Tom Taylor and Darick Robertson take John Constantine to the neighborhood where he was born, because something is killing the rich in town and it’s the warlock’s fault.
superstar tom taylor (Batman the Detective, Suicide Squad, Superman the Son of Kal El) and the best-selling cartoonist David Robertson (The Boys, Transmetropolitan, Happy!, Punisher) join forces to tell a story of the best-known urban magician John Constantine. A story about social classes, friendship, sex and demonic pacts where nothing is what it seems. John comes home, and no one seems very happy about it.
Constantine receives some strange news: they are dying wealthy in as “originals” and all wear angelic wings attached. John knows a lot about hellish and angelic stuff, but this doesn’t sound like something on either side. The magician will return to his neighborhood at the request of an old friend to help solve the case. And that will open the trunk of bad memories and of his childhood, which, how could it be otherwise, was not too normal-
Tom Taylor is right now one of the best-selling screenwriters in the US. He combines quality in writing with interesting plots, a good handling of the characters and above all because it is never “just a fictional story” there is always something more. Whether it’s civil rights, a protest against American interventionism and neo-colonialism, the writer never has the idea of just entertaining.
In this case we see the English working-class neighborhoods that suffered during Tacherism, the class differences and even the obsession with privileges. Not only between humans, supernatural beings also have a class struggle. And all of this is wrapped up in a detective plot with the classic urban fantasy touches of the character, bad drool, tacos, a lot of sarcasm and bravado that in this case comes from the lower class rebelling in most cases.
Hellblazer has been the scene of many plots that have had a social and political background. Taylor does not attack anything head-on, she tells and shows you the situation, subtly and surrounding it with action and humor, leaving smiles with a hint of sadness at times. Even with everything, it is a model story of demonology, exorcisms and “Constantinian” bad blood. And by the way, to leave no one happy, John reveals himself as bisexual without throwing a party without being a big revelation, he just stole a friend’s boyfriend. So normalized that the one who sees it as a mistake because he destroys the character, is that he has never read the character.
Out of all controversy should be the art of Darick Robertson, a cartoonist who started with superheroes, his main presentation was the New Warriors after the departure of Mark Bagley, but who has long since taken his own personal path. With reality as his flag, with a hint of caricature and humor always present, the cartoonist leaves a clean style in terms of lines, but dirty in terms of what he represents, he is the best at making a lot of garbage look aesthetic in a vignette He knows how to tell everything with dynamism and simplicity, he is capable of being spectacular or showing a lot in gestures and details, and he likes reality. For something he is the co-creator with Garth Ennis of the series The Boys that has originated a hyper-brutal series, which is far from what the authors did on paper.
Hellblazer. rise and fall it reads in one shot, it has much more than a detective story, and there are demons, murders, magic and sex, and it has something very important to Taylor, it has a tribute to one of his great passions, Liverpool FC, and the importance of a sport for the working class that turns them into a community, that never lets them walk alone.