Review by Frank Plowright
There’s no denying Brian Azzarello is a good writer, with his speciality being inventive crime stories, which benefit from his great facility for naturalistic dialogue, so check out the recommendations. However, despite a prime start to Good Intentions, the question has to be asked whether Azzarello’s a good fit for Hellblazer. He certainly captures John Constantine’s self-serving personality, but it wouldn’t require great modifications to remove Constantine from this material altogether and just be left with well written crime. There’s barely any supernatural activity, and one prominent use right at the end is too convenient. Even accepting that as a premise, there’s another problem to overcome.
John Constantine had a long publication history before Azzarello, and the adult labelling of his material means writers haven’t shied away from his sexual indulgences, so one might have thought we’d have known by now if his tastes encompassed more than women. Changing that for the sake of presenting a manipulative relationship motivating much of what happens behind the scenes in this volume is unconvincing.
Azzarello certainly uses the adult licence well, though. A club catering for every gratification features strongly at the end, enabling funny scenes and smutty comments, yet the most disturbing content arrives in the title story. Here Azzarello has Neo-Nazis expounding on their hateful ideology. There’s never any doubt of the outcome, and the story is one where the supernatural features vividly, but it’s strong stuff, and possibly too offensive for some. Ignore the minimal presence of anything other than mood and violence, and ‘Freezes Over’ is the most successful story here, a taut noir gangster thriller of people trapped in a bar during a snowstorm.
The mood is evocatively supplied by Marcelo Frusin, the primary artist, fantastic on every page he draws here, capturing exactly what’s needed to tell the story, yet so stylishly. Guy Davis drawing a look into Constantine’s past is a good artist on the wrong feature. The story is told well and neatly, with the characters elegantly defined, but the sense of menace required for Hellblazer is absent. The remaining artist Giuseppe Camuncoli is handed the short straw of what seem to be two placeholding stories written at short notice to ensure Frusin could draw the entire finale to a monthly schedule. Camuncoli would later distinguish himself on Hellblazer and elsewhere, but this early work shows talent without finesse.
Having a single person behind everything that happens to Constantine is fine, but the person themselves is tiresome. The starting point appears to have been satirising Bruce Wayne, but the pomposity and monologuing of S.W. Manor strains the patience. He’s not as one-dimensional as Agent Turro, a character whose collective appearances puzzle for artistic variation, but seems forced into situations because he’s needed for the finale. He’d have been better introduced for the closing investigation alone. ‘Ashes & Dust’ has plenty of clever moments, but ultimately fails due to Azzarello opting for an enigmatic ending and no explanations. It’s not worthy of everything built beforehand.
Too many caveats mean Highwater’s not as strong as Good Intentions, Frusin’s excellence notwithstanding. This material was previously available in slimmer paperbacks titled Freezes Over and Highwater, but with a different cover. Vol. 16: The Wild Card sees Mike Carey begin to guide Constantine’s destiny.
