I didn't do a lot of actual schoolwork at Caltech in 1992-1994 but I did read a lot of comic books, and this was one of the most important: Jamie Delano's initial run of Hellblazer episodes. Alan Moore might have created John Constantine but this was how I first came to know him (and like him), and I've gone back to these decades-old Hellblazer comics in search of memories, just as Constantine's returned to Newcastle in search of memories, here in this image.
There's something I didn't get about Hellblazer at the time but it's depressingly obvious now: it's like Delano was giving vent to a primal scream. It was the tail end of a 1980s ruled over by a pair of grotesque grinning villains, Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Greed, avarice, jingo patriotism, bigotry, cruelty, and arrogance were uppermost in the West, and Delano's Hellblazer seethes with quiet fury at the ugliness of Thatcher's Britain.
It must have been all too easy to imagine that Hell itself had erupted into the world...
~Chara