GUEST POST Constantine #18 review by Colin Smith

Why can't the cool be distilled from the challenging, the attitude from the provocation, the pleasurable shiver from the unnervingly taboo, the comfortingly lad-thrilling from the tragic and the confounding? 

Why not John Constantine, super-magician? Skill, a cunning change of genre and a clear sense of purpose can transform even the most unsettling of characters into intrinsically comforting figures. From Cyrano de Bergerac comes Fire Chief CD Bales, from the ruthlessness of pulp-era Batman comes Adam West's joyous interpretation, and even Granny-shocking Johnny Strabler eventually morphs into The Fonz. So, what if John Constantine wasn't, for all his dubiously good intentions and crass charm, a poisonous mess of irresponsibility, faithlessness, self-loathing, impulsiveness and hubris? Why not a heroically tarnished, cursed-but-indomitable hero rather than a repeatedly toxic everybloke? What if we were to ultimately sympathise far more with Constantine than his cannon-fodder victims, and what if his unsettling physical vulnerability was homoeopathically diluted by the clear implication of a superhero's might? 

Taken on its own terms, there's no reason an all-ages Constantine can't be at the very least interesting. He couldn't be the fabulously dangerous and profoundly damaged anti-hero of Moore and Delano and Ennis and their peers, but why can't a kid-friendly, don't-scare-the-horses Constantine be entertaining, and even challenging, in its own right? More has been achieved with a great deal less.

On the evidence of writer Ray Fawkes and artist Jeremy Haun's 'Half A Chance', the problem's not that Constantine's been reframed so much as that he's been bowdlerised. Though the work seems anxious to insist that this Constantine is compellingly tragic and rebellious, he's been stripped of many of his most distinctive and unsettling characteristics. Boy-thrilling self-pity has replaced the conviction of irredeemable guilt, while PC-quips and one-note braggadocio have supplanted the threat of a truly dangerous outlier. Instead of a profoundly unsettling and somewhat contemptible social refusenik, Fawkes and Haun's Constantine has all the carefully emasculated cool of a boy band aimed at the early teen market. 

As such, 'Half A Life' fetishises power and arrogance rather than dissecting their appeal and consequences, flirting with the pretence of defiance and a suggestion of uncomfortable emotions while delivering a securely banal experience. It's a circle that can't be squared. Much of the surface of the old Hellblazer remains, but Constantine's been drained of his old capacity to challenge, amuse and upset.

'Half A Life' is nothing but a by-the-numbers, humourless, issue-long set-to between Constantine and his mystical enemies, and the more the comic tries in its over-serious, dead-hearted and wisecracking way to pretend otherwise, the more obvious it becomes.

For all that Constantine remains positioned as a sneering counterweight to the superheroes of the DCU, he's clearly now little more than a costumed crimefighter himself. With his deflection charms, duelling magik and defensive chants, he's far more the heroic brawler than the would-be-Machiavellian, out-of-his-depth troublemaker. So clearly does Constantine now fit with the superhero tradition that his once-defining contempt for "costumes" appears ludicrous. (As absurd, in fact, as his Eighties costume of red tie and trenchcoat, which is surely as irrelevant to today's culture as Sherlock Holmes' deerstalker and churchwarden pipe. But then, surely a rebooted Constantine for today should be associated with something more daringly contemporary than Seventies English punk?) With little but the lack of Lycra and a remarkably unconvincing English accent to clearly distinguish Constantine from the Nu52's default Dark Age product, the comic's insistence that it really is brave and dark and disconcerting strikes as both pretentious and embarrassing. In truth, its ethics are nothing more nuanced than kill-or-be-killed, while its intellectual ambition extends no further than the mechanics of ripping a super-baddie's body in half. No matter how tastefully dingy the colours of Richard and Tanya Horie, 'Half A Chance' is entirely free from the suspense that it aspires to project. Too glibly grim to escape the memory of Hellblazer's fundamental spirit and purpose, Constantine seems to be constantly drawing attention to its own inadequacies.

Yet if the premise of the strip is barely baked, its execution is frequently woeful. Trying not to offend while striving to maintain Constantine's belligerent cool results in some truly appalling, if undeniably treasurable, dialogue from Fawkes. Amongst a number of jostling examples, perhaps the most remarkable involves Constantine's attempted putdown of the one-note supervillain Wotan:

'It's like listening to a goose caught in a car engine. Honk honk bloody honk all day and all night.'

Honk honk bloody honk indeed.

Displaying a similar aptitude for accents, Fawkes channels the laughable faux-Cockney of Dick Van Dyke's Bert from Mary Poppins with a splutter of inexplicably dropped 'H's and cries of 'Oi!' from his supposedly British cast. That he sets his bar scenes in Liverpool only underlines how Fawkes' version of the London accent is as inappropriate as it's inept. (My favourite stab at working class speech from Fawkes is 'rounding the bend over thirty', a fantastically unconvincing way of expressing the aging process in cod-proletarian.) 

That exclusively tin ear for character and speech shouldn't, however, be allowed to obscure the more fundamental problems with Fawkes' work. With whatever passes as foreshadowing proving thin and obtuse, the comic's conflict depends on the piling up of one deus ex māchinā after another. Since the reader can't possibly predict how Constantine will eventually thwart Wotan's assault, it's impossible to care about a sequence of plot beats that appear largely without warning and pass without impressing. It's as if the fact that Wotan will end up torn in two, as DC's obsession with asinine body-horror appears to insist, can compensate for the longueurs of the interminable preceding face-off.

Regrettably, neither Constantine nor Wotan are lent anything of depth to complement their desire to do away with one another. This is all about pontificating blokes fighting to the death and little else at all. (An attempt to introduce a sprinkling of emotion in the scenes featuring Constantine's alt-Earth doppelganger flounders in excruciating dialogue and confusing scripting.) With his taste for would-be poetic captions - 'The air is screaming. It seems to relinquish itself to the ground in whirling heat...' - penchant for enervatingly decompressed pacing, and habit of failing to explain key plot points such as the end of Earth 2 and Constantine's grotesque attackers, Fawkes' script defies involvement. Bad things happen, and then more bad things happen, and then the badder bad guy meets a terrible end before the story, as it has to, judders to a close.

To be concluded ... here

For four years, Colin Smith's Too Busy Thinking About My Comics provided some of the most thought-provoking and enjoyable writing about comics on the internet, taking in everything from the fundamentals of the Fantastic Four to the question of aliens as second class citizens.  Colin is busy with other projects - a book on Mark Millar due next year and regular writings at Sequart - but the archive remains. Devour it. Wondering what he's making of DC's New 52, I suggested Colin review a random title, and Constantine #18 is it.