Written by Peter Milligan
Illustrated by Simon BisleyA dying woman’s desperate need to see her long lost son sends John Constantine on a mission in “Suicide Bridge,” a haunting tale of evil and melancholy that finds John using his occult connections to learn why so many young people are going missing. It’s a story full of strange places and desperate lives that leads Constantine to unearth his own connection to the mysterious disappearance of a boyhood friend.
Peter Milligan and Simon Bisley, mad geniuses at large, take a moment out from Constantine’s regularly scheduled adventures to look into one of the darker recesses of human experience. It’s grim and it’s cold and it’s vital and you need it.
Find out why after the jump.
Hellblazer Annual #1, page one, panel one, caption three: “Even back then, before I had any demon in my blood, it wasn’t safe to be a friend of John Constantine.” The casual brilliance of such a line only becomes apparent when it’s repeated (more or less) at the end of the story — that is, when what we’ve read lets us suss out the tremendous levels of both truth and bullshit in it. “Suicide Bridge,” a plus-sized issue by regular Hellblazer scribe Peter Milligan and cover artist Simon Bisley, has all of the hallmarks of a typical Vertigo one-off — magic, bastardry, geographical potency, and names like “Ezekiel Fenchurch” — but its guts are cold and swollen underneath its grey skin. Just as John Constantine, one of the most dangerous magicians in the world, is a shabby man in a ratty coat, “Suicide Bridge” contains more than it lets on, and a power that is at times bracing and acidic.
John Constantine is drawn back to Liverpool, where the dying mother of a boyhood friend asks him to find out what happened to her son, who disappeared when he and John were both in their teens. Constantine’s investigation takes him toward the Hornsey Lane Bridge, a real-life London structure that attracts both photographers and suicides. “Suicide Bridge,” it’s called, and as we all know, naming things gives them power. People jump, and in Constantine’s world, they never land — so he must gaze into the maw just past the bridge’s railing, and try to find his old friend in there.
Suicide, like rape, is a horrific thing that historically has received a fairly glib treatment in comic books. The history of the medium is littered with the corpses of characters — mostly villains — who failed to achieve their dream and thus devised their own exit. Superheroes catch teenage girls who’ve made an impulsive, emotional choice to conclude the narrative of their lives, to reassure these fragile, troubled things that their life has value, and establish the bona fides of their compassion and heroic worth. Some of these incidents are estimable and even moving, but many are unfeeling and calculated, like Hollywood winks.
When not writing about aliens who throw up blood and punch people, Peter Milligan is a strikingly intelligent writer, with a knack for considering offbeat angles and the crushing pressure of the human condition. There are always forces nagging at us, keeping our heads underwater when we want to go up for air, holding us aloft and dangling when we need solid earth beneath our feet. Maybe better than any other writer in comics, Milligan captures the enormity of these sensations, and the way that people — real people, not superheroes — can try as much as they want to figure them out, but must live with them all the same, even (especially) when they’re absurd and tragicomic. John Constantine is one of these figures, a man who takes no pleasure in his own beastliness but makes no apologies for it, either. Constantine’s shoulders hunch and sag with almost constant discomfort, as if he can’t reconcile the choices he’s made with life among other human beings. He’s perpetually lost in his own internal monologue, gazing out at everyone else through its prison bars.
Simon Bisley is an artist who captures, better than nearly anyone else, man’s inhumanity to man. This covers the fantastic, gory, hyper-horror violence of his more independent pieces, but also the relationship of his characters to their readers. When Bisley cuts loose, his Körperwelten-esque people seem like mad gods and demons, stretching and flexing and bending their bodies in ways that suggest a constant, indefatigable pain. When Bisley restrains himself, as he does in “Suicide Bridge,” the raw power of his berserk breakdowns of form an anatomy contracts inward, like a convulsion. We see the old ultraviolence in weird little details like a scarred cheek or a mouthful of rotted teeth. Brian Buccellato’s colors cast the world in a grey fog, both indoors and out, and judiciously tease out the cloying mania that seems coded into the whites of these people’s eyes.
Continued belowDo not by any means mistake the low-key dread of Bisley’s artwork for a sudden embrace of subtlety. His pictures remain sublimely unsubtle, but without the aggressive sexuality that marks, say, his Heavy Metal covers, or the machismo of his 2000 AD work. Instead, all of that orgone energy is pushed into the wrinkles, shadows, and stray hairs of Constantine’s face, and the folds and crinkles of his coat. Constantine is a more densely rendered figure than any other in the book, and he crowds out anyone else in any shared panel — as if trying to blot out their very presence and overrun them. This is in keeping with the unspoken moral of Milligan’s tale, and having it only spelled out sideways in pictures leaves that point feeling like a cold shiver.
“Suicide Bridge” is more than a skilled writer and a skilled artist rolling their muscles for the crowd. It’s more than a grim sidetrack for a great character. It’s a powerful and understated evocation of the ripple effects of suicide, framed as it must be through strange fiction. Its gaze is cast upon characters whose lives are spent mulling over unanswered questions — ones that will never be resolved, because the conversation can never continue. Constantine’s quote at the beginning — his weary crack about the toxicity of his friendship — carries inside itself the self-examination that comes when someone slams a door in your face. Constantine and the other characters turn over events in their mind, trying to recreate the final moments, the last vivid sensations, the reasons. They want it to be something more than it was: cold, small, lonely — and an ending.
Final Verdict: 9.5 – Buy, but don’t expect to feel good when it’s over
