Was Hellblazer something of a misstep? Was it a compromise by an Editorial team that couldn’t see their way clear on certain points of John Constantine’s DNA? It’s hard to pose these questions in the light of how successful Hellblazer has become over the years.

I wanted to grapple with these questions from the point of both the outgoing Hellblazer title, and the incoming Constantine book. I don’t think I got to a properly fitting epitaph in last week’s Part One of “Don’t Get Too Attached…”. But after 25-plus years, how could you get at that? At least Part One functions well enough to intro the idea that maybe Hellblazer was a misstep.

Part Two really does get at something deeper. It filters Constantine both through Ali and Hunter S. Thompson. Does this mean I’m writing a kind of gonzo? That I’m embedding myself directly into the story and making things happen? Not in the sense of course, of embedding with the personalities themselves, but in a sense of embedding with the written product.

Considerations of length prompted me to cut a substantial segment of the second act of Part Two. It’s the why of it all, why Vegas is the perfectest metaphor. The same story I’ve been trying to tell for some time now—imagine Vegas as it is now, but relocated in its own prehistory. Vegas as a kind of doomsday boomtown. You know an end is inevitable (and with LA not too far away this is at least geographically true), but you can’t be bothered to get there or you shore these fragments, as TS Eliot did, against your ruin and you live it up in Vegas. Excess for breakfast, destination traded for destiny.

I want to tell that story more fully, and maybe I still will.

CT and MRI, and they’re just finished.

Is that all?

Dr. shathley Q | Comics Editor, PopMatters | @uu3y324rdry

Ever since SURROGATES, I’ve been a Fan of Robert Venditti’s. The narrative trick he pulled during the sequel mini-series (FLESH & BONE) demonstrated a superior ability, a command of the comics form, and indeed of storytelling mechanics, that should usually takes decades to acquire.

The idea of Rob now crafting stories that will inform centuries of the fictive DC Universe is a treat I’m really looking forward to. But more so, I’m looking to Rob continue to evolve himself. His career is interesting to watch pretty much because it’s geared around a creative evolution. What strikes me even more than a year after our interview for THE HOMELAND DIRECTIVE, is something he said almost as a throwaway comment: “I wanted to write a female lead character because I hadn’t written one yet and wanted to figure out how to write one. I set it as a kind of challenge to myself”. Rob’s thinking points to a kind of writerly courage that always refocuses around growing latent talent to its full potential. And more than anything, it’s that courage that I’m looking forward to see on the page.

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Every single time I pick up my copy of FEAR & LOATHING AT ROLLING STONE and hold it in my hand it feels like I’m burning daylight.

I’ve got a Modern Classics edition, wild and ferocious and neat. A tiny compact edition that feels heavier for the ideas it holds.

Jann Werner writes: “a story about himself, who as, after all, his own greatest character”. In BOB DYLAN BY GREIL MARCUS, Greil creates himself and creates rock journalism while Dylan creates himself. Without this coevolution with another, HST seems to occupy both Greil and Dylan’s positions.

Dr. shathley Q | Comics Editor, PopMatters | @uu3y324rdry

It’s just gorgeous and opens the story in a way that neither Daniel Craig’s movie nor the original Swedish version did.

Reminds me of an older idea, the every artwork is struggling to express itself time and again, across multiple versions, across different mediums.

Is this idea Platonic, anti-Platonic or something else entirely?
Dr. shathley Q | Comics Editor, PopMatters | @uu3y324rdry