Magic and Loss: Reading “Damn Them All”
Right from the start, Damn Them All lets you know its creators are up to interesting things, formally speaking. The first five pages detail protagonist Ellie Hawthorne’s induction into the world of strange magic by her uncle Alfie, described as “a big deal in London’s spookier circles.” The way writer Si Spurrier and artist Charlie Adlard tell the story of Ellie’s immersion in the occult is meticulous, orderly, and thoroughly unconventional: a series of wide first-person images showing flashes of Ellie’s memory, interspersed with stretches of white on which we can see dialogue and narration.
And then there’s a moment where Spurrier and Adlard utterly disrupt the rhythms they’ve established in order to illustrate Ellie’s first encounter with a supernatural being, and it’s every bit as jarring and magnificent as such a sight should be.
This is the thing about Damn Them All (or at least its first volume, which is what we’re discussing here): just like the magic practiced by Ellie, Alfie, and others, it’s all about rhythms, tradeoffs, and invocations. The first two are pretty straightforward, but it’s the metatextual layer that makes this book even more fascinating. Spurrier’s been in the midst of a fascinating creative streak lately, and Adlard — arguably best-known for his work as artist for the bulk of The Walking Dead — is equally at home illustrating intimate human drama and bizarre cosmic happenings. And what they’re doing here feels alchemical.
Damn Them All blends a crime story with a tale of fundamentally unknowable occult forces. The fact that its protagonist is a magician who also carries around a hammer — because, hey, sometimes magic won’t do when a melee weapon will. This volume finds Ellie dealing with a mystical gang war in the streets of London — one that upsets much of what she’s understood about the properties of magic and which reveals unsettling secrets from the life of her mentor. There are demons to be exorcized and a police detective in town from New Orleans with her own agenda and a plot that rarely goes where you’d expect.
As first chapters to a larger work go, it’s hard to shake. But it’s also fascinating for the way that it’s in dialogue with a few other notable recent (and not-so-recent) tales of urban fantasy and crime.
Earlier this year, when writing about Andrew Wheeler and Travis Moore’s Sins of the Black Flamingo, I addressed the way that long-running DC/Vertigo character John Constantine was beginning to enter the realm of the archetype. There haven’t been many instances of Constantine-inspired characters, but those that have existed have been memorable for what they have and have not had in common with their inspiration.
There was Jack Carter, a magician who turned up in Warren Ellis and John Cassaday’s Planetary in a very Constantine-esque manner before taking on a very different modus operandi. Longtime Hellblazer writer Garth Ennis riffed on Constantine (in the person of a raygun-wielding version of, well, John Constantine) in his collaboration with artist Russ Braun, Sixpack & Dogwelder: Hard-Travelin' Heroz. And there’s Ellie’s uncle Alfie in Damn Them All, who Adlard regularly draws with his face partially in shadow — and who has more than a few things in common with one John Constantine.
On a metatextual level, this is interesting for two reasons, one of which is the fact that it’s Alfie’s death that sets this book in motion. The first present-day sequence we see, in fact, is his funeral — and Spurrier’s script does a dedicated job of whittling down the archetype and showing its flaws. It’s also interesting because the most recent writer to chronicle the adventures of the actual John Constantine is, well, Si Spurrier. The two trade paperbacks collecting his run on the book are, in fact, terrific, and accomplish the complex task of both reckoning with post-Brexit politics and the character’s complex history.
Spurrier’s run on the series was canceled after a year, and Spurrier addressed his time on the series with a very candid post on his blog. ”I suppose the bottom line is this: you can’t write a story like Hellblazer without taking it personally,” he wrote. “That’s a problem when it’s basically work-for-hire.”
It doesn’t seem too outlandish to see Damn Them All as, in part, Spurrier’s way of creating a title of his own that could address some of the same thematic and stylistic ground as Hellblazer while also charting its own path. And the fact this book begins by killing off this world’s Constantine analogue is a bold move, akin to Sergio Leone opening Once Upon a Time in the West by introducing characters played by veteran Western actors Woody Strode, Jack Elam, and Al Mulock — only for Charles Bronson’s character to show up, dispatch all three, and set the film in motion.
(Though there's also the interesting wrinkle that Spurrier is revisiting Constantine in a recently-announced miniseries reteaming him with artist Aaron Campbell and colorist Jordie Bellaire.)
Both Spurrier and Adlard are doing phenomenal work here. Spurrier’s creator-owned work has carved out a fascinating place when it comes to occult happenings, obsessive characters, and surreal cosmologies — but the use of text pages to impart some information suggests he’s also imparted some lessons learned from his time writing several X-books in the Krakoan era of that corner of the Marvel Universe. The hook of the book, which breaks down neatly into granular pieces while also containing an overarching storyline, is both high-concept and elegant.
I’ve long been an admirer of Adlard’s art, which is capable of showcasing both human drama and supernatural elements with equal skill. Here, though, he’s pushed his style into new places; the designs for the demons and the way that they’re drawn suggest beings that are, in fact, truly of another plane of reality. The work of colorists Sofie Dodgson and Shayne Hannah Cui is also fantastic here, as is Jim Campbell’s wide-ranging lettering.
Here’s the thing, though: the metatextual issues that I mentioned above make this book especially interesting if you’ve read other titles in the same vein. If you haven’t, though, that’s totally fine. Damn Them All has layers to unpack, but it’s also a terrific piece of pulp storytelling. It’s about a magician trying to get to the bottom of an occult conspiracy and her own troubled past, and it’s executed by talented creators putting everything they have into it. The result is tremendously entertaining.
As always, I'm Tobias Carroll, and this has been Postcards From Komiksoj.
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