Collects issue 164 through 174 of the monthly series
Writer: Brian Azzarello
Artists: Marcelo Frusin, Giuseppe Camuncoli, Cameron Stewart
Publisher: DC Vertigo/Titan Books (ISBN 1-84023-861-5)
The last eleven issues of Azzarello's run on John Constantine, and the perfect time to reassess the whole story. What comes strongly to the fore is that the whole is very much more than the sum of its parts. Individually, as released, the monthlies were poor in comparison to the previous heights reached by the series, a meandering, rambling narrative, seemingly disconnected with previous issues from previous writers, as well as prior stories in his own run. It's in trades, however (of which this is the fourth of Azzarello's work), that the whole vista of Azzarello's vision finally becomes clear - reading them over the course of a few days (rather than one chapter per month for a couple of years) shows that he knows what he's doing, that the four books are effectively one story, that of Constantine's imprisonment and consequences, all of which tie back to a seemingly innocuous episode from his youth.
Two major elements still don't work, though. The story is not really Constantine's, it mostly reads as other stories through which he's more of a passing, bit-part, player. He's like Martin Sheen in The West Wing - the driver of all that happens, but kept off-screen for much of the time, appearing in cameos mostly with the occasional full episode devoted to him. For a book ostensibly about the life of John Constantine, it's annoying to have him off-stage so much - I want to read about him, not about a bunch of cookie-cutter foul-mouthed rednecks and assorted villains, the likes of which populate 100 Bullets each month. The second element is the dialogue - when Constantine does appear, it just doesn't feel right...it doesn't sound like him, it sounds like an impersonation, like someone has studied the dialogue from previous issues and used that as a template, rather than getting into the guy's head and writing his dialogue as he would say it.
And so to this final book - here, all the elements come together, yet if you haven't read the first three books they don't really make much sense, it's a definite final chapter, almost everything is in relation to some event or character from a previous Azzarello issue, and as such is very poor for new readers, yet fulfilling and excellent for those who've stuck with it. Frusin's art (he draws the majority of the chapters here) is uniformly superb, he has an excellent dark style which matches the tone and pacing of the story to a tee, and an air of menance pervades the whole book. There's no real point in relating much about the individual stories in this book, suffice it to say it's the capstone to a fine novel, it works best as part four of a four-part story, and if you read all four parts in one go you'll get much from the book.
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