Piccolo Explorer Books - Mysteries - Ghosts (1981)

 

Title – Piccolo Explorer Books - Mysteries - Ghosts 
Authors – Words by David Lambert.  Illustrations  by Harry Bishop
Publisher - Pan Books.
Format - soft back
Year - 1981
Original Cost – 0.75p

I think these kinds of books were made just for staring at!

I've got a small selection of  the Piccolo Explorer series but being as I'm on a bit of a supernatural curve at the minute, what with rereading my Hellblazer comics, this seemed like the best one to start with.  

I was around 13 when I got this and if I read it at the time I don't remember a single word or story.  Picture-wise though, they are all still in there; tattooed on the brain.

Most pages give you just a few lines on a handful of reported incidents from around the world and through history but the illustrations by Harry Bishop are so rich and full of character and mood that to be honest the words are redundant anyway.

The best sections for me now, as an adult, are the last two: Ghost Hunting and What Ghosts Are.  You can clearly hear the author and the publisher washing their hands of all responsibilities for any childhood nightmares by being very level headed and skeptical about the whole idea of Ghosts even being a real thing anyway.  Its an excellent example of having your cake and eating it, especially after 10 double page spreads of cinematic sinisterness.  But they knew what dark doors they opened up for us and we loved them for it then and now

This is one of those books that you probably got rid of when you turned into cool teenager or a serious young adult. But when you've grown past all that, you find yourself seeking them out again because the images have haunted the back of your childhood memories for the intervening decades. Looking though its pages again now is to be instantly transported back to when you were that wide-eyed child and both excited and scared at the possibility of your own encounter with something from beyond the grave.

There was only you and those pictures and you looked at them for so long that you traveled into them... and they into you.

Brilliant Brilliant stuff.

Steve

Hellblazer #89 & #90 (1995)

Title – Hellblazer #89 Dreamtime & #90 Dangerous Ground
Authors – Paul Jenkins / Sean Phillips
Publisher - DC Vertigo
Format - Comic Book (two issue story)
Year - 1995
Original Cost – £1:50

And so starts the Paul Jenkins / Sean Phillips run proper with John still in Australia where Eddie Campbell's previous story had left him. John dives deep into Aboriginal myth and magic via the Dreamtime and confronts the great serpent god with some classic Constantine bravado.  Deals are struck, plans are hatched, and debts are banked to be paid back later.

Jenkins nails the attitude of our hero from the off and has a wonderful sarcastic and world weary line of dialogue that reassures the Hellblazer fan that their protagonist is in safe hands.  Even if he is venturing into a magical realms new to him and the comic book.

That said, as a child of the 70s, Australia was the setting for a lot of influential new wave cinema that eventually washed up on my portable TV via late night BBC 2 movies seasons.  Walkabout (1971), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), The Last Wave (1977) and Long Weekend  (1978) to pick four of the most resonant.  So to find John Constantine exploring this same storyscape, was particularly satisfying to me because its strangeness had a familiarity.  And here was one more tale on which I could return to it.

As a reread all these years later it still kept me entertained and amused but I'm equally keen to get on into the run and see Constantine back into Britain where he best belongs.  As a clue of what was to come, Jenkins used the letters page to introduce himself and shares some elements of the pitch that won him the new regular writers seat.  He describes Constantine as;

"...a working-class magician, a hedonist whose conscience kept getting in the way of his pursuit of pleasure, a man on the mend after an unexpected bout of nihilism."

and in regard where he was taking him;

"I wondered aloud about the untapped landscape of English magical symbolism that was waiting to be mined."

I would have given him the job as well.

More soon

Steve