John Constantine, Hellblazer: Reasons to Be Cheerful. Mike Carey and Others. DC, tpb, 144pp

Classic Hellblazer storytelling, as gloomy as in Jamie Delano’s day, as John Constantine has some of the worst times of his life. But like a lot of the current Hellblazer trade paperbacks, the colouring is murky and extremely unattractive. It isn’t necessarily the colourist’s fault – it’s the paper these trade paperbacks are printed on. It’s so difficult to make anything out that I’d prefer to read them in black and white. – SWT

John Constantine, Hellblazer: The Gift. Mike Carey and Others. DC, tpb, 224pp

This volume brings Mike Carey’s back-to-basics run on Hellblazer to a close. It’s been a good, exciting sequence, and this set of stories in particular is very rewarding for long-term readers of the title, bringing threads together from all previous eras – in particular those of Delano, Ennis and the under-appreciated Paul Jenkins (rather unfairly, the only major Hellblazer writer whose work has yet to be collected in even a single trade paperback), with quite a few nods to his origins in Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing. This book would have been a perfect end to the series, if the comic had to end. Happily it is still going, though, so I’m looking forward to catching up (weirdly, this was collected in trade paperback form only after the Denise Mina run which followed it, which meant the Denise Mina books, Empathy Is the Enemy and The Red Right Hand, have been sitting idly on my shelf these last few months). – SWT

Originally published in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #22.