Hellblazer: City of Demons #1-5

Written by Si Spencer
Art by Sean Murphy

While I always like a good John Constantine story, my interest in this mini-series was largely fueled by my regard for Sean Murphy's artwork on Joe the Barbarian.

This story is kind of strange.  In the first issue, Constantine gets hit by a car, and ends up in the hospital for a while.  While there, a pair of doctors extract some of his demon blood, and use it to experiment on just about any other surgery patient they can find.  This leads to a number of random acts of violence around London, which John has to investigate.

What makes this series strange is the way in which Spencer takes a lot of space to develop a number of characters who are then quickly killed off or otherwise dispatched.  While I liked these little character studies, I found that it disrupted the flow of the narrative each time.

But, since I bought these comics for Murphy's artwork, I was still quite happy with the whole thing.  His work is not as inventive as it was on Joe, but it's still very good.  I found it a little reminiscent of Shade-era Chris Bachalo (mostly because of the lines on peoples' noses), which is always a good thing.