With comics so easily accessible at no cost, why not read 'em all? Adapted into a decent Keanu Reeves film a few years back, Garth Ennis' John Constantine, Hellblazer: Rake at the Gates of Hell is a standard-setting volume. The final act of the Constantine story, it boasts incredible layout and perhaps the best use of the comic medium that I've ever seen. Unfortunately, it's also shockingly immature, uncessarily vulgar, unremittingly oppressive, and its plot can be summarized as, "life's a bitch and then you die, unless of course some random homo ex machina* kills Satan and cures your lung cancer in the last panel." Sometimes stories read out of sequence make me thirst for the rest of the tale (case in point, Hellboy); Hellblazer is not one of those. Boring, I can handle. Stupid, I can handle. Boring and stupid? I may be unemployed, but I've still got better things to do. Watch the movie, for example.
*Don't get your vapors all fluttered, this isn't some weird slur against homosexuals, it's just a joke riffing off deus ex machina. In Latin, which this is, homo means "human", or "man". You're thinking of the Greek homo, which is the one that means "same", and it's kind of ironic if you think about it that that particular word has been co-opted to only have one understood sense or meaning.
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2 comments:
if you think this is "shockingly immature, uncessarily vulgar, unremittingly oppressive", wait 'till you read Ennis' "The Boyz" ;) :))
but I liked the 'Rake' series...
and the movie's best quality is that it manages to catch the "Constantinian" atmosphere without Ennis' excesses.
I think a big reason I'm so bitter about Hellblazer is that I really expected I'd like it, and wanted to like it because as a comic it's so incredible, so there's some pretty big disappointment colouring my hindsight.
And thanks for summing up the film in such an excellent fashion! I envy you people with the talent of being concise.
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