Name Forthcoming: John's World

I've already mentioned that the ending to the Hellblazer series is in sight and that that is bumming me out a little bit. I've come to absolutely love John Constantine's world and as depressing as it sometimes can be, I really don't want to leave.

And so, after reading Hellblazer volume 20 I decided to collect and read some of the series that, at times, have overlapped with Hellblazer. There were some obvious avenues of exploration, the protagonists from different comics usually standing out like a bloody nose, easily straining the seams of the story and the very fabric of the world Constantine inhabited simply by their nature alone, simply by showing up.

As mythological fiction is one of my favourite pastimes there were a few series that had been hinted at in Hellblazer that I had already become acquainted with solely because of their own merit. The one that I had started reading at about the same time as I read Original Sins (HB 1) was Neil Gaiman's dark fantasy epic Sandman, which, unaccustomed as I was with comics as a whole at the time, I definitely had some problems with: The art style was terrifyingly inconsistent, the stories themselves meandering and sometimes connected only by the loosest of threads to the main narrative; if said main narrative could be even said to exist. And though it all was quite excellently written and the series as a whole quite satisfying on its conclusion, I was far more fond of Hellblazer, and it didn't really feel as if these stories, these "Endless", could inhabit the same world as Constantine.

My main desire (in the past?) in collecting and reading fiction was to have a complete set of stories, to have a library of fiction, with my chosen and favoured sagas to be complete, present and accounted for, on the shelves. All the stories that were connected with each other would be available to any peruser, with nothing left out and everything to find.
And Sandman made me realize that even though it seemed to exist in the same realm as Hellblazer, it also did not, not really, and that this was something that was very present in comics as a whole. It bothered me for a while, but these days, I've come to see it as more of a bonus rather than a reason not to pick up any given series.

Either way, and anyway, Constantine showed up quite early in Sandman's run, and then disappeared back into his own stories. Apparently there were a few references to his continuity squirrelled away in the pages of Sandman, but they've not managed to stand out enough to have made them memorable. To me at least.
But Sandman did give rise to something that was memorable, something infinitely more in my ball-park; the excellent Lucifer.

I'm still not done reading the whole thing, but even now, on a re-read of those books that I had already read and which will be continued on into the one I hadn't, it's still pretty undeniable how insane this comic is. It all keeps escalating, and because of this it's a good idea to space this series out a bit, as after a while your mind just gets numbed by the constant universe-shattering stuff. I read the first 4 books when I was high on pain killers but I stopped short of reading the fifth and final one. Lucifer at that point just became a little too 'big' for me. I tried to continue on into book 5 but I just couldn't keep it all in my head. Too much wildly escalating epic stuff mixed with a very detached state of mind courtesy of medication.

And so that's why I'm here for round 2, doing the devil's dance again.

And as for how this one ties into the misadventures of John Constantine?
Well, you'd think that Hellblazer and Lucifer would be closely linked, because what's in a name after all? but they really aren't.

Hellblazer occasionally mentions the Morningstar as being absent from hellish affairs but on the whole prefers to create its own pantheon of devils and fallen angels. I remember being quite confused at who exactly the First of the Fallen was when I realized he wasn't actually Lucifer.
The answer to who this being was, when it finally was revealed, was rather mind-blowing, and if this was any other series than Hellblazer the idea itself would have been explored and played around with. But this is John's world, and the big mythological bastards usually end up with nothing other than a huge middle finger.

Either way, and in any case, Sandman and Lucifer, and then of course the standalone Death comic, exist in a realm more or less their own, even though they don't really. They don't 'feel' like hellblazer and they don't work well alongside its storylines as Sandman and Lucifer have consistently and improbably huge mythology-uprooting journeys. They're these bafflingly massive things, completely incompatible with any story on a human level - at a macro-level (if you see what I mean?), because their smallest collateral side-effects tend to uproot human reality in a universe-altering way. Every mythology you can think of is incorporated in a story wherein gods and devils routinely die, where new realities are created par the course, and where every 2- or 3- parter will likely violently end in a cataclysmic, and quite frequently also in rather an emotionally upsetting, manner. That's mostly Lucifer though, as I remember Sandman being quite benign, though not afraid to kill off major characters.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that, even though they technically exist in the same sandbox with Hellblazer, there are other comic series that are comfortably quite a bit closer to Hellblazer while also having a more active hand in its stories. And so, when I decided to venture further into the Hellblazer-universe one title immediately presented itself:

I had previously dismissed it, despite its pedigree, despite its impact on comics as a whole, simply because I don't like superheroes. Not the capes, not the ethos, not the endless reboots and cross-overs. But either way, it's not that this thing looks like any conventional superhero, right?