stanleyuris

‘There’s always one place lower you can go’. 

In Brian Azzarello’s take on the inimitable Hellblazer comics, John Constantine is a fearless, peerless, Man-of-Mystery. He’s unstoppable. Ya wanna put him in prison? Well, he’ll burn the whole damn place down for a single cigarette. And who can blame the man? I mean, he’s addicted to nicotine.

Look, I won’t lie to you. I almost get it. Azzarello’s ‘Hard Times’ is, in its own way, kind of fun. If you look past the misogyny, homophobia, racism…well, let he who is without sin cast the first stone, right? Except that quite frankly I really hate Azzarello’s Hellblazer. 

What irks me more than anything else is how cruel it feels; how anti-humanity. Specifically, Azzarello’s Hellblazer is anti-poor. It’s set in the U.S. (because Azzarello is American — there’s a tradition wherein Hellblazer writers set their works in their home fields, and it’s usually a good thing), so it’s the American Poor he’s talking about. And I can speak to that, because, well, I guess I am that. The American Poor, I mean. The American working poor, which is a whole different thing from the unemployed, especially now, and I think my family straddles that line between the working class and the middle one, but then — every American thinks they’re middle class. It’s a whole thing. 

Whatever. That’s not the point (except for when it is). What’s the immediate point here is that in Brian Azzarello’s Hellblazer, the disgusting poor do disgusting things. They’re desperate; so desperate that any morals they may have once had fly right out the window, to the point where Our Man John, the main character of the whole gig, is sexually assaulted by the gross, dirty, awful population of Doglick, West Virginia. No, Doglick isn’t a real place. Yes, Azzarello chose to set his fictional terrible-evil-impoverished town in West Virginia, presumably because he was born in Ohio and cheerfully replicates all the Appalachian stereotypes he grew up with. Not that the sexual assault of men is something that Azzarello cares about to any genuine degree, but the point is — these people, if you can even call them people, are so worn-down by circumstance that they’ve become awful; cruel; amoral. 

I’m not explaining it well. I don’t know how to explain it better. I think a more talented writer could’ve maybe said something with this theme — what poverty does to people, how it can drive them to act in ways they never would otherwise. Remember in Parasite? “She’s nice because she’s rich.” Morals and dignity and kindness are a game of the rich and comfortable.

Except, you know, that they aren’t. Not really. It’s hard to strike a balance here; between understanding that extenuating circumstances make people act in ways that they never would otherwise...and remembering that they’re, you know, still goddamn people, not weird remorseless creatures that have no sense of right and wrong, and never, ever, know happiness.

It makes me think about my coworkers. It’s 2021, they’re almost a year into the pandemic, and they’re struggling. They’re tired — exhausted; showing up to work on a few hours of sleep. They drink too much. They smoke too much. They’re lazy, and they fuck over other people by doing their jobs poorly. 

They have, at times, been cruel.

But they also smile. They crack jokes. They commiserate. They go home, and they take a nap, and they watch movies and they listen to music and they take care of their families and pets, to the best of their abilities. They’re just like every-fuckin’-body else because the state of being impoverished does not, in fact, transform you into some sort of inhuman creature that flourishes in misery and death. I mean, obviously, right? I really hope that’s obvious. 

I’m still not explaining it well. I guess all that I’m trying to say is, Azzarello’s stories feel like ‘poverty porn’. We’re supposed to delight in the poor’s distance from us, their subhuman status. But I can’t, because I know that poor people go home and they sing to their children, and then they collapse into bed and get a few fitful hours of sleep, and they drag their broken, aching bodies up, and they go to work. Again, and again, and again.

(I guess I’d know. I drink too much, smoke too much, and I am lazy at work, too.)

It feels particularly disrespectful that Azzarello did this in Hellblazer, a comic that is about a working class man. Born in Liverpool in 1953, John Constantine has been down-and-out since, literally, before he was even born. The Doors song “Been down so long” could’ve been written about him. “Been down so goddamn long, it looks like up to me.” 

He’s a Labour man. He was a teenage runaway. He was a high school dropout, and he never went to college. He’s had the odd job; he’s been largely unemployed. His usual means of money-making aren’t exactly kosher. He drinks too much; he smokes too much; he’s certainly lazy, and he’s keen to pass the tougher jobs off to the next guy. He has been, occasionally, very cruel.

But John — Johnny, our John, ‘Conjob’ — is a goddamn human being. At his very fucking core there is an intense love for humanity that he’d never admit to...but he’s been fighting for them, for humanity, and for the underdog, his entire life.

He’s got shit luck. He has been so miserable he’s wanted to die. He’s gotten real close to that death, too. But he also laughs. He loves his friends, joyously. He sings, he rolls you a joint, and tells ya — in words or actions — Hey, have a good time. For tomorrow we may die.

To me, that’s the whole beauty of John Constantine as a character. Not that he’s some badass cool-guy who is untouched by the cruelties of life and of other people...but that he takes all the shit that the world tosses at him and he still stands back up. Somehow. His stance is shaky, but hey — he’s got his boxing gloves up. He was supposed to die in the goddamn womb! Literally anything is proof of his strength of character and his occasional good fortune! 

In an earlier arc of Hellblazer, written by Garth Ennis, John reaches one of his absolute lowest points. After his girlfriend leaves him and he and his best friend have an awful fight, he’s lost the two most important relationships in his life. This shitty situation is, like many things in his life, one-half the fault of his terrible decisions, and one-half plain ol’ bad luck. John spirals; ending up homeless and leaning real far into his pre-existing alcohol dependency. He’s still hanging on — he shares his drink with a young man he meets. Of course, because John’s life often resembles the Biblical Job’s, this man dies pretty soon after, but hey — John reached out to him. He was low, low-down and dirty, but he was still a human being seeking connection. 

“Thousands more like him, thousands more tough old lives that couldn’t hack out their slice of the pie…” That’s John’s internal monologue from the end of one of those chapters. In the story, he’s just done something horrible; something genuinely cruel. But this still really strikes me — because he’s thinking about other people. He’s still placing his life in the context of their lives. 

This is how we survive. We contextualize our own suffering within the deep basin of the suffering of others, and then we get mad as Hell. On our own behalf, or on theirs — it doesn’t really matter. But we’ve got to understand that we aren’t alone. 

What pulls John out of that particular low is a dream. He dreams of an airman; a man doomed to die in flames and war, but who realizes, with his death approaching, that he does not goddamn want to go. He fights death, he fights the inevitable, up until (in his words) “the last bloody drop”. John wakes with a frantic start — he’s lying, in his drunken stupor, across that man’s corpse. ‘I think I owe you something,’ John thinks, as he buries the skeletal remains of that man, whose name he does not know. 

And that’s sort of that, when it comes to that particular storyline. I mean, it’s a comic book; they’re not exactly known for their excellent continuity. But Hellblazer was sort of special; it was a whole thing that the character aged in real-time. In the end, this creates a fictional man who has had an absolutely colossal amount of shit happen to him. Maybe, in a way, it’s innately more like Azzarello’s poverty porn than it is anything else. But the thing is, John carries on. A form of the character exists to this day, and while half of that is comic book bullshit, the other half is something else.

The other half is...John drinks too much, and he smokes too much. He’s like my coworkers. (He’s like me.) He’s miserable, but he thinks humanity deserves a better future. So he keeps on fighting for those better days. In between all the fights, he gets drunk in pubs with his mates, and he laughs. He sings. For tomorrow we may die. Better make merry while ya can.