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Hellblazer (Single Issues)
Hellblazer #5
One copy of Hellblazer #5.
- GenresComicsHorrorComic Book
Comic
First published January 1, 1988
2 people are currently reading
26 people want to read
About the author
Jamie Delano
460 books351 followersJamie Delano aka A. William James began writing comics professionally in the early 1980s. Latterly he has been writing prose fiction with "BOOK THIRTEEN" published by his own LEPUS BOOKS imprint (http://www.lepusbooks.co.uk) in 2012, "Leepus | DIZZY" in April 2014, and "Leepus | THE RIVER" in 2017.
Jamie lives in semi-rural Northamptonshire with his partner, Sue. They have three adult children and a considerable distraction of grandchildren.
Jamie lives in semi-rural Northamptonshire with his partner, Sue. They have three adult children and a considerable distraction of grandchildren.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 7, 2014
I was perturbed with what I just read. I still can't find the words since yesterday but I'm going to have to suck it up and start reviewing because I feel like I'm losing momentum here. As far as first impressions go, I thought this issue (When Johnny comes marching home) was interesting but otherwise quite exhausting and confusing to get through. It's not even the premise itself that made it hard for me to wrap my head around it. I actually adore stories on the psychological effects of warfare on soldiers especially the distress that comes from the aftershocks of committing inhumane and violent actions that they justify as mere by-products of war. In that sense, this issue should have been a great read for me. In some parts, it was. But for some other parts, it just became irritatingly confounding.
I can't help but feel immensely disconnected from what I was reading. Delano's prose is top-notch descriptive and vivid as always but I can't bring myself to care about what happens to the characters, not even the soldiers with their PTSD whom I do feel sorry for. But again, it didn't seem enough because I wasn't sure what the direction or message of this issue were. I was grasping on straws the entire time. I knew what I was witnessing was tragic and it was unfolding in such a solemn way that I would have been more moved if I understood why it was happening.
I supposed we will get some enlightenment (at least that's what I expect) on the later issues after this because I believe even Constantine himself is confused as fuck.
And this brings me to my next point. John Constantine didn't take any active role for this story and such inaction serves a bigger purpose, apparently. He was merely an observer like he's in some sort of wild-life documentary where he cannot interact or intervene which means that while all this gruesome things were happening around him, he made a decision not to interfere. The most extreme portrayal of which is when he watched a deranged husband rape his own wife. John hid in view and didn't make a sound. That was pretty cold no matter how understandable his motives were by not stopping it. It would have been agonizing for anyone in that situation but I think John was actually skilled in distancing himself from this sickening environment. I perfectly understood why he did it, though. I suppose he was gathering intel and he needed to see for himself the gravity and measure of what he is up against, these Resurrection Crusaders as they call themselves.
I think I'll rate this the lowest from what I read so far because there was enjoyment or pleasure while reading. I also wasn't sure I also liked the way John was characterized here even if it was a logical direction.
RECOMMENDED (sort of): 6/10
DO READ MORE OF MY HELLBLAZER REVIEWS
I can't help but feel immensely disconnected from what I was reading. Delano's prose is top-notch descriptive and vivid as always but I can't bring myself to care about what happens to the characters, not even the soldiers with their PTSD whom I do feel sorry for. But again, it didn't seem enough because I wasn't sure what the direction or message of this issue were. I was grasping on straws the entire time. I knew what I was witnessing was tragic and it was unfolding in such a solemn way that I would have been more moved if I understood why it was happening.
I supposed we will get some enlightenment (at least that's what I expect) on the later issues after this because I believe even Constantine himself is confused as fuck.
And this brings me to my next point. John Constantine didn't take any active role for this story and such inaction serves a bigger purpose, apparently. He was merely an observer like he's in some sort of wild-life documentary where he cannot interact or intervene which means that while all this gruesome things were happening around him, he made a decision not to interfere. The most extreme portrayal of which is when he watched a deranged husband rape his own wife. John hid in view and didn't make a sound. That was pretty cold no matter how understandable his motives were by not stopping it. It would have been agonizing for anyone in that situation but I think John was actually skilled in distancing himself from this sickening environment. I perfectly understood why he did it, though. I suppose he was gathering intel and he needed to see for himself the gravity and measure of what he is up against, these Resurrection Crusaders as they call themselves.
I think I'll rate this the lowest from what I read so far because there was enjoyment or pleasure while reading. I also wasn't sure I also liked the way John was characterized here even if it was a logical direction.
RECOMMENDED (sort of): 6/10
DO READ MORE OF MY HELLBLAZER REVIEWS
January 7, 2025
A good sad story about war, that is still happening till now, with different people and in different places.
January 2, 2015
This issue was quite amazing except some things, like how John didn't take any actions. Although maybe that was because he was shocked but still, seeing what the soldiers were doing, he didn't feel a little bit human to me. Only one thing that was very shocking was that John didn't have a little bit of humanity in this issue. Quite impossible for me to believe.
March 28, 2015
The horror of the Vietnam war coming to middle America...
November 15, 2023
This isn't the first time in this series that I've been compelled to reflect on some of the language choices.
There's super racist language in this issue, and there's no denying that.
I'm willing to take these works in the context of their time--we hadn't had as many conversations about what kinds of language are or are not worth using in fiction (not that these conversations have fully resolved)--and I do understand that the racist dialogue in this issue are words that feel authentic to characters who are designed (critically) as racists.
I don't think this language is endorsed by Delano, except insofar as putting it in a racist character's mouth can potentially be described as a infinitesimally weak endorsement by an author, by virtue of it being used at all in their art (rather than being treated as strictly off-limits).
I haven't spent enough time learning about how people feel about this kind of thing (characters being authentically toxic), but I know that--at a minimum--in 2023 we demand that risky/edgy choices be worth it, if they have any chance of dehumanizing real people. The characters using the racist language in this book are plainly (which is to say: deliberately, in terms of authorial intent) dehumanizing the individuals they refer to in a manner that's portrayed as ignorant, which is more responsible than a case where the author's endorsement or condemnation was less clear.
With all of that out of the way...
More and more, I really value stories about post-traumatic stress.
I think that for a lot of obvious and less obvious reasons, our world is just exceedingly rotten with traumas of different degrees. Some of them are spectacular and horrifying, but some of them are just extremely uncomfortable and underexamined.
Like, I truly believe that--if psychological trauma is defined as "an emotional response caused by severe distressing events that are outside the normal range of human experiences" (this is what Wikipedia says, anyway; sorry for the lazy research)--what we've learned as a species is that "normal" is a very elusive condition in the first place, and that--especially in a 21st century media environment--even if we do not personally experience trauma in our lives very often, traumatic (and traumatizing) images have a way of finding their way into our algorithms.
So, because of how exceptionally exposed we seem to be to our own traumas and the traumas of others, I just think that stories about how to live in a traumatizing world become especially valuable.
And it's not just about coping: it's about recognizing how violence reverberates. This is why I'm not quick to condemn the challenging language in this issue: the dehumanizing language and the violence are interrelated, which is why being thoughtful about language is important! When you condition a person to believe that "killing THOSE people is okay", it only takes a little bit of instability for that same person to find their moral guidelines getting blurry.
Not only does this issue illustrate all of that, but it illustrates the industries that exploit people's traumas. The example in this story is the megachurch that exploits a town's grief over its MIA sons, but it reflects all sorts of dubious endeavors we've seen time and time again.
The only unqualified negative things I'll say about this issue are that John is weirdly passive and I think sometimes details become confusing. There's a lot of switching between voices and contexts, and I don't think everything is as clear as it could have been. But I also feel like this story being slightly disorienting is kind of appropriate, so my experience with it ended up being weirdly cohesive.
There's super racist language in this issue, and there's no denying that.
I'm willing to take these works in the context of their time--we hadn't had as many conversations about what kinds of language are or are not worth using in fiction (not that these conversations have fully resolved)--and I do understand that the racist dialogue in this issue are words that feel authentic to characters who are designed (critically) as racists.
I don't think this language is endorsed by Delano, except insofar as putting it in a racist character's mouth can potentially be described as a infinitesimally weak endorsement by an author, by virtue of it being used at all in their art (rather than being treated as strictly off-limits).
I haven't spent enough time learning about how people feel about this kind of thing (characters being authentically toxic), but I know that--at a minimum--in 2023 we demand that risky/edgy choices be worth it, if they have any chance of dehumanizing real people. The characters using the racist language in this book are plainly (which is to say: deliberately, in terms of authorial intent) dehumanizing the individuals they refer to in a manner that's portrayed as ignorant, which is more responsible than a case where the author's endorsement or condemnation was less clear.
With all of that out of the way...
More and more, I really value stories about post-traumatic stress.
I think that for a lot of obvious and less obvious reasons, our world is just exceedingly rotten with traumas of different degrees. Some of them are spectacular and horrifying, but some of them are just extremely uncomfortable and underexamined.
Like, I truly believe that--if psychological trauma is defined as "an emotional response caused by severe distressing events that are outside the normal range of human experiences" (this is what Wikipedia says, anyway; sorry for the lazy research)--what we've learned as a species is that "normal" is a very elusive condition in the first place, and that--especially in a 21st century media environment--even if we do not personally experience trauma in our lives very often, traumatic (and traumatizing) images have a way of finding their way into our algorithms.
So, because of how exceptionally exposed we seem to be to our own traumas and the traumas of others, I just think that stories about how to live in a traumatizing world become especially valuable.
And it's not just about coping: it's about recognizing how violence reverberates. This is why I'm not quick to condemn the challenging language in this issue: the dehumanizing language and the violence are interrelated, which is why being thoughtful about language is important! When you condition a person to believe that "killing THOSE people is okay", it only takes a little bit of instability for that same person to find their moral guidelines getting blurry.
Not only does this issue illustrate all of that, but it illustrates the industries that exploit people's traumas. The example in this story is the megachurch that exploits a town's grief over its MIA sons, but it reflects all sorts of dubious endeavors we've seen time and time again.
The only unqualified negative things I'll say about this issue are that John is weirdly passive and I think sometimes details become confusing. There's a lot of switching between voices and contexts, and I don't think everything is as clear as it could have been. But I also feel like this story being slightly disorienting is kind of appropriate, so my experience with it ended up being weirdly cohesive.
May 2, 2025
This was such a hard hitting piece of anti-war material, specifically the Vietnam war. Which makes it all the more fitting that Vietnam was just celebrating the 50th anniversary of the end of the war with America. In this issue, while Constantine was visiting Swamp Thing, he ended up finding his way to Liberty, Iowa where he found a thread connecting back to the resurrection crusaders. Especially after the events of this issue, they are becoming a force for death that Constantine can no longer ignore. The town of liberty has held out for 20 years that the boys they sent over to fight in Vietnam would one day come back, the entire time resenting the one man that did make it back and made his money off of the interstate that killed the town. But through their donations to the prayer pyramid (most obvious pyramid scheme ever) they believe they will finally have their prayers thrust into the light of the lord and the miracle of having their boys returned to them may finally come true.
Unfortunately for them their prayers come true. But not how they would wish, their boys returned through the memories of the one who returned. But they also didn’t realize they ever left Vietnam, and when you think you are trudging through the jungles of Iowa…everyone seems to be your enemy. It’s interesting, and somewhat discomforting, how passive of a role Constantine took in this issue. Once the older people who still reside in the town had the guns of the images of their sons thrust in their faces, Constantine ran. Bullets and guns are not something he deals with well, and throughout this issue he could only become an observer to the horrors in Vietnam. The war films that took over the nation had finally come home and he watched as the man in charge replayed the events that led to the death of his company, and all of their boys, in Vietnam. How he decided to take a Vietnamese girl off to the side and rape her, but once she escaped be realized she would alert the others to their location…then there was no telling what would happen to his group. So instead of letting that happen, and being the only one with a radio, he called a napalm strike on everyone in the area. That’s what happened in the past, but as this is playing out in his head in the present the woman on his vision who he raped…has been replaced by his own wife. Horrified by what he has done, she grabbed his gun and failed to kill him after being gunned down herself. There was a moment here where he realizes what he had done, that he had killed his wife. I am not sure what compelled Constantine to but in with his own mimicry of a drill sergeants voice, but instead of letting things play out the same he ordered the man to join his company and go down fighting alongside them like a true soldier. This time instead of his company and their prisoners dying to a napalm strike he ordered…the man, the towns people, and the visions of their sons all died to the man shooting a tanker truck off the road causing it to blow up his own gas station and take everyone along with it. As the issue comes to an end Constantine has now faced war and bear witness to it and left because the body counts were totaled. The resurrection crusade is truly on his radar now. It’s only crazy that this is what it finally took.
Unfortunately for them their prayers come true. But not how they would wish, their boys returned through the memories of the one who returned. But they also didn’t realize they ever left Vietnam, and when you think you are trudging through the jungles of Iowa…everyone seems to be your enemy. It’s interesting, and somewhat discomforting, how passive of a role Constantine took in this issue. Once the older people who still reside in the town had the guns of the images of their sons thrust in their faces, Constantine ran. Bullets and guns are not something he deals with well, and throughout this issue he could only become an observer to the horrors in Vietnam. The war films that took over the nation had finally come home and he watched as the man in charge replayed the events that led to the death of his company, and all of their boys, in Vietnam. How he decided to take a Vietnamese girl off to the side and rape her, but once she escaped be realized she would alert the others to their location…then there was no telling what would happen to his group. So instead of letting that happen, and being the only one with a radio, he called a napalm strike on everyone in the area. That’s what happened in the past, but as this is playing out in his head in the present the woman on his vision who he raped…has been replaced by his own wife. Horrified by what he has done, she grabbed his gun and failed to kill him after being gunned down herself. There was a moment here where he realizes what he had done, that he had killed his wife. I am not sure what compelled Constantine to but in with his own mimicry of a drill sergeants voice, but instead of letting things play out the same he ordered the man to join his company and go down fighting alongside them like a true soldier. This time instead of his company and their prisoners dying to a napalm strike he ordered…the man, the towns people, and the visions of their sons all died to the man shooting a tanker truck off the road causing it to blow up his own gas station and take everyone along with it. As the issue comes to an end Constantine has now faced war and bear witness to it and left because the body counts were totaled. The resurrection crusade is truly on his radar now. It’s only crazy that this is what it finally took.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 3, 2024
Didn't like this, racism all over the issue, I don't like racism even if the characters are racist to begin with.
Didn't like the yellow faces of the Vietnamese either.
I didn't like the entire Vietnam-war ghost soldiers storyline.
I was gonna rate this 3 but dropped it to two after reading my review lol
Didn't like the yellow faces of the Vietnamese either.
I didn't like the entire Vietnam-war ghost soldiers storyline.
I was gonna rate this 3 but dropped it to two after reading my review lol
April 12, 2025
This really went at a slow pace.
December 16, 2016
Me agrada la personalidad y las acciones de John, pero en éste tuve problemas porque las situaciones involucran a ancianitos. ):
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews