Constantine's Cancer

"Constantine's Cancer" from Hellblazer #43 (DC, 1991) by Garth Ennis, Will Simpson and Mark Pennington

While I read the Jamie Delano comics thanks to a friend's Hellblazer collection, my favorites were the issues written by others, like Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman. When an irreverent new writer from the second wave of the British Invasion called Garth Ennis started on the book, I decided to make it my jump-on point. I wasn't disappointed! That first arc, in which that bastard Constantine swindles himself out of cancer and pisses off the Devil was awesome, and heralded a lot more lows than highs for our favorite member of the Trenchcoat Brigade. Over the course of Ennis' run, I even got a letter printed in the letters' page! I read Hellblazer up through issue 100, about halfway through Paul Jenkins' run before temporarily getting out of comics, and I never picked it up again. So yeah, I'm partly responsible for it ending with #300 lately. If you accept the premise that DC was motivated by sales and not the need to put its JLDark character into its New52 instead of Vertigo, of course.