HELLBLAZER #170 (Best of the Week!)
"Ashes & Dust in the City of Angels, Part One"
Highly Recommended (10/10)
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DC Comics/Vertigo imprint
Writer: Brian Azzarello
Pencils: Marcelo Frusin
Colors: Lee Loughridge
Letters: Clem Robins
Editor: Will Dennis
Price: $2.50 US/$4.25 CAN |
Brian Azzarello's exploration of the dark side of America through the eyes of a mysterious Brit continues, and it makes for chilling, enlightening and ballsy reading. Frusin's dark, foreboding art captures both a film-noir atmosphere and a sense of the supernatural with seeming ease. Though Azzarello's is earning more acclaim for his work on 100 Bullets, his scripts on Hellblazer are just as powerful.
FBI agent Frank Turro, who has a special interest in con man and magician John Constantine, arrives on a crime scene at a Los Angeles sex club. The object of the investigation is a corpse that bears a greater resemblance to charcoal than to a human being, and it's believed to be the body of Constantine. Turro has his doubts, though, and after calling in his own medical examiner to examine the body, begins interrogating those in attendance at the club at the time of the incident.
Frusin's art here strikes me as a cross between the work of Peter (Starman, JSA) Snejbjerg and Eduardo (100 Bullets) Risso. The sometimes cartoony quality of the characters' expressions makes them come off as menacing and disturbed as opposed to silly. Loughridge's colors reinforce the tense mood perfectly, which should come as no surprise to those who first sampled such work on various Batman comics a while back.
Azzarello instills the characters with voices that sound natural while coming off as clever at the same time. The dialogue isn't exactly genuine, but idealized, and that's OK. It makes for a modern film-noir atmosphere that spotlights just how corrupt the edges of our world have become over the years. It's the kind of world in which Constantine fits perfectly, yet others' descriptions of him doesn't seem to fit with what we've seen before. It deepens the mystery and doesn't just sustain the reader's interest, but puts it in a choke-hold.
What really makes this book worth reading, though, is that the creators don't hold back. At all. The visuals are shocking, but nowhere near as much as the dialogue. "You can only be in five places at once." "I was being pissed on." And what makes it so chilling is that the reader knows that this is no dark fantasy world. Despite the supernatural plot elements, Azzarello presents us with a stark reality that one never or rarely considers.
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