Hellblazer: Pandemonium s/c back

"War. I never realised just how brutally fucking loud it is. How viciously its explosive claws disintegrate soft sackfuls of humanity. How shockingly instant, the violent obliteration of a life. And how absolutely alone you are in the chaotic lottery of death."

It's 25 years since John Constantine, mouthy wind-up merchant, began tormenting the Swamp Thing under Alan Moore and in celebration the original HELLBLAZER writer returns with a typically topical original graphic novel set first in London then, once suitably stitched up by the British Security Service, out in the desert of Iraq, once home to the magnificent Sumerian temples where John quickly starts sniffing a familiar scent which I'm about to throw you off:

"There's no humour in the eyes that I unveil... Just a predator's primal recognition of prey. A hot feline musk engulfs me. And suddenly I'm back in the Big Cat house at the London Zoo in the 'fifties. Six years old. Stomach churned by tectonic growls, flinching from the tawny lash of tails... Lion teeth gnawing on the skull of my imagination. Forty-eight years later, it's as much as I can do not to piss myself again."

It's some of the Delano's finest writing to date, every page littered with his love of the English language, whilst Jock's line and light casts the sun in your eyes as well as the grit of sand.

Definitive HELLBLAZER, then, eloquently conjoining the real world horrors of extraordinary rendition and the war in Iraq with John's long and bloody occult history, whilst making it abundantly clear that any demons involved are merely benefactors of human brutality, not its catalysts. It's John the witness and John the player, hiding his hand with bluff and black humour right to the gates of the Iraqi detention centres:

"So which way to the Dr. Mengele suite, sport? And where can I charge up my cordless drill?"