let her go once they'd 'found' her (because they'd been with her for 25 years or so by that point anyway). We knew that the adult River couldn't join them in the ship - how could they get around that? By packing her off to the start of what we understand to be Alex Kingston's timeline. And he even explained why River Song was definitely, undeniably not going to regenerate at the end of the Library two-parter.

All the stuff we knew had to happen did so in the most unexpected way possible. It was like a magician's trick - we're all so entertained by the flim-flam with Hitler and the robot* that we don't see how deftly Moffat's manoeuvred the pieces until it's all over.

And it had space Numskulls.

*That machine actually does kill fascists!

EDIT: Happy birthday, Malin!

Guessing it's a Delano issue, but can't say for sure, sorry! If I come across it while re-reading I'll let you know...

Hi, BHG!

Bisley's art has been a bit hit-and-miss for me but those pics are gorgeous. I was a bit disappointed that there was no House of Mystery annual this year, but this is far better.

Again it is offish, but there was no other mention that I recall of incest between Rosacarnis and her Father Nergal, so it would have had to work on that level.

Oh, wait, you're right. I forgot that one of the souls says, 'Incest, John!'

Slightly off, because John got rid of the Nergal blood in the Jenkins issues and regained the demonic taint from Ellie, who is unrelated to Nergal.

At the time I thought they were going to reveal that Angie (from Liverpool, 20-odd years younger than John) was actually his daughter, which would've been creepy as fuck at the time, though I suppose it doesn't open any story possibilities that aren't tediously soap-operatic.

In the end, I guess the Ghant's souls were telling John to ask about Rosacarnis's father.

Although I'd argue that up until this Gemma issue, Milligan's stories have been dense as hell ever since Sectioned started wrapping up (take it from the guy who's written up every Milligan story on the Hellblazer wiki...).

And rob me of my 'China Mieville writes Hellblazer' fantasy. Damn you alllllll!

Ade's right, though. All it says is that putting Constantine into the DCU won't affect Hellblazer. It doesn't say that the series won't be cancelled for other reasons, like low sales.