Brett Ewins only contributes three pages. He’s at his best on a story flashing back to the Vietnam war, which features lush scenery and some excellent portraits.

They’re on the tame side, and his refinement sometimes makes him a good artist on the wrong strip. John Ridgway is spot on with urban squalor, but less at home with the assorted inventive cruelties and demon personalities infesting Constantine’s world. His satirical farce about the upper class preying on the weak provides the strongest story, everything he says elsewhere about Constantine and his environment confined to 24 concise pages set around the UK’s 1989 general election. At times the relentless negativity chafes, but Delano’s been proved right by the lack of improvement over thirty years, leaving Original Sins as social documentation. Social problems inflicting poor areas are reinforced, while dry cynicism characterises Constantine’s narrative captions, along with Delano feeding him neat observations. Delano ups the ante on that, with anyone associated with Constantine lucky to remain alive after one of his interventions, and bases him back in Britain, where his own seediness is reflected by the surroundings. Delano had been handed Alan Moore’s creation of an unpleasantly sarcastic English practitioner of magic, worlds away from Doctor Strange, one who dabbled in the dangerously arcane and did the right thing while simultaneously alienating everyone he was helping. A testament is the Original Sins collection of his earliest material being continually in print since 1992.ĭelano’s first caption for Constantine reads “the traffic is barely moving and the back of the taxi still smells of last night’s vomit”, which perfectly sums up his downbeat world.

The work of other creators defining John Constantine may now come to mind before that of Jamie Delano, but Delano’s fleshing out and cementing of his personality was instrumental to all later incarnations.

Hellblazer jamie delano