Descartes
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Posts posted by Descartes
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Btw we don't yet know WHOSE enemy Empathy is....
Obviously...
My money is on him as the whole problem anyway... a la Francis Bacon in Cambell's short run.
or whoever... maybe im going crazy.
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Btw we don't yet know WHOSE enemy Empathy is....
Obviously...
My money is on him as the whole problem anyway... a la Francis Bacon in Cambell's short run.
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Bond needed to have been done by Robert Aldritch
Is the "t" intentional?
In other words: "vera cruz" or "the longest yard"?
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This one:
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Bond needed to have been done by Robert Aldritch or Sam Peckinpah (Sans the drugs).
Now it is Michael Mann for obvious candidacy.
Fucking hell. The idea of Bond a la peckinpah sounds great untill I remember that terrible peckinpah film involving ninjas.
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You know it, True Believer!
Anyone here ever read Starbrand?
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Now, imagine a new storyline where the family man wasn't really dead (for some convoluted reason, like, John really shot a robot or, the family man died, BUT he became a greek fisherman).
That'd be a retcon.
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Character development is not retconning.
Hopefully not. But out of continuity character devlopment is. Funny old world innit?
Example: Josh Wright. Not a retcon. Though it completely sucks any love out of the end of Ellis's arch, we can pretend that it is "character development" that he went from being "totally fucked lsd left for dead sad sack" to "smooth occult gangster." For me, its just a crap attempt to bring a character who should have been left alone back into the constantine fold but it wasn't a retcon.
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Yes, he would have demon blood, but it would be Ellie's blood, not Nergal's....Unless Nergal and Ellie are related! Then Carey would be correct by referring to John having "Nergal's blood", only not directly from Nergal's veins.
Stan, since Mike Carey never makes any mistakes, I think that Nergal is really Ellie's father, it's just a secret. Shameful and all that.
Well, how about it Stan? Do I get a nefarious, nubulescent No-Prize for my effort?
M.M.M.S. Christian Cage
I think the reason , Christian, you don't see any retcons in hellblazer is because you are king of the hellblazer no-prize! :)
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So, as my wife points out, you are conceding that nergal thing is a big "retcon" in hellblazer lore.
As for the first, it fucking tears the balls out of the end of rake at the gates if you thought while reading it, "well, maybe if john wins this one the first will become a greek fisherman" but that is beside the point ... imagine if at the end of the kindly ones, we found out that morpheus had become a greek fisherman. You see my point? But. regardless, while Jenkins run "makes sense" that doesn't make the return of the first seem any less of a retcon...
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Oh yeah, and my wife brought up the whole demon blood thing.
In her mind, everytime John fucks someone, he infects thier womb with evil--which is a fucked up idea inofitself-- but the demon blood should've gone to the demon constantine-- but in my mind thats more along the line of a continuity error.
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yep. i looked it up. you speak the truth.
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Retcons often add information that effectively states "what you saw isn't what really happened" and then introduces a different version.
That's the def. of retcon I'm working with.
Sooo....
Nergal looked real dead to me when he was torn apart on the steps of heaven. Not to get too geeky or shit, but my D&D lore tells me that when you kill a demon on the non-material plane, you've killed them for good.
And that makes sense in the comic, also. I mean, if Nergal wasn't "D-E-A-D" why did he not come back and fuck over John in issue #13? I mean, e-mail JD and ask if he thought Nergal was dead... :)
As for number two. No, you dont know what happens to anyone when they die, let alone the first of the fallen ... but.... He seemed pretty dead. I dont know if you were reading hellblazer at the time, but when he returned to the comic, for me, at least, it made me want to stop reading (the sadsack King Arthur storyline sealed that deal:( ).
As for zed--- well... zeds dead, baby. zeds dead.
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Straff's mum's redeath wasn't really a retcon--it was a continuity fuck-up.
Retroactive continuity is similar to, but not the same as, plot inconsistencies introduced accidentally or through lack of concern for continuity; retconning is done deliberately. For example, the ongoing continuity contradictions on episodic TV series such as The Golden Girls reflects very loose continuity, not genuine retcons. However, in series with generally tight continuity, retcons are sometimes created after the fact to explain continuity errors.The big retcon is Nergal (ie, he who dies every single time he shows up in hellblazer--Carey devoted a whole issue to retconning Nergal, didn't he??).
The second big retcon is The First returning as a greek fisherman (the assumption at the end of the ennis run, for me at least, was that the first was d-e-a-d).
The third would be the return of Zed (though I can understand the obvious counter-argument).
This is not to mention all the non-retcons-- for example who did we move form issue 40 to 41 and from the end of Azz's run to the start of Carey's.
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Grammar's probably slightly esque in the question, sorry!
Is there room for a future series?
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Mike Carey resurrected a previously dead person just to kill them again
When did he do that?
Wait wait wait
Before we kick carey's ass over this, lets remember he was practically the only writter in hellblazer who bothered with continuity at all :>
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Those Punishers is good.
I've been trying to buy all the individual issues from the Essential Punisher. So far I've got Amazing Spiderman #129, the Daredevil ones, and Vol. 1 #1-5.
Wish they would do volume deux.
I picked up Tomb of Dracula Volume 4 and Monster of Frankenstien Volume 1.
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I'm fascinated by other almost Hellblazer writers?
Like Cambell leaving before his run could take shape.
Anyone know any more?
Eddie Campbell really only intended to do 4 issues. He has said that he wasn't interested in doing a long series.
Eddie Campbell: I thought about this, I thought these people are ringing me about horror. I don't think I like horror, I don't think I'm interested in horror. I have problems with the Hellblazer thing... I'm only doing four issues of that. We were banging our heads over it, agreeing it isn't really 'in character'. I'm happy with it, the four issues I've done -- or at least I'm writing the third one now. But the trouble with the whole formula thing, because it's horror, because it's Hellblazer, because it's John Constantine, there has to be exactly five and a half ounces of nastiness per issue.Tabula Rasa: Does there have to be? With Garth Ennis there certainly is.
EC: Yeah. They're weighing it. They get my script and they weigh the nastiness and if it comes in an ounce short I've got to rewrite, I've got to add something in. I mean that Constantine himself has to exude nastiness. It's certainly an unusual book. There is no other like it.
TR: Is that editorial or reader expectation?
EC: Well, they've been selling it for eighty issues and they know what sells it. It's Vertigo's second best seller after Sandman. I don't think they like this horror connotation as a description of the whole Vertigo line. I was at the convention in Glasgow, and they were searching round for something they were happier with, and they were happy with 'Dark Fantasy' as a catch-all for what Vertigo is about. To me it's still horror, and I don't actually like horror. I mean the 'horror story' as manipulative entertainment. I'm not saying that if there is something horrible in the world we shouldn't draw attention to it... hide my head under the carpet like a big ostrich.
TR: There seems to be some dissatisfaction at Ennis' 'in your face' style and a desire to return to Delano's subtler, if still really nasty, methods.
EC: All that political stuff Delano was doing. Me, I've gone off the top, into total fantasy. They're seemed to be some perception when I came on that I was bringing it down to earth a bit more, but I've done totally the opposite.
TR: Reading the Deadface comics, they're very down-to-earth. I think the quintessential image was the Minotaur wearing the smoking jacket, Joe Theseus and so on. Is that the opposite of what you're doing in this?
EC: I can't really be myself on Hellblazer. I was asking Neil Gaiman before I got on to it and I said I don't think I can do it. They rang up to ask if I could write it -- Lou Stathis was editing Reflex Magazine about a year and a half ago and that went out of business. I used to write a column in there, called Genius, And How It Got That Way, they had asked me to write a column on the great comics in history. I thought, well I can do that. I couldn't be bothered writing a book review, because I'd have to read the book, I haven't got time to read a whole book for a fifty dollar write-up. So I wrote about the geniuses of the comic strip, Segar, Kurtzman, Will Eisner and Jules Feiffer were the ones I did, although the last one didn't appear, the magazine went bust and I didn't get paid for the last one. So Lou was out of a job and he landed at DC, with Vertigo.
TR: Was this in Britain?
EC: Reflex was a New York magazine. It was a Rock/Culture 'zine. They had a section on comics, three pages at the back. So that's my connection. Lou needed a writer since Garth was leaving Hellblazer at issue 83 and I think Lou decided to have a complete sweep clean. New cover artist, new writer, new artist, everything.
TR: Who's the artist on it?
EC: The artist is Sean Philips. But what happened was that we ended up taking so long to agree on what the hell we were doing. I did a synopsis and everybody was happy with it, but when I came to do the script they got it in and they weighed it and there was only two ounces of nastiness. It was taking so long to get it just so that they got Jamie Delano to do a fill-in issue, which is appearing as number 84, and I'm doing 85 to 88. So I had to come up with another three ounces of nastiness. Jamie's fill-in is brilliant, by the way. Two and a half kilos of undiluted evil.
TR: Do you think you could write something else for Vertigo that didn't have this big history behind it?
EC: I don't think I'm entirely in tune with the Vertigo house style at this juncture, but I'm thinking about it.
TR: Is that to do with its British domination and thus entirely pessimistic outlook?
EC: They've got this house style which is writer driven. I heard of one person who sent his script in, and Karen [berger] said there weren't enough words in it. Put some more in.
TR: She does seem to have a well-defined idea of what's going in.
EC: She's done well. It's business, selling comics, you work out what sells and you don't want to muck about with it too much.
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This may ave already been posted here, but I found it interesting as John Smith is one of my favorite hellblazer writers and I'd love to see his take on the title.
Returning to Sean Phillips, you and he worked on a "Hellblazer" fill-in for DC. How'd you get that job?I’d actually been one of the writers (along with Garth and I think Warren Ellis) who pitched to take over the book after Jamie Delano left. I’d already met Karen Berger by then and I submitted this huge sprawling outline with the next 2 or 3 years worth of stories laid out but I never got the job. DC probably just remembered my stuff from there and Stuart Moore asked me to do a fill-in while I was developing ‘Scarab’ (which was Doctor Fate at that time). He asked me to pick one of the single issue storylines from that original ‘Hellblazer’ proposal so I chose "Counting to Ten"…
What's it like working in John Constantine's head?
Grimy but interesting. It’s a shame I never got to do more with him because he is one of my favourite comics characters. I always preferred the Alan Moore ‘globetrotting occultist’ angle to Jamie Delano’s more introspective naturalistic view of the character and would have loved to have seen him trekking with Eskimos in the arctic and handgliding in the Grand Canyon and lounging round on four-poster beds with loads of Afghan hounds and beautiful women and stuff. Sort of Constantine meets "The Persuaders".
Strange that the one story I did get to write was so humdrum and down-to-earth. For that particular story I bought all the collected plays of Harold Pinter and tried to write what I thought would be a neat Pinteresque zombie story. There are lots of little in-jokes in there like the street names and stuff but that was the idea, yeah…
You also gained some notoriety among US readers for your Vertigo miniseries "Scarab". I read that was intended to be an ongoing series, but what happened?
Oh God. It’s a long and depressing story paved with poor intentions and misguided efforts. Like I said, it started out as ‘Doctor Fate’. I’d been submitting all this stuff to DC and not really getting anywhere when I got a phone call out of the blue one day from Stuart Moore asking if I’d like to take over writing ‘Doctor Fate’. I’d never really read DC Comics in any big way - all I knew about the character was from his appearance in Alan Moore’s ‘Swamp Thing’ – but opportunities like that don’t come every day so I said yes. Then someone there decided my take was a bit too extreme for Doctor Fate so Stuart asked me to revamp the proposal using a new character and new backdrop. The similarities are pretty obvious and in hindsight it wasn’t the cleverest idea ever but there you go. Stuart wanted me to create an alternate Golden Age history, a Vertigo take on all that ’40s stuff, which I did, all connected to this big background storyline which was gonna reintroduce all these Lost Heroes to the Vertigo universe, but we had to ditch all that when the continuing series got cut down to an eight issue miniseries. I think Vertigo had overestimated their own selling power and a lot of their new titles just didn’t get the advanced orders they expected and from what I understand Karen Berger just said: "No. Chop it down to a miniseries." Which, you know, considering it started off as a monthly ‘Doctor Fate’ comic…
I’ve since heard she hates my stuff anyway. There were lots of censorship problems and strange directives issued by Karen Berger and all my enthusiasm kind of fizzled away the more I was forced to change stuff. I mean, ditching all these supporting characters, ditching the continuing subplot that tied all the storylines together – it was just doomed to failure from the start.
(I remember one bit of censorship concerned a throwaway line about "anus-eyed children". It didn’t really mean anything in the context of the story – it was just a disturbing image meant to convey a disturbing atmosphere - but it was that kind of stuff they kept complaining about. There didn’t seem to be any logic to it all. You sort of expect some kind of editorial restraints in stuff for ‘2000AD’ because of its young(ish) readership but this was a horror comic from the much-touted new adult Vertigo line and it just really pissed me off that they wouldn’t stand by me and let me write the stories I wanted to write. Basically the whole ‘Scarab’ thing was a fiasco from beginning to end.
At the end of issue 7, we met two characters, Dazzler and Creed, who had me scurrying to the ‘Indigo Prime’ organizational chart to see if I'd forgotten them. Were they just cut from similar cloth, or did you have something more grandiose in mind?
A bit of both. I needed a deus ex machina ending and I had all this stuff figured out about what the Labyrinth of Doors really was but because the series was cut down to 8 episodes I never really got to use any of that stuff. Same with The Angelus/superhuman reproduction stuff on ‘New Statesmen’. We were going to discover that the Scarab suit was alive in its own right and would gradually gain independence and go out skulking over rooftops and into bedrooms to inseminate people, male and female; lay seeds in their minds and bodies and start to really fuck up the world… But by that time I was probably just so sick of the thing I thought - "Fuck it. I’ll rip off my own story" – and stuck in ‘Indigo Prime’ as a lazy way out.
Scarab recently returned in the pages of ‘JSA’, creating huge surprise and controversy among DC Universe fans. Were you consulted before James Robinson resurrected and then killed Louis?
No. Some guy at DC did leave a message on the answering machine but I never did get to speak to anyone. I thought it was just typical of DC’s sloppy handling of things. You’d think it’d be common courtesy to at least let you know what was going on, even if you don’t have any final say in the matter, but the editorial people don’t seem to understand such sentiments. Part of me thinks I deserve a second hearing from DC but a bigger part of me just thinks, "Fuck ’em."
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How did Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, from Staring at the Wall, remain?
Are they on Warner's label?
I dont get the reference. Please explain.
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apart from The Incredible Shrinking Man and scripting a few of those Corman Poe films, Matheson hasn't had a lot of luck with films really, has he?
Oh, I'd say he has great luck... I am legend (the price version) is quite good . . . matheson worte the screen play, and then, at a later point took his name off of it, but thats to be expected when you involve a writer with hollywood (OR the process of making movies in general).
Compare his luck to, say, H.P. Lovecraft's luck with films before you cry too hard for the guy.
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I first experienced John somewhere in the middle of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing American Gothic story arc, forcing me to buy back issues to fill the gaps back to his first appearance. I continued with Veitch's run, and I read Hellblazer itself through most of Delano's run. Then I dropped it until this damn movie reminded me just how great it was. I am slowly now filling the gaps with trade paperbacks.
Welcome ba
ck to the fold, old-timer!!! -
"What was your first exposure to endless arguing about the film adaptation of John Constantine: Hellblazer?"
Sorry. It gets old after awhile.
I was telling Jay y.d., "Why the fuck is the Forum still discussing the Hellblazer movie?"....yep.....
Because no one would discuss it in real life...
Sample discussion in the real world:
Me: Did you see Constantine?
Pretty girl/boy: No.
Me: Oh, well they totally fucked up the comic. Those bastards!!! I mean they missed the essence of John completely!!
Pretty girl/boy: Comic? You mean you read comic books???
Me: Umm... no, I read graphic novels.... (akward pause) So did you see v for vandetta?
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I had the poster that was, i think, the cover of issue 61 (with john holding the scalpel). But this was back in high-school mind you, which, to my chagrin was over ten fucking years ago . . . .
I took it with me to college, where it competed with my roomate's poster of the daniel version of Sandman.
Thinking back to it, its amazing that either of us ever got laid...:)
ck to the fold, old-timer!!!
Hellblazer Q&A
in Hellblazer
Posted
Oh my god... Christian wrong about somehting. I will savor this moment forever....
or maybe I should calm down and find a social circle.
and with post one-oh-one im done.