Constantine had just buried Phoebe, his most-recent girlfriend. The storyarc wraps more-or-less Milligan’s first year on Hellblazer.

Its events play out with Constantine at a unique low. “India” represents a major chunk of Milligan’s character arc for Constantine. “India” is not the welcome break between battles, “India” is not Constantine cocky as ever and super self-assured. Even if readers knew he must have been faking after the harrowing he had just been put through.Īlso drawn by Camuncoli, “India”, nearly a year later, serves a very different kind of function. With Camuncoli, it was easy to buy into the idea that Constantine was at the top of his game. Camuncoli’s more iconic style of artwork, contrasted sharply with that of series-regular artist Leonardo Manco’s sharper, more terse realism. At the time Camuncoli’s artwork gave a radical reframing of the Constantine character and his impending struggle against occult profiteer Lord Calvin Burnham, African War-mage Mako and a third, unseen enemy with the power to alter destiny itself. A battle that would play out in “Roots of Coincidence”, then series-runner Andy Diggle’s final storyarc. “Mortification” appeared just after the onslaught of African War-mage Mako, it read as a repose, a small retreat before the major battle looming on the horizon. Constantine would always be given a breather just before a major confrontation, and he would always find himself in complete control. Drawn by Giuseppe Camuncoli (who features as a key artist on current writer Peter Milligan’s run), “Mortification of the Flesh” was an example of a recurrent feature in the kind of storytelling Hellblazer had developed over its 21-year run. It is this four-part storyarc that is the first to see John Constantine, the titular Hellblazer, leave the familiar shores of his native England since the 2008 filler “Mortification of the Flesh” took him to a secret chamber in the Vatican.

Pop! London by Peter Milligan