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The Abortive Warren Ellis Era (1998 - 1 January 2000) |
 With Jenkins, the third writer to have a run on Hellblazer of
about 40 issues, now gone, a new major writer had to be selected. Given that the general
response was that Jenkins's run was inferior to both
Delano's
and Ennis's, a writer who could successfully deal with this anxiety of influence had to be
selected. Despite his strengths, Hellblazer as a commercial title might not have
survived another three-year run that lessened sales.
Before such a run began, however, a brief interlude of five issues would
occur, much as one had between Ennis's run and Jenkins's. And just as
Jamie Delano
had returned in the last such interlude,
Garth Ennis,
still active on the quite popular
Preacher,
would return here. His cover artist from most of his Hellblazer run, as well as his
then-ongoing work on
Preacher, would join him -- though artist
Steve Dillon would not. The five-issue tale was one Ennis said he had been waiting to have an
opportunity to tell, and it was a refreshing change. As the last such interlude had suddenly
shifted the tone of the series from Ennis's straightforward horror to subtler and more
textured stories, so Ennis shifted the tone from Jenkins's fairly complex tales of humanity
and gods to a humorous style that emphasized fun and over-the-top supernatural horror. His
story of gangsters and demonic possession, themes explored in a very different tone in
Mobfire, was a breath of fresh air -- and sales, given the popularity of Ennis's
Preacher soared.
The announcement that
Warren Ellis
would be the next major writer was greeted with great enthusiasm. Critics were rapidly taking
note of Ellis, whose
Transmetropolitan
had familiarized Vertigo readers to him and who was launching, at about this time, the
ingenious super-hero titles
Planetary
and
The Authority.
Ellis was hot. He was also seen as a genius in training, someone whose writing had improved
dramatically over the preceding years and who might further cut his teeth, as both
Delano
and Ennis had before him, on Hellblazer.
Ellis's first storyline,
"Haunted", focused on John's response to news of a former girlfriend's death. Though his
enthusiastic engagement with her absolutely grisly murder, all described in thrilling and
repulsive detail, and through characters' comments within the story,
Ellis
established his own perspective on John. Constantine, as we have seen, is a rather malleable
character: a past-haunted and self-destructive middle-aged magus for
Delano,
an everyman with the heart of a young rogue for Ennis, and, for Jenkins, a family man coming to
terms with himself and trying to do good when the cards are stacked against him.
Ellis
saw John as an adrenaline junkie, someone for whom a death allowed him to go on a crusade and
feel true sadness for the victim -- despite that, a moment before hearing about the death,
the subject of murder and obsession was disposable and irrelevant. Tragedy allowed John to
romanticize in "Haunted"; it allowed him to play the everyman and believe in himself as such.
If this view was more cynical than Ennis's, for example, it was nonetheless smart; it showed an
awareness of the element of egotism in the desire to save the world, especially when
reactionary and situational. And readers less inclined towards the recognition of such insight
had the delightful violence, infinitely respectible artistically because it was integral to the
plot and its points about character.
A series of single-issue stories followed, and they made increasingly
apparent
Ellis's
attitudes regarding the narrative of Hellblazer. Magic was, at best,
a setting -- but it had nothing to do with horror. Magic was more likely, for Ellis, to be
a society with its own conventions or a pathology with its own obsessions than a tool.
"The Crib" (#141) and "Telling Tales" (#143) made this point quite well. Even when magic
appeared, it was not usually magic per se. The horror came from ourselves, as if it
could come from anywhere else, and magic and the supernatural as horror ususally serve as a
mask for deeper psychological anxieties. The horror of life, Ellis argued, was not so much a
razor-toothed demon or the Devil as what we're capable of doing to others and ourselves: that
we as a species and a culture are capable, and in some cases desirous of, mutilating,
torturing, and brutally killing each other. "Setting Sun" (one of the stories in #142) made
the point beautifully, both in its simple narrative and art and in its economic use of
evocative flashback, in having John respond to a Japanese man who committed "attrocities" on
prisoners during World War II -- for no other reason, as one suspects may always be the case,
than because he, like the many others who did likewise, could.
But, while this was a very successful time artistically, it was also a
tragic one. As DC had censored Rick Veitch so many years before, on the grounds that the
issue in question might be religiously offensive, so DC now censored
Warren Ellis
on the grounds of insensitivity, brought as a national concern (or neurosis) by political
correctness. Hellblazer #141 was to have been a story entitled "Shoot", dealing with
school shootings. It was soliticed as such to retailers and was, like the infamous Swamp
Thing issue, censored very late in the game. At issue here was not the issue's provocative
content but a matter of timing: the shootings at Columbine occurred, receiving massive media
attention and resulting in hysterical public concern, between solicitation and publication.
DC at first agreed to stand by the issue; its "insensitivity" could also be read as timeliness,
and controversy generates attention and sales. But DC pulled back, refusing to publish the
issue -- and, while this censorship did not seem to derail an ongoing storyline as the
Swamp Thing censorship had, the most important result was the same: Ellis, like Veitch
before him, left the series.
Only a month was lost, unlike the Swamp Thing case, because
Ellis's
next three autonomous issues were already under production. Renumbered from what would have
been numbering had #141 been "Shoot", they would prove Ellis's last. Ellis, given greater
freedom with the ostensibly creator-owned
Transmetropolitan,
did not leave DC entirely as Veitch had, given that DC saw itself as protecting a property.
Once Ellis's issues were up, a two-issue story, written by Darko Macan and illustrated by Gary
Erskine, was run. Its apparent inferiority to Ellis's work, combined with readers' resentment
towards DC for censoring the story and prompting Ellis to leave, caused many to consider
dropping the title. The promised and promising fourth major run on Hellblazer was an
abortion, though a glorious and beautiful one, and it left the title dangerously adrift.
Such was the state of Hellblazer going into New Year's Day, 2000.
For this great symbolic event, DC / Vertigo celebrated by publishing and launching a small
number of graphic novellas and mini-series. One of these was Totems, which featured
those Vertigo characters created in books originally under the main DC umbrella and thus a
part of the DC universe -- including Swamp Thing, John Constantine, Black Orchid, and Animal
Man. Characters like the Doom Patrol and Shade, the Changing Man, also appeared.
Totems was a truly awful work despite its obvious insights into the symbolic
interrelation of these characters. The ghastly story, which would have been comfortable
in a mainstream super-hero title, seemed to ignore these characters' pasts,
however. Black Orchid seemed not to be the child left as successor at the end of her
predecessor's series. Swamp Thing in particular showed no sign of having transcended the old
form depicted in this graphic novella. It only emphasized the point that Swamp Thing
was gone and Hellblazer was directionless and perhaps even immoral to read.
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