Jamie Delano: Search & Destroy

What? He's a wroter! He done did wrote!

The Constatine stuff collected in Original Sins is top. Some seriously haunting stuff in there, and Ridgeway's art suits the material perfectly. Might reread it over the weekend, actually. I seem to recall his Hellblazer run went a little convoluted later, though.

Has he done anything recently?

Thatcher-era Constantine was pretty awesome.

World Without End was horrible, iirc. Animal Man looked good at least against what came before it, even though it wasn't.

Tainted is one of the best things Vertigo has ever published (face was better though, obv). I hoped Hell Eternal was going to recapture that classicicity, but instead it was some lame serial-killer road-movie thing (or something!) that struggled to be written in an American voice and didn't pull it off - I gave it away after one read (wish I hadn't now, I'd like to re-read it and see if I'm being unfair or even accurate).

The Horrorist is an alright Hellblazer interlude sort of thing, nice moody painted art from David Lloyd, but comes off a bit like JM DeMatteis crossed with Delano in its teary-eyed mysticism. Bad Blood was indeed the aged Constantine Vs The Royal Fam and is totally great - I'm sure it would have a greater reputation and be collected and stuff if it had had an artist more suited to the material. Philip Bond is of course an excellent cartoonist and great on the humourous elements in the story, but the One Last Big Job nature of the story and the horror/social manipulation themes could have come across better with a more "serious" artist. Track it down folks!

His other return to Hellblazer, in a single issue before the abortive Eddie Campbell run, is also one of his best (and pretty much straight-forward comedy but drawn by a horror-friendly artist! swap Phillips and Bond and redraw the two!).

I read two issues of Cruel & Unusual and it felt oddly compromised & unfulfilling, but they were issues 2 and 4, so there's that.

Chuck remembers correctly, World Without End was horrible. So was his Man-Bat miniseries from around the same time, if I'm not imagining it.

Ooh, Bad Blood sounds good, I loooove Philip Bond.

Ha, i've just remembered, I shamelessly plagarised elements of Bad Blood for a creative writing assignment at university when the deadline was looming and I was very short on inspiration. I got 68% for it!

What was WWE, though?

Alien species battle for supremacy over their disputed territory but OMG THEY ARE ACTUALLY GERMS AND ANTIBODIES IN A LIVING BODY (again, "or something", I never made it through the third issue and this was fifteen yrs ago). truly hideous post-Sienkiewicz 'arty' painted art. DESTROY.

i reread wwe kit and it was ok. no, really. weirdly enough i am halfway thru rereading the nightraven gn and its good too - david lloyd helps of course. then again englishmen doing chicago gangster speak c/d?

also its too fuckin verbose. too purple. all that post moore for this is hope's crowding graveyard, whose massive headstones bear down pressing the corpses of butchered dreams into nightmare stuff

didn't he write Captain Britain with Alan Davis for a while? what was that like?

It was ok, but a pale shadow of the Moore stuff. Which was underlined because he was using Moore's characters and concepts.
But then, compared to the way Claremont used the same material later, it seems brilliant. Delano at least did some radical stuff with them - he was responsible ( I think) for both the metamorphosis of Megan and the blinding of Betsy Braddock. Though apparently Davis wrote the last few stories alone..
It used to be available in a tpb, which I've got somewhere...

also its too fuckin verbose. too purple. all that post moore for this is hope's crowding graveyard, whose massive headstones bear down pressing the corpses of butchered dreams into nightmare stuff

-- mullygrubbr (fan...), October 10th, 2005 11:14 AM. (bulbs)

I've been rereading 'Original Sins'. There's a panel of Constantine walking down the road in London. All we need to know is that Constantine's walking down the road in London, but Delano has seen fit to add "The streets are hardened arteries leading to the city's dead heart... A streetlamp winks its sickly yellow eye as I pass -- Footsteps echoing from sullen buildings" Horrible, sixth-form poetry stuff, that achieves nothing but detracting from the flow of the story.