Flipping Good re(a)d
Hauntingly life-affirming, this two-in-one graphic novel is a unique storytelling experiment not to be missed.
As a result, we get two completely different stories with the same visuals and characters, each going off on its own tangent.
Don’t sweat it if this linguistics experiment doesn’t seem to do it for you. Just dive straight into the yarns, which are intriguing page-turners.
Kristiansen’s original tale ( The Red Diary) revolves around a biographer called William Ackroyd.
While piecing together the biography of a poet, he comes across a red diary belonging to the poet’s old friend, an aspiring painter living in Paris in the early 1900s, just before World War I broke out.
Instead of his assigned subject, Ackroyd gets caught up in the painter’s story, which leads him to more diaries, this time coded in blue and green to mark the different phases of his existence.
The mystery is riveting and like our biogra- welcome, especially when the cynical Brit interacts with the usually stuffily-scripted American superheroes.
Written by Jeff Lemire and Ray Fawkes with art by Renato Guedes, the all-action superhero-like image of the magician on the cover of Constantine #1 immediately sets it apart from its Vertigo predecessor’s moodier and more atmospheric covers. From the get go, Constantine acknowledges his new place in a world filled with superheroes. “The costumes have their uses, but someone who knows what’s really going on needs to make sure nobody goes too far with the cheat. Maybe that’s me,” he says, before going off on a treasure hunt for one of those “cheats”, a magical compass.
There you have it, the New 52 John Constantine in a nutshell. This is not the screwed-up, conflicted, older John Constantine of Hellblazer – this new Constantine is younger, more cocksure and, well, a lot less foul-mouthed.
Guedes’ depiction of him still seems a little rough, with the character sporting almost the same expression in every panel. Also, although there is certainly more action here, Constantine himself seemed a little ... tame to me.
The powers that be at DC Comics have explained the return of Constantine to the main DC line as a return to his “roots” (he