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[Retrospective]Heartland
Bobby Derie
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Before I work myself into a lather over the continuing Marvel clusterfuck leadup to Secret Wars, I'd like to take a breather and do a retrospective on a fairly obscure comic. Next time I'll do something more of you might have read, but for right now I just want to talk about Heartland by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon.
This was a one-shot spinoff of Ennis & Dillon's highly esteemed run on Hellblazer. Now, not everybody likes that run. Which is fair. If you don't like Ennis, you're not going to like this. Yes, a lot of Ennis' work, from Hitman to Preacher, reads the same - this is actually him being a bit more poignant. It's not saccharine and it's gritty in the way a British crime film tends to be gritty, with a bleakness and a black humor drowning all. Heartland follows John Constantine's one-time girlfriend Kit as she goes home to Ireland. It's completely non-supernatural, all family drama and the topical issues that seem eternal. It flows out of a story of the same name in Ennis' run on Hellblazer, and...that's rare, when you think about it.
How many comics can you name where the normal characters could conceivably hold their own comic? Kurt Busiek can do it with Astro City, but he's Kurt Busiek. Not many other people can really manage that. The last time Marvel tried something like that was, I think, Frontline - or maybe that one silent issue of Hawkeye told from the perspective of Pizza Dog.
!
More to the point, being able to put out a one-shot on a character like this - a character who is well-developed and three-dimensional enough to carry their own book (okay, it probably didn't sell that well, but still) - was rather characteristic of the old Hellblazer. Like Frank Castle, John Constantine was a character that for the longest time bucked the usual comic book trends - no spandex, crapsack worlds inhabited by people with real problems, and they aged in real time. Hell, John Constantine was past fifty by the time they retired him...and it was, overall, good. They had cycled through any number of writers and artists, but the number of stories you could tell with Constantine weren't all used up (even if, and I will admit this, the ending of the series was very confused and poor). It became a plot point, that Constantine was getting older throughout the series, and his friends and family grew up and had kids of their own, and there was John, the perpetual ne'er do well, never settling down with anyone too long, never really making that commitment (and writers never picking up the threads of the various children he sired throughout the series, for the most part, but let's not go there)... and that's what makes Heartland so interesting, in respect, because it's told from the view of an ex-Constantine girlfriend. A woman that has loved two magicians, but who slips out of that world like a penguin slipping out of the water.
Not my best simile.
...and it's something I don't think you could ever have with the new Constantine series. I mean hell, I used to be one of those guys that argued Constantine should rejoin the DC universe, but now that I've seen the result...I don't like it. It's not just that there's still no real discipline to DC's magic subuniverse, it's just that the character of John Constantine I grew to love would not be able to pal around with superheroes like he does. Batman riding in the back seat might be good for a guffaw the first time you read it, but it's just silly after that. The thing is, Constantine should be wading through the ruins of lives and the open sewer of the occult, bluffing and swearing and working long cons, not throwing down with Shazam and slinging fireballs. The grit isn't there, it's just spandex by another name.
Part of the problem, I think, is not the fault of the writers of Constantine; comic writers on long-running interconnected universes tend to go through periods of generation and consolidation. I like to point to Doctor Strange in Marvel - who for many years could do pretty much anything as long as he could get it to rhyme. It made him too powerful, and hard to write convincing stories for, sort of like Silver Age Superman. They had to put limitations on him to make him more interesting, and they built up his pantheon of extradimensional gods and spirits and cults, which were in turn built on and consolidated, little connections made here and there between different characters - my favorite is probably how one issue of Doom 2099 with a reference to the "three eyes of Agamotto" has proven influential over the years - but you're never going to have one writer doing all this, or every writer checking some massive company wiki to see whether or not they can do X, Y, or Z. So the limitations or connections get overlooked, forgotten, rewritten in ways that don't make sense (remember when Hellstrom was the Son of Satannish? And bald?)...it's all no-prize territory, but continuity is a bear. When it works, it's awesome, but it doesn't always work.
The thing is, I would make a strong argument that Heartland is the best Hellblazer spinoff. Most of the others are either just standard Hellblazer storylines, or they kinda cripple the characters involved by trying to be Hellblazer stories sans John Constantine, and so fall a bit flat. But Heartland tackles a character on her own ground, on her own terms; it's her book and her story, not a story with a Constantine-shaped hole in it. That's what makes it work...and I kinda wish we had more of that kind of thing. Or that the writing in more contemporary books allowed that kind of thing.
I don't think I quite managed not to rant up there, but it is what it is. Next time maybe more people will have read.
This was a one-shot spinoff of Ennis & Dillon's highly esteemed run on Hellblazer. Now, not everybody likes that run. Which is fair. If you don't like Ennis, you're not going to like this. Yes, a lot of Ennis' work, from Hitman to Preacher, reads the same - this is actually him being a bit more poignant. It's not saccharine and it's gritty in the way a British crime film tends to be gritty, with a bleakness and a black humor drowning all. Heartland follows John Constantine's one-time girlfriend Kit as she goes home to Ireland. It's completely non-supernatural, all family drama and the topical issues that seem eternal. It flows out of a story of the same name in Ennis' run on Hellblazer, and...that's rare, when you think about it.
How many comics can you name where the normal characters could conceivably hold their own comic? Kurt Busiek can do it with Astro City, but he's Kurt Busiek. Not many other people can really manage that. The last time Marvel tried something like that was, I think, Frontline - or maybe that one silent issue of Hawkeye told from the perspective of Pizza Dog.
!
More to the point, being able to put out a one-shot on a character like this - a character who is well-developed and three-dimensional enough to carry their own book (okay, it probably didn't sell that well, but still) - was rather characteristic of the old Hellblazer. Like Frank Castle, John Constantine was a character that for the longest time bucked the usual comic book trends - no spandex, crapsack worlds inhabited by people with real problems, and they aged in real time. Hell, John Constantine was past fifty by the time they retired him...and it was, overall, good. They had cycled through any number of writers and artists, but the number of stories you could tell with Constantine weren't all used up (even if, and I will admit this, the ending of the series was very confused and poor). It became a plot point, that Constantine was getting older throughout the series, and his friends and family grew up and had kids of their own, and there was John, the perpetual ne'er do well, never settling down with anyone too long, never really making that commitment (and writers never picking up the threads of the various children he sired throughout the series, for the most part, but let's not go there)... and that's what makes Heartland so interesting, in respect, because it's told from the view of an ex-Constantine girlfriend. A woman that has loved two magicians, but who slips out of that world like a penguin slipping out of the water.
Not my best simile.
...and it's something I don't think you could ever have with the new Constantine series. I mean hell, I used to be one of those guys that argued Constantine should rejoin the DC universe, but now that I've seen the result...I don't like it. It's not just that there's still no real discipline to DC's magic subuniverse, it's just that the character of John Constantine I grew to love would not be able to pal around with superheroes like he does. Batman riding in the back seat might be good for a guffaw the first time you read it, but it's just silly after that. The thing is, Constantine should be wading through the ruins of lives and the open sewer of the occult, bluffing and swearing and working long cons, not throwing down with Shazam and slinging fireballs. The grit isn't there, it's just spandex by another name.
Part of the problem, I think, is not the fault of the writers of Constantine; comic writers on long-running interconnected universes tend to go through periods of generation and consolidation. I like to point to Doctor Strange in Marvel - who for many years could do pretty much anything as long as he could get it to rhyme. It made him too powerful, and hard to write convincing stories for, sort of like Silver Age Superman. They had to put limitations on him to make him more interesting, and they built up his pantheon of extradimensional gods and spirits and cults, which were in turn built on and consolidated, little connections made here and there between different characters - my favorite is probably how one issue of Doom 2099 with a reference to the "three eyes of Agamotto" has proven influential over the years - but you're never going to have one writer doing all this, or every writer checking some massive company wiki to see whether or not they can do X, Y, or Z. So the limitations or connections get overlooked, forgotten, rewritten in ways that don't make sense (remember when Hellstrom was the Son of Satannish? And bald?)...it's all no-prize territory, but continuity is a bear. When it works, it's awesome, but it doesn't always work.
The thing is, I would make a strong argument that Heartland is the best Hellblazer spinoff. Most of the others are either just standard Hellblazer storylines, or they kinda cripple the characters involved by trying to be Hellblazer stories sans John Constantine, and so fall a bit flat. But Heartland tackles a character on her own ground, on her own terms; it's her book and her story, not a story with a Constantine-shaped hole in it. That's what makes it work...and I kinda wish we had more of that kind of thing. Or that the writing in more contemporary books allowed that kind of thing.
I don't think I quite managed not to rant up there, but it is what it is. Next time maybe more people will have read.
Bobby Derie on
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