The Horrorist

According to Wikipedia, this series is a two issue spinoff from the Hellblazer series (with this being the first issue.)  Hellblazer, for those that aren’t familiar with it, focuses on John Constantine—an anti-hero who specializes in the occult and is closer to Hell than most people are.  In this story Constantine meets the one person that maybe even more dammed than he is, “The Horrorist.”  A woman with no name and a scary past, who wanders the country and causes chaos wherever she goes.  I haven’t read much of Constantine, but that was enough to intrigue me and made me want to know more.  So I opened the issue and waited.

It’s snowing outside and a foot or so already covers the ground.  In the park a young woman sits on a bench, not wearing anything other than a simple cloth robe, while in front of her children dressed warmly play a game.  And then it all goes wrong.  Land mines explode from nowhere killing the children and traumatizing a passerby with memories of wars gone by.  She is “The Horrorist,” a person who has the ability to make others feel pain, sometimes through altered reality.  At a nearby bar Constantine attempts to pierce the icy shell that surrounds his soul by making love to a young woman, but nothing can pierce his gloom…until he feels the presence of “The Horrorist.”  Intrigued by the one woman who can perhaps restore some of his humanity, he sets off cross-country to find her and who she is…hopefully before she destroys the world and all who live in it.

This is one of those comics that’s a bit difficult to make out.  First off I got more from reading the blurb on the back cover than from the actual story.  It wasn’t until I was 20 pages into the comic that I found out that we’re reading about the John Constantine and even letter before we’re given information about who the heck “The Horrorist” is.  And if you haven’t read Constantine comics before, this issue is a bit confusing with the actions that he takes and how he acts.  Basically it isn’t really an issue for the beginner.  My second issue is that some of the transitions are a bit rough.  For example, when he’s in the alleyway, goes into a fugue state, and suddenly he’s surrounded by cops…I had no idea what the heck happened and even though they indicated there was a bomb it wasn’t very clear to me how it all fit together.  I think perhaps my biggest problem is that I’m just not familiar enough with Constantine’s world to just pick up this issue and follow the story.  I wish they had clued the reader in with just a bit more background information.

I really do like the artwork in this issue, excluding the cover.  The artwork is all done in watercolors and with a few simple brush strokes the artist manages to capture the human figure.  They are adept especially at displaying the emotions of the figures and you really get a good sense of some of the horrors the “Horrorist” has seen by looking her haunted painted eyes.  The front page is particularly striking, a scene of a snowy landscape, with stark black shapes over the top of it disturbing its serene beauty.  It’s just kind of haunting and sticks with you.  The scenes where there are fires are also visually striking, because the artist does a fairly good job of showing it in the reflections of people’s faces and in the landscape behind them.  The muted color palette and darker shadows really go well with the disturbing story line.

Frankly the story was a bit disappointing to me, mostly because it seemed to assume that if you picked up this issue you were completely familiar with John Constantine and everything that had happened to him in the past few years.  So that’s a bit off putting.  If you are a huge fan of Constantine then you may enjoy this issue.  If not…I’d pick up a different Constantine series or perhaps “The Sandman” series instead.