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Jamie Delano
The following in an excerpt of an interview conducted by Barb Lien for the
Sequential Tart Website with Jamie Delano, the first writer of the ongoing
monthly Hellblazer series. You can find the original interview, which covers
Jamie's career in depth and makes for fascinating reading, over Here.
Thanks to Barb for allowing us to reprint the parts relevant to Hellblazer here.
ST:John Constantine, the lead character of the supernatural DC mature horror comic Hellblazer, started out as a supporting character in Swamp Thing. What inspired the actual series and where did you come into the process?
JD: I guess a favorable response among Swamp Thing readership to the character Alan Moore created in that saga was the inspirational impetus for DC in deciding to try out John Constantine with his own series.
By that time (1987), Alan's reception among US comic readers had alerted editors at the company to the existence of a pool
of comics "talent" potentially available in the UK. I had a series proposal under consideration. DC thought that the
intrinsically British nature of John Constantine obviously called for a British writer: I was asked to submit any ideas
I had for style and direction of the series. Lucky for me, I got the job.
ST: How difficult was it to do the world-building for Hellblazer?
JD: Not too difficult, as I recall. It seemed natural that the story should run in the real world in real time:
then it was really a case of assembling some precarious scaffold of metaphysics to support some of the more visceral
special effects. Of course, that is a retrospective analysis. At the time I didn't have a fucking clue what I was doing.
I just sat down and started writing as if my life depended on it, which it probably did.
ST: Why did you decide to make John Constantine a Liverpool native instead of a London native? His Swamp Thing appearances made him sound more like a pseudo-Cockney than a Liverpudlian.
JD: I might be wrong, but I think Alan had already established Constantine as Liverpudlian by birth: I did a story
about him running away from home in his early teens, and spending the time since living in London, as a justification for
his southern British accent.
ST: This was one of the first (some might say only) horror comic book that used tone and mood to evoke horror
rather than violence and blood. Yet, with the exception of a few very dark moments in Captain Britain, you'd never had the
chance to be this atmospheric in a work before. Was it a liberating experience for you?
JD: Absolutely, hence the wild profligacy of the prose. As a writer becomes more experienced in his craft, he learns that
the number of his words is finite, and he needs to make them last.
ST: How did you come up with this use of tone and mood to scare and disturb people?
JD: Largely, I think I just took elements of reality which scared and disturbed me, and spun them through my
imagination, adding a little cosmetic magic and feeding them back in the form of fiction.
ST: What works (both inside and outside the comics medium) influenced you when you wrote Hellblazer?
JD: Nothing direct, that I can think of: I never read too much horror fiction. There was a '70s British TV series,
about an antiheroic ex British Intelligence agent called Callan whose atmosphere is echoed by Hellblazer in my mind.
ST: John Constantine is about your age. There are a couple of Hellblazer issues that feel so real that one
wonders if they have any element of autobiography in them. This is especially true for Dead Boy's Heart, perhaps my
favorite comic you've done (issue 84 being a close second). How much of you and your history is in Constantine stories
that you've done which explore his past?
JD: Well, the scene where Young Constantine is invited to witness a bout of al fresco sex is "based on a real
incident", but I swear to god no goddamn monkey ever stuck its finger up my ass. No sirree, Bob! [Editor's Note: The
Monkey Reference is to Hellblazer # 84]. A man would remember a thing like that, never mind how much schnapps he'd
drunk.
Dead Boy's Heart is probably my favorite, too. While it's true that most of the story is "pure" fiction, I think I got
lucky that day and tapped into my own emotional memory of that age and time in a way that came through in the story.
As for the other stories: There are bits and pieces of contorted and distorted personal experience woven in here and
there "fictionalized autobiography"; all writers mine their own lives constantly for raw material: what else do we have
to work with? , but all the black magic shit is imaginary or from books.
ST: I also notice that Constantine had a kick-ass taste in music back then. There are references to everyone
from John Cale to Grandmaster Flash in the comic. Were these all favorites of yours? Did knowing his taste in music help
you to better evoke the character?
JD: Constantine may have had a "kick-ass taste in music" back then, but if he's anything like me, he struggles
to work the stereo, now. But yes, I guess giving him a taste in music that I understood helped me slip into the character
more easily. And checking a person's CD rack, or bookshelf, is a tried and trusted shorthand insight into personality.
ST: While you were writing Hellblazer, Swamp Thing had a cross-over plot, of sorts, when John helped father Abby and Swamp Thing's baby, Tefe. As seen in the Original Sins graphic novel, the fathering of Tefe turned out to be the solution to a Hellblazer plot involving the new Messiah. How far along were you in writing Hellblazer when you heard about the Tefe subplot? How did that affect writing the first few Hellblazer story arcs?
JD: I think I probably knew about Rick Veitch's plans to use Constantine in Swamp Thing quite early in the development of
the book, but avoided the ramifications as long as I could, not quite seeing the point of cross-over stories. I can't
remember exactly how it all fit together, now. Constantine had to have a tree tattooed on his ass and then didn't Swamp
Thing give him a hard time manifesting from a bunch of tenuously organic materials around a demolition site?
I know readers probably assume that we writers have all this stuff carefully planned for months in advance and perhaps
some do, I can only speak for myself but in reality it is much more haphazard than that. There's an image in a Hellblazer
story somewhere, of a Young Constantine hopping from one large rock to the next along a beach, in a state of perpetual
movement from balance point to balance point. Series plots are kind of like that for me. The possibilities for a story's
progression are an infinite field of rocks to be crossed. You start out with a vague idea of direction and destination,
but each individual footfall is random, decided instinctively. Some rocks that looked promising from a distance turn out
to be slippery, so you avoid them in favor of a detour: some have an unexpected camber that sends you off on a new
heading...etc..etc...
Sorry...exhibiting a worrying recent tendency to ramble obscurely that seems to be associated with the onset of
grand-paternity.
So all I'm saying is that the Swamp Thing elements that needed to be incorporated in the Hellblazer continuity became
useful "rocks" that I used to inspire new directions to move my own story in.
ST: During the whole Tefe's birth plot in Swamp Thing, you wrote a stand alone issue of it that explored Abby's
feelings towards Constantine. How did it feel to be writing the comic that launched the Constantine character onto
the unsuspecting world?
JD: Incestuous. But again: "necessity is the mother of invention" and the constraint of a story's need to fit a continuity
can often force a writer's creativity in an interesting direction.
ST: It seemed that Hellblazer became increasingly dark as the book progressed...especially after The Family Man story
arc. Did you intend for that to happen or were you surprised at the direction your stories were taking?
JD: It felt like a natural progression at the time. I guess The Horror had a hold of me.
ST: There were two issues or three issues of Hellblazer that read more like surrealistic drug trips than plots
(On the Beach and Sundays are Different come to mind). What problems, if any, did you have getting this style of work
published? What if anything did you have to edit out before the final version saw print?
JD: Yeah. On The Beach was written during a family vacation spent largely within view of a nuclear power plant.
One of those stories where you haven't got a good idea, so you turn the job over to your subconscious and ruin
everyone's holiday by being weird. Kind of liked it in the end, though; and I don't remember DC wanted anything
changed.
Sundays Are Different was another subconscious lucky dip, I guess. Must've been feeling paranoid and alienated
that week. Maybe I'd just turned 35 years old, or Thatcher had just been elected again...Technique didn't work as
well as with On The Beach, though.
ST: What factors influenced your leaving Hellblazer?
JD: Familiarity breeding contempt, maybe. Constantine was getting too close for comfort. I started to get sick of the
flippant cynical bastard, and his constant jones for the most sordid and painful of human experience. A writer has
that kind of shit to live with at home: he doesn't need it at work all day, too.
ST: How did it feel leaving this title that you breathed such life into?
JD: Pretty natural, I think. I'd uncovered about as much of John Constantine's contorted psyche as anyone could likely
want to know: It felt like now it was time for someone to find the evasive bastard something to DO.
ST: You returned to Hellblazer after years away from it with issue # 84. Why? What made the time right to write Constantine again?
JD: Garth [Ennis] had finished his run on the series; and the next poor sucker wasn't quite ready to go, I think. Lou
Stathis (then editor) asked me if I wanted to write a fill-in episode and I couldn't resist having the last word on
that bastard Ennis. (Who I will never forgive for allowing Constantine to discover a taste for that filthy brew Guinness).
ST: Why the lighter tone modern urban gothic/shaggy dog type story for this issue?
JD: No conscious decision: It just happened that way.
ST: Why is #84 your favorite?
JD: It makes me laugh and I can reread it without wanting to edit it very much.
ST: You used a lot of musical references in your comics. How connected with the music scene of that era were you?
What were some of the reasons you incorporated so much music into your comics?
JD: I wasn't really connected to the music scene of the era; other than as a consumer. Maybe musical references
in comics serve in part as a cue to mood or context, a shortcut to shared experience, as I might have already said,
above somewhere. Sometimes, just having a song in my head can provide enough mood to start a story moving.
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