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Hellblazer by Garth Ennis – Classic Constantine Contemplations

December 9, 2014 by Nick Bryan Leave a Comment

Inspired by the launch of that Constantine TV show, Comixology recently held a generous sale on Hellblazer, the original for-mature-readers John Constantine series. I took this opportunity to finally read in order the entire Garth Ennis-written run on that title, the work that broke Ennis into American comics and first teamed him with Steve Dillon, with whom he’d later create Preacher.

For the uninitiated – Hellblazer is a horror comic about John Constantine, trenchcoated modern-day wizard antihero, confronting supernatural/magical unpleasatness in a modern setting. He was created during Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing stories, before spinning off into own series after fans enjoyed his manipulative schemes and wry British comments.

Hellblazer distinguished itself from other urban fantasy via particular emphasis on straight-up awful horrific moments and a tendency to reference real modern-day British issues rather than just the affairs of its own fictional universe, all of which made it a massive cult hit.

Long time ago, when we were young…

Now – I’ve only read Ennis’ run in segmented chunks before, mostly due to DC/Vertigo’s until-recently-quite-shitty approach to reprinting Hellblazer. The original issues came way before every single comic book got a collected edition as a matter of course, but thanks to Ennis/Dillon’s later success, there was a half-arsed attempt to collect this early collaboration. Sadly, these had no helpful volume numbering and an annoying habit of skipping non-Dillon issues.

I, meanwhile, was a teenager in a suburban-Essex library where neither Google nor Wikipedia had emerged yet. Not a chance in hell(blazer). But DC have, at last, started collecting early Hellblazer in easy-to-follow numbered volumes. On the down side, they’ve cancelled the monthly comic and relaunched it as the no-longer-so-horrific all-ages Constantine series, but… y’know, it’s something.

Stories within stories

John Constantine is sad, he is so very sad

Not getting into big spoilers, the ongoing storylines of Garth Ennis’ Hellblazer hinge on two points:

  1. In the first (very well-regarded and good) storyline Dangerous Habits, John discovers he’s dying of lung cancer from his years of smoking. Escaping that certain death requires such a big, risky deal, he ends up dealing with the repurcussions for the rest of the run, right up to the climax.
  2. Constantine finds himself in an unusually healthy and normal relationship with Kit, a dead friend’s ex, to whom he makes a lot of promises about not fucking it up by getting in deep with magic. These prove difficult to keep, especially with the aftermath of that first point hanging over him.

As is the joy of monthly comics, there are a lot of diversions into horror vignettes along the way. Still, the Ennis run broadly reads as one big novel covering those two interweaving stories. Scattered references to past Hellblazer storylines, but you can basically read it as a complete unit in itself. It’s fine. God knows I only knew the bare-bones basics when I started, and I’ve still not read that much other Hellblazer now.

The Litany

I first kinda-sorta read chunks of this run in my late teens, and re-reading it now, a lot of it came lumbering out of my past recollections. I didn’t realise to what extent I’d half-absorbed it, nor how much I’d failed to understand some of the broader themes – especially the many references to political and social issues of the time.

I’ll be the first to admit, I’m still not shit-hot on the tensions of 80s-90s Britain, but the ideas about race and class in these Hellblazer issues shot straight over never-left-suburbia teenage Nick’s head. Good to see all this time reading liberal Twitter has changed something in me.

It’s interesting reading this as an early Garth Ennis work, spotting some of the tools he’d later become extremely known for – pontifications on self-destruction and the effects of extreme actions; the enduring nature of male friendship; crowbarring a war story into an unrelated plot; creating strong and likable relationships, then putting them under extreme pressure.

It also features a predilection towards demons delivering rather long, ponderous and flowery monologues, a tendency Ennis thankfully dialled down in later works – Preacher, in particular, featured a lot of heavenly beings, but less of their unvarnished soliloquies.

Also, it’s so easy to think of Hellblazer as a forerunner to other tortured urban fantasy antiheroes, you forget how much more genuine horror there was, how many times Constantine was faced with magic not just as a vague swirly force, but a really on-the-nose, awful esclation of something wrong with the real world. There’s not as much extrapolating through metaphor, far less excuse to think, actually, this isn’t really happening. Because a lot of it clearly is, and that’s when this book really works. The visceral stuff.

Ennis was, I gather, pretty young when he wrote this, and he’s definitely youthfully angry about some stuff. Another character type Ennis always writes well, and often applies to the many forces that displease him: idiots bringing about their own doom.

I’m a sucker for Dillon’s art after growing up on Preacher, and he’s great for this kind of stuff, creating a grounded real world around Constantine – a plausibility that only makes it more brutal when fucking horrible magic hits home. William Simpson, the other main artist involved, is excellent too – his work carries a washed-out, ghostly feel, bringing out the End-Of-The-Line-Mate sense permeating Dangerous Habits.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t all a grim journey into the heart of darkness – yes, things inevitably get bad before the big showdown, but before that, in order to make us care about JC and chums, there’s a lot of real human warmth in there. Yet another Ennis trick – writing dialogue that actually feels like human conversation rather than… well, like dialogue. Look, here’s John talking to a rabbit.

Whereas today, on the other hand…

The weirdest part about reading this book again, to be honest, is realising how much it’s influenced me. Much like when I revisited Quantum & Woody a while back, this is a series that got to me young, even if always as a supplement to Preacher, and a lot of the lingering regret and tone of world-weariness does come up in my work. I look at John Hobson (of Hobson & Choi fame) after this re-read and think, actually, there’s a bit of the Ennis Constantine in there. Only without the magic, obviously.

I’m also following the Constantine TV show, and I think one reason old-school Constantine fans aren’t all taking to it is a lack of the two points I mentioned that distinguish Hellblazer from standard urban fantasy: genuine horror and real world relevance. But on its own merits, it’s a reasonably entertaining pulpy supernatural antihero show, helped along by Matt Ryan being quite good as John himself (even if other characters can be a bit flat).

That, in summation, is every thought I had after re-reading the Garth Ennis Hellblazer run. Hope you enjoyed the piece. Do check out the comics in question if they sound appealing – they genuinely are quite good. The Ennis stuff is Hellblazer #41-83 plus a few specials, or volume 5-8 of the recent collected editions (only the last six issues of book 5 are by Ennis).

And if the comparisons with Constantine make you want to buy the first book in my Hobson & Choi series, I won’t discourage you from doing that either.Now, I might even try reading some other Hellblazer some time.

Filed Under: Comic Reviews Tagged With: comics, constantine, dc comics, garth ennis, hellblazer, john constantine, my influences, retrospective, steve dillon, vertigo, william simpson

My Writing Music – Songs to mash the keyboard to

May 27, 2014 by Nick Bryan Leave a Comment

Some writers don’t listen to music while they work, needing constant silence to produce their genius. However, I require an endless rolling soundtrack to drown out the screaming choirs of my own insanity (10 points for knowing where I stole that last phrase from), so I get through a lot of tracks.

A lot of the choices go in phases – new records come out, or I fancy immersing myself in the music of one artist, so I load my phone up with their albums. Then I listen to this person exclusively for a while, until I’m sick of them and don’t want to hear anything they’ve done for months.

A few songs/sounds do survive the gap though – elevate themselves above the flighty phases and become evergreen presences. Here, then, are my perpetual audio companions. Apologies if a few of them turn out to be part of temporary phases and I’m just blinded by momentary love.

Warren Ellis – SPEKTRMODULE

SPEKTRMODULE - by Warren Ellis

SPEKTRMODULE is an irregular ambient music podcast by British comics/novels writer Warren Ellis and is rarely far from my writing playlist. It helps that there’s loads of it and new ones sometimes slip out, but even with that, it’s a good soundtrack. A nice combination of atmospheric and relaxing, and always my first go-to when I don’t feel like listening to music with lyrics.

You can see all the episodes in their category on his blog, or subscribe to the iTunes feed here. Well worth a look.

In other beepy/electronic music, I sometimes listen to the Social Network and Girl With The Dragon Tattoo soundtracks by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, but they’re a little too scary to relax into.

Gorillaz – The Fall

This is the lesser-known fourth Gorillaz album, the one with less budget, very few famous guest artists and sparse/instrumental songs recorded on an iPad about Damon Albarn’s loneliness while touring America.

It didn’t top the charts like other cartoon monkey records, but it is great writing soundtrack material. Haunting and driving in equal measure. And just in general, if you like a good Blur/Albarn song, there are some nice ones on here, especially Little Pink Plastic Bags, The Parish of Space Dust and Amarillo.

The new Damon Albarn solo album Everyday Robots is pretty too, though a bit too languid for work-motivating purposes – in my opinion, at least.And to complete this segment, here’s the excellent song Amarillo in YouTube form.

R.E.M. – Up

I really like R.E.M., for which I blame their total ubiquity on my parents’ stereo when I was younger. Although considering they and Blur/Gorillaz are two of my favourite artists, it’s also possible I like music where the focus is just as much on the clever lyrics as the songs – this might be a writer trait? I don’t know. Someone tell me I’m normal, for god’s sake.

Putting self-analysis aside, a lot of R.E.M.’s stuff is hooky, attention-seeking indie-rock and not always ideal background work music. The album Up, however, shifted towards whispering, downbeat stuff or, even on the less grim songs, a swirl of noise rather than louder, more straightforward indie.

A music-minded person might say this is the album where R.E.M. most tried to replicate their good friends in Radiohead, but either way, this album really works for me as writing music. More so than most Radiohead stuff, actually, although Kid A does come out when I’m hitting the misery juice hard.And now, for a sample, the song Suspicion which I’ve always found pretty lovely.

Honourable Mentions

At this point, there is a risk of hitting some stuff that’s just a phase. For example, the new Elbow album The Take-Off And Landing Of Everything has lasted well, but I imagine it won’t be with me forever. Their classic The Seldom Seen Kid is a bit of an evergreen though.

Every year for a while now, around the time the sun comes out, I pull out The Duckworth Lewis Method album, and their 2013 release Sticky Wickets has joined it this time. Good times, very seasonal, if sometimes a bit loud and jangly for heavy work deadlines.

At the opposite end of the spectrum to most things we’ve talked about so far, I sometimes like a little higher-energy pop music, especially when crashing out first drafts. I’ve got the three-disc Genesis Platinum Collection for a lot of this, for better or worse. Also: the second Little Boots album Nocturnes, which really deserved more attention, and The Bones Of What You Believe by CHVRCHES.

That’s probably enough music to be getting on with – what can I say, after following Kieron Gillen on Tumblr for long enough, you start to think about the role of music in your writing. If you have any recommendations in a similar vein, feel free to leave them in the comments below. Ambient stuff in the style of SPEKTRMODULE would be particularly interesting to me – need a precise level of atmospheric but not too attention-grabbing.

Filed Under: Music Reviews, Writing About Writing Tagged With: amwriting, blur, damon albarn, duckworth lewis method, elbow, genesis, gorillaz, little boots, music, my influences, my writing process, process, r.e.m., rem, spektrmodule, warren ellis, writing about writing

Black Panther by Christopher Priest – A Homage

April 24, 2014 by Nick Bryan Leave a Comment

Black Panther #1 cover by Mark Texeira

I recently subscribed to Marvel Unlimited, a Netflix-esque system that gives me all-I-can-eat Marvel comics for a fairly low price. Not bang-up-to-date ones, but I’ve not read half the comics I wanted to over the last decade due to financial concerns, so I can keep trawling for a while.

However, as well as striking out for new material, I’ve also re-read some old favourites, and I’d like to talk about one of those now: Black Panther by Christopher Priest and various artists, a series that ran from 1998 to 2003. The Black Panther character has existed since 1966, King of a fictional African nation called Wakanda, and mostly associated with standing in the backdrop of Avengers groupshots in the later decades of the twentieth century.

Attentive readers may note Priest also wrote Quantum & Woody, a series even closer to my heart than Black Panther. I started reading Panther due to following Priest over from Q&W, barely knowing who the character was, and Priest made me love it in approximately one issue. If you want a gushing tribute to Q&W, here’s one I wrote in September 2012.

But anyway. Black Panther. What was that about?

“The bathroom had no door. I still had no pants.” – Everett K. Ross wins my heart in one page.

Everett K. Ross by Mark Texeira

As you may have guessed from both the name and his status as King of an African nation, the Black Panther (aka T’Challa) lives outside the standard white American superhero demographic. And yes, particularly in the old days, black superheroes did have a bad habit of having the word Black in their alias.

Characters outside the standard demo didn’t tend to hit mega-sales in the pre-2010s US mainstream Marvel/DC comic market, but Priest found ways to embrace that. First up, he introduced Everett K. Ross, T’Challa’s new state department liaison and self-proclaimed King of Useless White Boys. With Ross serving as narrator, comic relief, audience POV character and exposition monkey, Priest took a different tack with the title character.

He made Black Panther effortless, dangerous and scary, and T’Challa a ruthless, brilliant schemer with the world’s finest poker face, an enigma one step withdrawn from the reader thanks to the Ross-focused storytelling. He also dug into the real implications (or as real as you can get in a fictional superhero universe) of the politically active King of a nation choosing to wear tights and play superhero, and the international politics of the Marvel Universe. All while Everett K. Ross flippantly monologued about the oddness of superheroes and explained T’Challa’s labyrinthine plots to us.

And seriously, labyrinthine is not hyperbole. I was in my mid-to-late teens when this comic came out, and re-reading it at the ancient age of thirty, I now realise how little of it I understood, especially in the latter, really confusing storylines. The out-of-sequence storytelling in the opening two or three years didn’t help matters, nor did reading it in twenty-two page monthly chunks.

Ironically, comics have milked death beyond death

Black Panther #14 cover by Sal Velluto

All those things probably contributed to the constantly middling sales on Black Panther, but reading back now, I’m glad Priest stuck to his guns, as it’s great. A uniquely idiosyncratic, smart take on a genre that really has been milked to death and back again. People talk about adult comics as the ones with tits and blood, but this is adult in the sense that it can be denser than a lot of political thrillers. In many ways ahead of its time, considering how much reading comics in collected edition format has exploded in the 2000s, not to mention recent industry moves to diversify a little from the white male superhero demo.

I’ve focused on the writing as that’s my area of interest, but I would be a prick not to mention the artwork – especially the gorgeous painted art by Mark Texeira and Joe Jusko in early issues and the reliably beautiful, clear, emotive work by Sal Velluto after that.

Sadly, Priest’s Black Panther had the poor fortune to be published just before collected editions of everything became standard practice, so it’s not available through many venues – except the afore-mentioned Marvel Unlimited, which has it free and easy, but for some reason it’s not on Comixology yet. Well, they have one issue, but it’s a midstoryline episode published because it crosses over with Deadpool, and would be utterly incomprehensible to a new reader.

Indeed, the series as a whole is quite dense on Marvel Universe guest stars at times. Still, considering we now live in a world where everyone in the geekosphere knows roughly who the Avengers are, it’s worth a go if you can find it and fancy a good, different superhero read.

Post-Panther Notation

Black Panther (Kasper Cole version) by Dan Fraga

The above is talking about the bulk of the Black Panther series by Priest, specifically issues #1-49. After that, other things happened…

  • With #50, the series underwent radical retooling – Priest stayed on as writer, but New York cop Kasper Cole took over as Black Panther after finding a costume abandoned in an alleyway. Cole’s adventures never hit the dizzy joyous heights of the best Priest/T’Challa/Ross stories, but they’re good, engaging super-crime stuff.
  • Alas, the Kasper Cole revamp was not enough to get sales up, and the book ended with #62. Which is about fifty more issues than a low-selling book gets nowadays.
  • Proving that point, Priest and artist Joe Bennett launched an ensemble book called The Crew partly spinning out of Black Panther, featuring Kasper Cole teaming up with a few other characters. It lasted seven issues, and that’s a shame, as it was excellent. Also available on Marvel Unlimited, happily.
  • Priest himself hasn’t done much in comics since the early 2000s, but seems to be dipping his toe back into the water at the moment, with an upcoming Quantum & Woody sequel mini-series and a short story in a recent Deadpool anthology issue. My fingers are predictably crossed that this leads to more – and not necessarily on existing superhero characters, I’d be just as up for a new property for a smaller company.
  • If you want more in-depth (and at times brutally honest) essays on Panther from the author himself, there’s a few on his website.

More blognotes may follow if I want to spotlight anything good on Marvel Unlimited. Or I might just plough through endless old Avengers and X-Men issues rather than taking the time to write about them. Let’s wait and see!

Filed Under: Comic Reviews Tagged With: black panther, christopher priest, comics, dan fraga, homage, mark texeira, marvel, marvel comics, marvel unlimited, my influences, sal velluto, stories, wakanda

My Influences – Quantum & Woody by Christopher Priest & Mark Bright

September 4, 2012 by Nick Bryan Leave a Comment

I imagine few have heard of Quantum & Woody, a comic book published in the 1990s (not a time known for great comics, I grant you) by Acclaim Comics. Q&W was pretty obscure even when coming out, and so it remains. It barely even exists on UK Amazon.

Nonetheless, that damn comic has been a huge influence on my stuff, in terms of both character and story structure. (In terms of actual prose, yes, I had to read some books.) So I’m going to talk about it a little.

Brief intro to concept (Quancept?)

Eric Henderson and Woodrew Van Chelton were childhood friends who drifted apart. They’re reunited when their fathers, who were working on a Mysterious Comic Book Science project together, die suddenly. Eric is now a serious man with a serious life, whereas Woody is a slacker whose band is going nowhere, but they try to investigate nonetheless, squabbling all the way. Inevitably, they are caught in a Mysterious Comic Book Science accident.

Thereafter, they have to meet up and touch wristbands every 24 hours, otherwise they both die, but in return, they get superpowers. Eric fancies himself as a proper superhero, and has the money to go through with it. Stuck near Eric thanks to the wristband dependency, Woody joins in to annoy him.

Buddy Superhero Goat Toilet Action

If this sounds like a mismatched buddy cop movie, only with superheroes… well, you’re not wrong. But it’s also a surprisingly subtle story about a long-standing friendship, the misdirected resentment between the two of them, along with the genuine affection beneath it. Oh, and the humour is mostly funny, in a broad sitcom kinda way.

The storyline where they switch bodies and have to face the prospect of peeing using each other’s genitalia is a watershed moment. It helps that Mark Bright, like all great comic artists, can do emotion and comic timing as well as people punching each other.

In retrospect, this series influenced me more than I even knew. My stories love thick-and-thin friendships, straight man/funny guy duos, out of sequence storytelling (seriously, “linear plot” is a dirty word in Q&W, especially early on), inane farm animal mascots (they had a goat, see image) and wry smartarse humour. Especially wry smartarse toilet humour.

Alas, the comic has been so lost in time that the odds of you reading it are quite small. If you know me in real life and are intrigued, I can dig out the four collected editions reprinting issues #1-16. For anyone else trying to track it down (good luck!) – get #1-16 and you’ll have a beginning, middle and end. Subsequent issues are also good, but the series was cancelled mid-storyline with #21, so you may experience frustration.

Speaking of Frustration

Writer Christopher Priest talks a little about Quantum & Woody here. He’s a very talented guy who’s worked on other good comics too (although Q&W will always be first in my heart), so it’s sad that he isn’t active in the field nowadays. A new company, Valiant, took possession of all character rights after Acclaim went bust, so maybe they could relaunch Q&W – if Priest is there, so am I. If he isn’t, I kinda feel the point is gone. And if they can get Bright back on art, even better.

This is the problem with following US comics not published by the big two, Marvel and DC. Even when they have superheroic elements in them. It’s a constant struggle for survival and they keep disappearing. But Quantum & Woody, even if it never returns or gets reprinted again, was a clever, warm, funny work, and I thought it deserved a note here. It was one of the first things I really took on board, and yes, I may view it with somewhat rosetinted glasses, but it’s still worthy of at least a look. Did anyone else read this? Just me?

Filed Under: Comic Reviews Tagged With: blogging, my influences, regular, writing about writing

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