In 1985, the three artists of the comic Swamp Thing - Steve Bissette, John Totleben, and Rick Veitch - wanted to draw a character who looked like Sting.

He possesses a rather unusual origin story. John Constantine is probably the only mainstream comics character deliberately designed as a fusion of counterculture and leftist politics. Activist in orientation, bohemian in sensibility, Hellblazer was virtuously unpleasant. It was no diversionary spectacle,but simply a straightforward presentation of the horrors of a triumphant far-right. This is because Hellblazer aspired to capture the horror genre in service of left-wing allegory. Rarely inspiring the sublime dread of, say, a Cronenberg movie, the body horror in these comics is mundane, almost quaint. And yet the horror in the early issues of Hellblazer is characteristically unspectacular. It’s amazing that DC - the publisher of Superman and Batman - ever even agreed to it. The comic’s many delights include sex scenes between lovers whose skin has been peeled off, a man’s body inflating with insects, and skinheads fused together into a horrific four-armed hooligan golem.

Page after page writhes with body horror. Hellblazer is one of the ugliest mainstream comics I’ve ever seen. What will be lost is precisely how uncool the first issues of Hellblazer were, how vitriolic, melancholic and spiteful, how negatively charismatic, how difficult to read. But this slick, atavistic, frat-guy incarnation is undoubtedly exactly what will be preserved when DC relaunches the comic - once a trenchant critique of consumerism - as a PG-13, family-friendly commodity ready for the rumored Guillermo del Toro movie tie-in. In this version, John Constantine is an handsome, exotically British rogue who chain- smokes Silk Cuts, always “knows the score” and has a lot of sex in squalid little horror stories.

The comics blogosphere has reacted to the comic’s cancellation by writing eulogies to the character’s charisma. Ballard and indie film pacing than superheroics. Constantine is the most charismatic “alternative” character published by mainstream comics, a one-man argument for a comic more influenced by J.G. The iconic horror noir comic, shortly to be rebooted as a straightforward superhero franchise, starred a left-wing anti-hero, John Constantine, who routinely tussled with both run-of-the-mill Satanists and Margaret Thatcher. Detective Comics recently published its last-ever issue of Hellblazer, one of the most important graphic novel series ever written. Horror is political precisely because the realm of the political is horrifying. Headed for a reboot, DC's comic Hellblazer will have to find a new politics in a post-Thatcher world

Jamie delano