Constantine #11 Review

At the end of the day, Forever Evil: Blight is really a John Constantine story, and never is that fact more obvious than within Constantine's own book. But that's hardly a bad thing. It's been an uphill battle for DC to reestablish Constantine as a DC Universe character rather than a Vertigo one, but Blight has helped in that process. Constantine #11 in particular does a great job of illustrating who Constantine is, how he he thinks and feels and suffers, and how he relates to the many other mystical heroes and villains of the DCU. On that basis alone, it's easy enough to forgive this crossover its faults.

Constantine plays an almost solo role in this issue, with Nightmare Nurse providing a little bit of backup. And Blight is his typically bland self. But again, Fawkes is able to offer enough strong character work with the titular hero that it doesn't matter if most of his team fade into the background. One element I appreciated was the way Fawkes ties this conflict into the rest of Forever Evil; no longer does this feel like a divorced conflict intended to keep the Justice League Dark busy for a few months, but another cog in that increasingly complex machine.

As with the previous tie-ins to Blight, Aco illustrates this issue. In some ways, Aco's style is very reminiscent of Mikel Janin's on Justice League Dark. The thick blacks and twisted designs paint this as very much a supernatural book in addition to a superhero one. But the line-work lacks some of Janin's careful confidence, and the facial expressions can be wonky at times. Luckily, Brad Anderson's colors do a fine job of capturing all the mystical energies and hallucinations being tossed about.

Jesse is a mild-mannered writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter, or Kicksplode on MyIGN.

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