hushicho's Hellblazer #300 - Death and Cigarettes, Finale: Ash review

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    A two-fingered salute plus raspberry to the unfortunate fans of over 2 decades

    Most people learn, at some point in their lives, that it's best to tell a story and leave the audience wanting more, rather than try to give them extra; the extra usually sours them on the experience.

    Unfortunately, by this point Hellblazer was dead in the water anyway. Never particularly a bastion of consistency or quality, it nonetheless featured some interesting stories and likeable characters (depending on who happened to be writing at the time) -- it had to be appealing to someone to avoid getting cancelled for 20 years and even spawning a love-it-or-hate-it live-action film adaptation. But for some time now, the title had been spinning its wheels and doing nothing but retreading well-walked territory; even different writers seemed to have nothing new to bring to it.

    Then came Milligan. And what little hope anyone had for the future of the series slipped down the drain.

    His clear contempt for any stories and characters other than his own (or mandated inclusions) mar the already abysmal run. By this time they'd thought hey, since it worked so well before -- let's give John a long-term relationship and even marry him off to her! Great idea, especially given the sad, uninspired concept of the unlikely-named Epiphany Graves.

    It's a shame first of all to see one of only a handful of bisexual characters being written as a pathetic dick with legs in search of the first available vagina, and even more of a shame for female characters to have dropped in quality so precipitously. Angie Spatchcock, one of John's best companions over the years, shows up in the past 100 issues to be written utterly out-of-character and then to supply a deus ex machina that doesn't even work for what it's supposed to be. Gemma, John's niece, has become an insufferable drama queen who by now is far too old to be acting like she does. No-one is remotely likeable or sympathetic, and this issue takes Milligan's incoherent approach to writing to new levels, wasting tremendous amounts of time with nothing special or interesting, least of all John being made to look a creep and a sad idiot instead of what a final issue and story should do: celebrate the reasons why we loved the character enough to stick with him for this long.

    This is a huge 'screw you' to anyone who actually stayed with Hellblazer through 300, or even who jumped on late and decided to ride it out. Simon Bisley's covers are, as always, wasted as essentially window-dressing to a terrible interior devoid of any creativity or vitality, perhaps ironically. Milligan has only retread old stories and bad ideas that had long been tossed out before this point. It's soap opera-level antics to the level where Eastenders would be ashamed. It's embarrassing to see the series last long enough to become that.

    The whole crux of the matter seems to revolve around a (poorly-explained) plan of John's to just move house somewhere else and thus be unbothered by anything ever again. Yeah, because that's worked so well all the other times he did it. This isn't like a superhero comic where the only alien invasions, villain attacks, and significant events occur in or around a singular nexus city. Not that Milligan cares much, or he'd probably have encountered the fact that literally almost every one of his stories and plot directions had been done multiple times before, and several of them abandoned because they proved so deeply unsuited to the series. At this point they clearly just didn't care and were trying to find someone who could drive it into the ground. This isn't any sort of graceful last tip of the hat, no -- it's basically a mercy killing after the worst run since Azzarello got his hamfisted mitts on the book.

    I'll give you some free advice: put the series down after 200, if you even last that long. If you have to keep going, stop reading when Milligan's put on the book at 250. Look at the pretty Bisley covers. That's literally the most enjoyment you will get from the books at that point.

    Certainly not from one of the laziest, most slapdash, incoherent last few pages of any story that ever appeared in Hellblazer. And that's saying something, given how often pretentious writers paraded their barely-readable nonsense in these pages.

    The Long Journey's End my Aunt Fanny. I'll give you, it was time for Vertigo to go away. It had really been something uniquely suited to the 90s, pretentious collegiate audiences being briefly interested in comics, and a sort of half-assed effort at raising the bar on mature storytelling in comics. But as far as I'm concerned, and as far as anyone with taste, Hellblazer was over before Milligan started. We can enjoy the good times, skip over the weaker issues and writers, and John Constantine can continue his adventures in our minds and hearts.

    And Milligan can go chomp a fat one.

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