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