Thursday, August 13, 2015

Constantine: The Hellblazer #3 Review and *SPOILERS*

Written By: Ming Doyle, James Tynion IV
Art By: Ming Doyle, Vanessa Del Rey, Ivan Plascencia, Lee Loughridge
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: August 12, 2015


On Her Majesty's Supernatural Service


*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

We've got a ghostbuster on the loose........ no, wait.... that would be terrible in Constantine, but we do have some sort of monster that's killing off Constantine's ghosts and after spending the previous issue trying to gain enough power...... and ghost bait to take on the Johnny Bartlett wannabe.... that's a Frighteners reference in case you didn't know, Constantine found himself in over his head.  Even though Gaz begged him throughout the issue to go get someone named Georgie to help him take on this threat and save his ghostly ass, John went and fucked Gaz over again by getting him killed.......again.  Hopefully that won't be the end of Gaz because I love him haunting John and just telling him that everything he wants to do is a terrible idea.  Let's jump into this issue where Constantine heads home to London to look up Georgie and hopefully put an end to his murderer of ghosts.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Our issue begins with an orgy gone wrong and let me tell you....... that can happen quite quick.  This isn't a case of finishing too soon and being terribly embarrassed though, this time it looks like the orgy ended with everyone dying right at climax.......which was apparently all at the same time so from what I know about sex, they were only at it for about a minute or two.  Of course the British police are baffled about this mass death and to make sure that it's taken care of quick and efficiently, the British Secret Service called in their supernatural expert, Georgiana Snow.  It doesn't look like she's going to solve this crime alone though because John Constantine shows up and from Georgiana's unpleasant reaction to him, it would appear that the two have met before.


During the case of what I'm calling: La Petite Mort, we have John tracking down leads on Succubi for Georgiana and to get us a little clued in to their past, we have intermittent flashbacks letting us know that Gaz and John met Georgiana and her friend Veronica at a concert where the band was supposed to actually be demons.  After a night of supernatural music filling their souls, this foursome decides that they are going to continue that high and get into magic.  It's quite obvious though that even when they first met, Georgiana was not a fan of John and was strictly a friend to Gaz.  Her friend Veronica on the other hand seemed to really fancy John and during our current story even mentions to Georgie that he should call her up again.


In the end, we find out that John was leading Georgie astray on the notion that the killer was a succubus when in fact it was a incubus and he wanted to take it out on his own the whole time.  This is weird because as we saw in the previous issue, John needs Georgie to help him with his ghost killer problem, but here it seems that he just wants to aggravate her the whole time. I get that John's a dick, but you'd think that he'd at least try to play nice with Georgie so he can get what he wants....... especially since Georgie makes it quite clear that she'll be the one to do the monster killing in this case.  Well, John gets in a little over his head with the incubus when out of nowhere the monster becomes a bunch of monsters....... or possibly they were in the shadows....... I don't know....... but luckily Georgie knew that John was lying to her and was waiting at the location the whole time.......... yeah, this isn't her first rodeo.  After killing the incubi, Georgie let's John know just how little she thinks of him and let's him know that her friend Veronica that he was once so fond of has been dead the last three years and that she blames John for not only Gaz's death, but Veronica's as well.  John's left staring at the blood on his hands as he contemplates the actual blood on his hands and I'm left wondering what the hell we're going to do about the damn ghost killer problem because in this issue we didn't take any steps towards finding a resolution to it.


That's it for this issue of Constantine: The Hellblazer and right from the get go I knew I wasn't going to like this book as much as the previous two issues because the art that I began loving from Riley Rossmo is absent here and it's been replaced by Ming Doyle and Vanessa Del Rey....... who switch back and forth between the current story and the flashback scenes and I'm not familiar enough with either's work to know who did what.  All I can tell you is that the current story art was really hard for me to follow and it just wasn't too pleasant to look at.  Hell, I didn't even know I was looking at John Constantine right away and if I can't tell who the main character is........ well, I think that's a problem.  So right away I wasn't a fan of the art in this book and by the time I was done reading it, I wasn't a real fan of the story either because besides introducing us to Georgiana Snow in an investigation that wasn't that interesting, I was left wondering where the hell the continuation to the story we had last issue was.  Just Incubi and us finding out that nobody likes John.  It's pretty standard stuff, but these creators really got me interested in the story that we've been dealing with and to have a break from that with art that I could barely follow is just disappointing as hell.  Hopefully we get back on track next issue because if things continue like this, I'll have lost one of my favorite new titles.

Bits and Pieces:

I found myself really loving Riley Rossmo's art after seeing him do the first two issues of Constantine: The Hellblazer and now that he's absent here, I realize how much he really brought to the title because I was really having a hard time understanding what was going down in this issue.  Apparently though, I didn't miss much because by the end of the book I realized that we didn't really continue the story from the previous issue, we only had an introduction to a character and a boring investigation.  This has been a really strong title and I hope that it continues in the next issue because this one just wasn't that good.

4/10

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