Review by Frank Plowright
Secondary to his magical knowledge John Constantine’s greatest ability is being able to talk his way out of any situation. So, a strong and intriguing start to a Hellblazer story is to place him somewhere it seems he can’t access his magic and where a smart mouth is instantly going to be filled with a fist. Welcome to Hard Time, and Constantine in a maximum security American jail.
It turns out he’s not the victim initially thought, as Brian Azzarello plays with the assumptions that narrative captions are going to be Constantine’s thoughts. They’re not actually provided during Hard Time, and instead we are given the thoughts of others from the person Constantine replaces as favourite of a tough lifer to the guy who actually runs the prison from the inside. At least before Constantine turns up. The assorted narrators supply their own impressions of Constantine, who’s only revealed via his dialogue and the occasional visual concentration on particular spots.
When Constantine does speak, Azzarello captures his smarmy and absolutely filthy English dialogue so convincingly you’d imagine he was also British. Azzarello’s version of Constantine is true to form as a master of manipulation. After all, what does a man who’s faced down the devil have to fear from a bunch of lifers, no matter who’re they allied to? As seen on numerous TV shows, American jails are spawning grounds for gang affiliation, and Constantine takes the tour, aggravating them all as a compulsive provocateur.
That Hard Time is such a sweaty, sordid success is also down to Richard Corben’s magnificent art. Corben remains true to his exaggerated style of people, creating memorable types throughout, some of them almost human, but all them low on the list of those you’d want to share any confined places with. Corben concentrates on faces, his sinister caricatures exuding evil intent, yet the spartan locations are enough to provide a sense of place.
He’s been such a fixture for so long that it’s forgotten than Constantine was visually modelled on 1980s pop star Sting, and this is relevant as Hard Time reflects one of Sting’s acting roles. In Brimstone and Treacle he was a malevolent presence utterly disrupting a middle class family suffering tragedy, and while the location and circumstances are different, Constantine does the same. Why? Because he can.
This is Constantine how we want to see him, and it’s excellent. When the entire Hellblazer series was repackaged in bulkier books, this was combined with the following Good Intentions under that title.
