Hellblazer: The Devil's confession Pt. 2: The Devil's secret origin!

[alicemacher]

In my previous post, the First of the Fallen told a very unpriestly priest something that made him lose his faith and become a mad serial killer. Twenty-five years later, he restored the priest's sanity (but not his faith) and arranged things so he'd meet his now grown up would-be victim, John Constantine, one last time. Why? To serve as a warning for Constantine that the Devil was coming for him and that, just before he died and went to Hell, he'd hear the Devil's confession too. And now that time has come.

Note: some gore (of the blood-coughing-up sort).


6 2⁄3 pages of 24 from Hellblazer #83 (November 1994), the final chapter of "Rake at the Gates of Hell."



It looks like the end of the line for Constantine (again). The First, whom he's double-crossed and humiliated on three separate occasions, has finally come for him. He gives John back his late-stage lung cancer (see the "Dangerous Habits" arc) and, as he waits for the weakened man to die, their conversation turns to the secret, about God and creation, with which he'd once driven Father Tolly to despair and madness. Having no faith to lose, John asks to hear it, because "it might cheer [him] up."



















A bit of trivia: Ennis would return to the idea of a mad, masturbating God in Chronicles of Wormwood. In this case, however, he's depicted on-panel. It's an Avatar series; enough said.

Upon rereading this arc (my favourite of the Ennis works I'm familiar with), I think the First isn't an entirely reliable narrator. He presents himself as noble and idealistic, fighting Heaven simply to bring about a better world, and blames his fully turning heel on Constantine's treachery. But in his very first appearance in "Dangerous Habits,"before John's done anything to him, he speaks of mortals with nothing but utter contempt, such that John hates him on sight even apart from his being there to collect the soul of one of his dearest friends. And the First's subsequent words and actions throughout Ennis's run suggest to me someone who's long experienced with doing evil, not someone who's only just gone over to the dark side.

What do you think?

Comments

[cainofdreaming]

I dunno. To me it kinda reads like the events with John made him so angry that he awoke to realize what he was, not started him on that route. I mean, he admitted that he had been "bribing, cajoling and threatening" for his souls even before the war in heaven and the fall of Lucifer and his angels.

[thezmage]

So the devil knew that people would use free will to do the wrong thing even though there were no people with free will to base that judgment on, then gets kicked out of heaven because he saw God masturbating, and this is the grand truth that drove a priest insane? I could see depressed, and I could see homocidal, but I'm afraid I don't see insane

Maybe I'm just weird, but why should it matter if we were created by a kind and loving God, random chance, or by slobbering horrors from beyond the stars? We're still here, just like we've always been.

[leoboiko]

It might matter for the future. A blind, insane God might, for example, decide people's afterlives based on absurd criteria, like faith or sexual orientation.

[thezmage]

At least you get an afterlife, though. I mean, life is already rather unfair and random, why should the afterlives the be better?

[alicemacher]

"absurd criteria, like faith or sexual orientation."

I see what you did there. (And I agree.)

Though it seems to me that'd be more of a Lawful Stupid deity, specifically. One whose criteria for admission to paradise were wrongheaded and detestable, but at least consistent and in theory predictable.

Imagine, instead, a truly insane god whose admission criteria were constantly in flux and completely divorced from any sort of value system that humans could predict or even understand. "Do you like chicken à la king? Great, you're in." Then the next soul gets, "What colour is an ibix's cloaca? You don't know? BURN IN HELL FOREVER!" And so forth.

[leoboiko]

"What... is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?" (reference)

[alicemacher]

Then you could overthrow that god by countering, "African or European?"

[silicondream]

Thus, Calvinism.

[lissa_quon]

The Discworld book Monstrous Regiment sort of touches on this concept. Except their god isn't just insane - he died a long time ago and his capricious nature is in fact echoes of a dying diety they were trying to make sense of.

They don't go into very much - but the country that's been trying to live with this is a bit of a mess trying to muddle through.

[espanolbot]

Always wondered how that worked in the context of stuff like Small Gods. Like, there it had the idea that certain gods end up fading as people believe more in the structure built around a god than the god itself (gods needing belief to maintain power, basically).

Nuggan still have believers... sort of, but they seem to be more interested in the head of state than him, leading to her beign deified as the story progresses. Nuggan's priest had to be getting his rules from somewhere, as small gods generally don't have the power to talk to more than one person at a time or something, so where did the get their commandments from?

[nyadnar17]

Imagine being a citizen of North Korea. Except Kim Jong-Un has been infected with Joker toxin, is invincible and immortal, oh and you are immortal as well.

Imagine being a small child, with a child's dependence and understanding of reality and somehow gaining the adult understanding that your parents were totally insane.

Imagine if a Sim in the Sim's games became self-aware.

[thezmage]

You forgot the words "and always has been this way." The world works just fine. Sure, it could probably be better, but nothing's changed. The world is still what it always has been, and any intervention God is doing is so subtle that large groups of people are uncertain He even exists. I'm not going around murdering people right now, why should I start?

[cainofdreaming]

Or maybe he goes on massive killing sprees all the time. He just resets the universe afterwards. Kind of like the worst Sims or Simcity stuff you do to your simulated people when you're bored, since you know you've got a save point to fall back on.

[silicondream]

And I don't really know why drooling and masturbating in a corner would be insane, if you're God.* I mean, it's not like he has to worry about what the neighbors would think. And all of his bodily functions--as well as his body--are more or less optional, no? He has exactly as much reason to drool as he does to breathe.

Seems like this devil must have been created with a very British set of sensibilities. He's just lucky he never encountered God the way Ezekiel or John of Patmos did.

*or even if you're not God. Most people masturbate, and drooling's a matter of motor control, not sanity.

[thezmage]

Yeah, I was trying to say that, too. Dude likes to whack it in the Celestial City, He probably made the whole thing for that purpose anyway. Lucifer is the one imposing here, not God. I mean, he's apparently so rational most of the time that Lucy didn't think he was insane, why should one bit of drooling pleasure change anything?

[kamino_neko]

Lucifer and the First of the Fallen are two different characters. They don't even like each other.

[espanolbot]

Oh, have they met? I always wondered about that. :)

Particularly considering how the First embodies all the kinds of Satanic tropes that Lucifer himself tended to sneer at, them meeting should have been amusing.

[kamino_neko]

Actually, now that you mention it, I'm not actually sure.

I have distinct memories of the First and Luci talking about each other, but I couldn't say where or when that happened, so maybe it's just a couple imagined conversations...

[bruinsfan]

Interestingly, Holly Black's new Lucifer series is contradicting that. In it, Lucifer is the one who got involved in that mess with Constantine and Chantinelle, and destroyed Gabriel's heart.

It's possible that all the Ennis mess about a crude, endlessly vindictive Devil is just John Constantine's perception rather than the true state of affairs.

[stolisomancer]

The character believed so strongly in God's word and the rules that were handed down to him that he violated the sanctity of the confessional to attempt to reinforce those rules, condemning members of his flock to be ostracized, beaten, or worse with a smile on his face. Any sufficiently convincing evidence that God's word was in any way flawed, let alone evidence concerning the mental stability of God Himself, would be more than enough to set the man off.

[thezmage]

Well, first of all, the implication in this story is still that this should have a negative effect on John's sanity.

Second of all, there's nothing here that questions God's sanity or his moral judgment. He just likes to masturbate. he created everything, how He wants to rest on the seventh day is up to Him.

[stolisomancer]

You're really fixated on the idea that all He did was jerk off when the text itself, which is located conveniently at the top of this page, says that the issue was in fact that Satan found God in a mad, catatonic stupor.

That isn't a question of interpretation. You are voluntarily misreading the text.

[espanolbot]

Weeeellll the priest in question was of the bone-rigid sort who would unthinkingly do evil things because he thought that it was the Morally Right thing to do (a teenager confesses to him that he's gay, which the priest is so morally outraged by he violates the rule of confession and reports him to the police, leading to the kid dying in prison). So when Satan literally appears and seemingly lets the priest (who saw himself as a very holy, important person) into his confidence, this played to his ego enough that he thought that it was literally true.

Like the priest willingly did terrible things to people under the justification that it was because he worked for a Higher Authority, so the idea that the Higher Authority was as flawed caused him to have a mental breakdown.

[cyberghostface]

To me 'Chronicles of Wormwood' is Ennis trying to be as edgy as he can while failing to realize there's nothing edgy about it at all.

[stolisomancer]

"Edgy" implies he's solely attempting to shock, and even in Wormwood that isn't his sole goal. Sure, there are a few gags here and there that rely upon shock factor to have any impact, like Danny's sensationalist TV shows, but it's not the deliberat6e provocation of, say, punk music or '60s science fiction.

Instead, he's finding a story from examining old religious tropes with an atheist's eyes. The central question is Epicurus's: if there actually is a God, and the world is still allowed to be how it is, then what does that say about God? In Hellblazer, it's that God's insane (although the point about the First of the Fallen hardly being an unbiased narrator is well made); in Preacher, it's that He's a nearly perfect narcissist; in Wormwood, He's senile and childish, but the systems of the afterlife He established have come to function smoothly and well without His involvement. In each case, they're examinations of faith, and more accurately, examinations of what faith leads the faithful to be able to do.

If there's a work in Ennis's religious fiction that I'd accuse of being pointlessly provocative, it's probably Just A Pilgrim, where the heroic denouement involves the protagonist finally renouncing God. It's one of his more obscure works for a reason.

[cyberghostface]

I'd say 80-90% of it is if not an attempt to shock/offend then to preach to a choir that laps up such stuff. We have the Antichrist engaging in anal sex with Joan of Arc, the Pope being a dirty old man sexually abusing nuns, the aforementioned masturbating idiot God, in addition to sight gags like a guy with an ejaculating penis nose. The closest thing to thoughtfulness is reimagining Jesus as a brain-damaged black man. But again they're all easy targets with virtually no real fallout.

[stolisomancer]

Those are all gags. You're confusing jokes for the actual core of the work.

The thoughtfulness you're looking for comes from the notion of, for example, heaven having rearranged itself around a sole principle of having done no harm, while hell seems to exist in that cosmology primarily as a tool for self-punishment. Danny himself wrestles with the idea that he may have been using the circumstances of his birth as an excuse for his own bad behavior, as represented by his attempts to reunite with Maggie, and in turn, that causes him to ask questions about how much it's possible for him to change at all.

Ennis very much wraps much of his work in facile gags and black comedy, as do many of the other UK-based writers of his particular era, but it's a mistake to conclude those gags and that comedy are anywhere near the sole substance of the work. He may get his blood up around the Catholic church and religion in general, particularly in the 2010-2014 period, but it's a poor reading to brush Ennis off as someone who's only writing to shock.

[cyberghostface]

I'm not confusing anything. I recognize what the message is its just surrounded by infantile gags and shock attempts. Like I'm sure he thinks Crossed is some deep commentary about mankind's inner nature but at the end of the day the humor comes in a family of comic geeks getting raped and disemboweled (and not in that order) and someone getting beaten with a severed horse cock.

[stolisomancer]

And now you're saying two different things.

Further, you're ascribing a moral to Crossed that isn't supported by the text. The point of it, in Ennis's hands, is in finding stories from hopelessness. The sequence of the nerd's death in the first issue isn't meant to be humorous even outside of the text; it's a wakeup call for the reader. It's cruel, sure, both in and out of the story, but it is neither treated as or meant to be comedy.

You do have to dig through some pretty weird/stupid jokes a lot of the time with Ennis, and I understand perfectly if a reader feels it isn't worth the slog. What bugs me is when people try to make inaccurate critical proclamations about his work, like trying to claim he's some jaded forum edgelord. That says a lot more about what you're bringing to the work than the work itself.

[espanolbot]

Going to have to say that considering the context of Ennis' childhood (growing up in Ireland during a time of sustained religious violence, with the Church getting up to some decidedly sketchy stuff like the Magdelene Laundries and the whole pedophile priest thing), it is at least understandable WHY he would have the views he does.

[stolisomancer]

I do wonder if some of the backlash against Ennis is because of the sheer number of would-be trendy atheist philosophers that seem to be all over the place lately, ranting into a video camera in a trilby or fedora and generally lowering the air quality.

There's a difference between somebody who came to atheism relatively honestly, since his entire life's been shaped by a serious and protracted religious conflict, and somebody for whom it's just a single facet of an ongoing attempt to get his parents' attention, or whatever the hell it is that Reddit atheists are trying to accomplish, but people seem to want to judge them on the same scale.

[cyberghostface]

I just looked at my initial comment and I'm not sure where the contradiction is.

"To me 'Chronicles of Wormwood' is Ennis trying to be as edgy as he can while failing to realize there's nothing edgy about it at all."

I never said that he had no other goal just that this was an example of him trying to be edgy or offensive and going around in circles.

[stolisomancer]

You started by claiming it was all an attempt to offend; then you claimed it was 85% to 90% of it; then you backtracked again. I get the feeling you haven't sat down and read much of Ennis besides the occasional page that gets posted here, so you're clinging to an incomplete picture in order to justify a dislike. In fact, this is an argument I've had with you specifically before, although it wasn't about Ennis then.

[cyberghostface]

I never said anything of the sort. Maybe you can point to my specific quotations where i said so.

And fwiw I've read the entire first miniseries of Wormwood.

[espanolbot]

I'm honestly kind of curious as to where Lucifer fits into all of this, considering how the First of the Fallen isn't referenced at all within the Sandman comics at any point to my knowledge. I mean, chances are Lucifer Morningstar is in LA at this point, but by the same token Hell is being ruled by representatives of Heaven at this point, which makes me wonder where the First fits into all of this.

Could be that Hell is so vast that the First has his own sub-kingdom, or he THINKS that he's in charge while Lucifer only allowed him to think he was for his own amusement.

[lego_joker]

Whoever "truly" rules Hell is whoever's comic you like better. ;)