Jamie Delano's Hellblazer: Hunger

[alicemacher]

[In Hellblazer] I was always just writing whatever my characters told me to. They all existed in an (enhanced) reality that I shared and responded to it with a tip of the hat to genre. Being a bit of a squeamish sort, horror has never been my first love. I slipped into writing it largely through the opportunity presented by Hellblazer and discovered its allegorical potential. I exploited the genre to dramatise the aspects of human existence that disturbed me.

-- Jamie Delano, Interview with Tabatha Wood, April 10, 2020

Warning for body shaming, child abuse and gore. Also, discretion is advised for those with a history of eating disorder.


From Hellblazer #1 (Jan. 1988). Art by John Ridgway. 13 pages of 40.

In this series of posts I explore the opening run of Hellblazer (1st series) by Delano. However, unlike with my series on Moore's Swamp Thing and Morrison's Animal Man runs, I won't be covering the whole thing (which comprised #1-40, including four guest-written issues). The reason is simple: when the run was good, it was very, very good, but when it was bad, it was... not horrid, but kind of "meh." My tentative plan is to cover the opening two-parter, the untitled Resurrection Crusaders vs. Damnation Army arc, "The Fear Machine" storyline, and "The Family Man" arc. I'll also post from the better single-issue and two-issue stories, by Delano and by others. And now, the first issue.











After some time out of the country, Constantine returns to his flat in Paddington, London. His landlady testily informs him that he has a guest, a seedy friend of his who had her post a package to the U.S., costing her £17.50. John reimburses her and enters his apartment, finding it a mess. To his disgust, he spots a heroin needle, indicating the presence of one Gary "Gaz" Lester. He's disgusted in a different sense to find the needle is full of insects. John finds even more insects in the kitchen and especially the fridge. Nauseated, he enters the bathroom, where he finds the fully-clothed Gaz in the bathtub, covered in bugs and freaking out over what he assumes are withdrawal hallucinations. A trip to the convenience store and a call to his long-suffering friend/lackey Chas later...










Gaz, whose addiction to magic almost rivals that of his to heroin, tied the boy to his bed and exorcised the demon Mnemoth, inadvertently killing the boy in the process. He trapped Mnemoth in a bottle and felt mighty pleased with himself.










Constantine instructs the reluctant Chas to stay over for three days and mind Gaz ("No buts, mate. You owe me") while, following the lead of a contact at the British Museum, he flies to the Sudan and seeks out a particular shaman. The elder has John join him in chewing a powerful psychedelic root so John can learn, by sharing in the shaman's recent experience, how to bind and defeat Mnemoth.







The shaman, to his remorse, learns from the vision that because he didn't see through the mutual consumption process to the end, the boy was found and sold to slavers, and was thus kept alive with the demon still inside him. Armed with this knowledge, John returns to London, picks up Gaz, and travels with him to New York.

After losing patience with his friend's withdrawal pangs and chewing him out for letting loose a demon on "one of the foremost population centres of the globe," Constantine heads with him for the Midnight Club, headquarters of the Haitian crime boss and voodoo mage Papa Midnite. He breaks in through the back, roughly commands a threatening zombie servant to stand down, and surprises Midnite on the roof of his club.







Leaving Gaz in Midnite's care, John drops by Emma's apartment, succumbing to the temptation to visit. (She had died there in Swamp Thing #37, leaping out the window in panic as an invunche she'd just sketched came to life and pursued her.) He regrets this when he encounters her ghost for the first time, thereby kicking off one of the recurring motifs in Constantine's guilt-ridden life: visits from ghosts of friends and loved ones whose association with him led to their doom.







John decides to make the most of this and chats amicably with Emma as they follow the trail of Mnemoth's victims, eventually locating the demon itself in a church, where a priest tries to fend it off with his cross. As he's done before and will do again, John lets his bravado get the better of him.










Funny how this closing panel of imminent chowing-down on Christ's image easily passed editorial muster at DC, while Rick Veitch's attempt the following year to include Jesus himself, in a fully respectful manner, in Swamp Thing #88, got nixed. (Yes, there was the background of the recent controversy over The Last Temptation of Christ film. But still.)

In any case, up next is the conclusion to the Mnemoth story.

Comments

[cyberghostface]

The opening scene reminds me of a book I read called “The Troop” although the cause is a parasite there.

[lego_joker]

Ahh, I'd been hoping you'd get around to this... I've been told by a friend that Delano's stuff sucks compared to both Moore and Ennis, so I've been a bit gun-shy about starting it. These posts could very well change my mind.

So... we're not covering the Vampire Thatcher ("Voting Tory May Be Hazardous To Your Health") story, then? Bummer.