Hellblazer 180 – Page 22 (London Film & Comic Con Part 1b)

“Take care of yourself, John.”

There are a couple of reasons why I find this page particularly appealing.

Around about 30 years ago I spent a lot of time hanging out in graveyards. Spending time drawing the cemetery statuary was partially to supplement the life-drawing classes it was compulsory for me to attend as part of the one-year course I was pursuing. This reminds me of a comment a fellow student made to me at the time. He was a teenager whereas I was a mature (in years if not in worldly wisdom) student –

“On turning up for my first life-drawing class I noticed that the life model we had been allocated was also just arriving. Harmony was young, alabaster-skinned, statuesque and voluptuous with flowing red tresses. You can imagine the anticipation I felt as I started to get ready to draw her in the nude. Sadly, the tutor insisted that I keep my clothes on.”

It was only after having a number of life-drawing lessons that I realised how very hard work it must be. You have to maintain a sometimes very uncomfortable pose for at least 20 minutes at a time while a dozen pairs of eyes are scrutinising every square inch of your naked body. You definitely have to have a certain temperament to be able to do that as your body positivity must be through the roof. I could never do it in a million years. I did find that 20-minute bursts with five-minute breaks in between for the model to stretch and rest when I was “in the flow” of drawing were not enough and that is why I spent hours in my local cemetery drawing the statues of predominantly angels and children which you would find there. I was partly inspired by something I read about Bernie Wrightson who said that when he was a boy he would sneak into the town cemetery after hours and spend a good deal of time there. I am not sure if he was equipped with a drawing book or if he was just lodging images in his memory bank but he masterfully translated those memories into his later work most notably in his illustrations for Frankenstein. I was hoping some of that greatness would rub off onto me if I frequented the same locations but it never did, although I do have drawing books from that time with pages and pages of clumsily-drawn graveyard statues which I would just as clumsily try to shoehorn into any assignment I was given. That is why I am drawn to scenes in comics which feature cemeteries. The three greatest comics artists to draw graveyards are not coincidentally the three greatest horror comics artists: Wrightson, Mignola and Corben. Those pages by those artists are out of my price range but I think this splash by Marcelo Frusin is right up there aesthetically.

The other reason: I have read quite a few Hellblazer comics since his first appearance in Swamp Thing 37. Not all of them and I was a bit of a “fair-weather reader” in that I had to quite like whoever was handling the art chores to pick up the book. It could be said that the two greatest British comics writers – arguably the two greatest comics writers full stop – who are Moore and Gaiman have penned stories in which John Constantine appears, and it does appear that any British comics writer who is anybody has at one point written a John Constantine story – it almost seems to be a rite of passage. Having said that I think this last-page splash page is the best summation of John Constantine I have come across. You won’t understand it without reading the last panel on the preceding page (the OA to which I do not own) which I have excerpted in my additional pictures. It is entertaining to read John Constantine’s exploits but I don’t think it would be advisable to have him as a friend or acquaintance as I believe it has been illustrated on several occasions in the comics that if Constantine were faced with the option of saving his own skin at the cost of throwing you under the bus then you should not make any long-term plans. I do sometimes wonder that the reason why Mike Carey’s characterisation of Constantine right down to his turns of phrase and speech patterns were so perfect was because he and John Constantine originate from the same world-famous British city which if you did not know where that is is also the birthplace of the Fab Four.

My thanks to Mark Hay of Splash Page Comic Art for supplying me with these two brilliant pages. Mark was the first comic art dealer that I started developing a relationship with to the extent that he was so in tune with my preferences and what was in my price bracket – even then I just could not cover the cost of his primo pages – he would sometime alert me in advance of something dropping. Thank you, Mark, for all your help, service and advice in the past.