by Jamie Delano & Richard Piers Rayner, Mark Buckingham, Bryan Talbot, David Lloyd. Publisher: DC Vertigo/Titan (ISBN 1845764900)
"Remember Newcastle, he said, and slapped me with a sudden chill of anger which now grows tentacles through me, like cancer, or death.
"Remember Newcastle. I wouldn't have given him credit for such subtlety -- but these words touch me as precisely as a dentist's steel probing the exposed pulp of a molar nerve."
Memory is very much at the forefront here, the second HELLBLAZER book from the late 1980s, as readers first discovered what was so utterly grim that happened in Newcastle in Constantine's greener days to send him to Ravenscar's Secure Facility For The Dangerously Deranged... looked back at the early 80s days of the Falklands War... remembered British holidays at the seaside... and were taken all the way back to old then ancient Britain as a mad, diseased and vainglorious abbot is told a tale by Merlin, his head-on-a-spike, and we discover said abbot's relative connection to thrice-born, Christian killing King Kon-Sten-Tyn of Ravenscar, who was a total bastard too.
You're right: that's the one Talbot's on. Not having read this material for some time, I was taken aback at how imaginative and vivid Delano was, particularly when daydreaming about the meltdown of a coastal nuclear reactor or flying the astral plane. He really does give the English language a damn good theatrical outing, with demons as loquacious as they repulsive. Rayner and Bucky's line are crisp and clear, and Vertigo's colourists hadn't yet blown out all the candles and left us choking in the post-snuff waxy vapour of more recent years.
