I find myself obsessed with some of the most pointless things. For example, I found the ending of the original run of the Hellblazer comic unsatisfying. I love me some Peter Milligan, but the way the series ended felt more like a hasty attempt to wrap things up in a suitably ambiguous fashion rather than allowing them to come to as natural a conclusion as a man like John Constantine could ever experience.
I’ve spent many, many hours imagining a better end or, more accurately, how I would have ended it. Here are my thoughts on the subject. I’ve read every book in the series, some of them many times, so that’s where I’m coming from. If this isn’t your bag, feel free to skip this one.
There was one huge loose end in Hellblazer, one that I always felt should have at the very least been acknowledged somewhere along the way. There was a being of incredible power who was treated very badly, undeservedly so in spite of their being an ass, and they were removed from the chess board and never mentioned again.
Only, they weren’t really “removed” in any permanent sense.
This being is the third most powerful in the order of created things behind only their creator and the one who rebelled against the creator. The archangel Gabriel was used by Constantine as an insurance policy against his soul being collected by the ruler of Hell. Constantine used a friendly succubus to seduce the angel and (literally) steal their heart. This resulted in Gabriel’s banishment from heaven and, with John holding his heart and threatening to destroy it and send the angel to Hell, they were forced to serve as Constantine’s bodyguard.
The first of the fallen (not Lucifer…nope, different character) found where the heart was hidden and destroyed it, and Gabriel fell to Hell. That is the last we ever hear of them. This is curious because Hell in this universe is a place of constant change. Demons and their ilk gain and lose power through schemes and brute force, but they seldom truly change their rank as demons are not known to be great at playing the long game. Hell rewards those who play the long game.
Angels, on the other hand, are very much creatures of the long game.
So, we have a fallen angel in Hell. This angel is already more powerful than any of the netherworld’s denizens, or, at least, they were and have the potential to be so again. This angel has motivation as well. They have been tricked by a demon, used as a lackey by a mortal man, shunned by Heaven, and damned to Hell, and Hell is the perfect place for a powerful, patient being with a grudge to accumulate power.
Another aspect of Hell is that human souls are traded as something between a commodity and curios. This was established early in the series when Jamie Delano was doing a dark take on yuppie capitalism. Let’s bring that forward a few decades and there’s no reason to think that Hell’s stock market of the human soul wouldn’t have acquired some of humanity’s more exotic financial instruments*.
Having long since determined that Constantine’s soul belongs to Hell but also will never be collected, it isn’t hard to imagine it becoming a much-traded thing. Fractions of it are traded among demonic investors (multiple claims on the same soul are also canon), and its ownership becomes so diluted that it’s almost impossible to determine which demon might have a prevailing claim. It’s become a “penny stock,” a “meme stock” if you will.
Now a particularly clever demon, perhaps even a fallen angel, might see this as an opportunity. The clever demon might recognize that trying to directly buy up all the slivers and fragments would bring unwanted attention, so that demon might play the long game and use cutouts and shell organizations and slowly, methodically, collect the outstanding shares in a myriad of seemingly-unrelated places before collecting them and showing their hand.
Or perhaps this demon would simply acquire the claim to the soul through force if the demon were very, very powerful.
In any event, the demon that was the archangel Gabriel is in Hell. The demon has the opportunity and means to become the holder of the claim on Constantine’s soul, and he has a bone to pick with our John. This is the state of play at the start of the story. Johnny may have forgotten Gabriel, but Gabriel as most definitely not forgotten Constantine. The former angel holds all of the cards and he is about to begin playing them.
* Contrary to what you may have been taught in Sunday school, demons learn their wicked ways from humans, not vice-versa. Demons are not nearly as clever nor as wicked as we are.
That’s the pitch. I have some beats mapped out as well, some unfortunate ends in store for old characters, and a few tricks for Constantine to play. It doesn’t end well, but I think it ends properly. One thing I really don’t want to do is introduce a batch of new characters. Not only was that the hallmark of some of the least-successful runs of the book, but it’s also a cheat to do that when wrapping things up.
It feels right to me to make Gabriel the putative antagonist of the final arc; Hellblazer was always about John dealing with the (literal) ghosts of his past. They’ve seldom been able to touch him, but that threat has always been there. Gabriel is not only one of the many victims of John’s schemes, they’ve been in Heaven, Hell, and everywhere in between. There’s a lot to explore there.
I would read this.