In reading Hellblazer comics the grisly fates that often befall John Constantine’s friends are usually just the consequences of stuff happening despite Constantine’s efforts to help or deal with the problem at hand.
Up to the latest one Hellblazer # 260. His best friend is being tortured to death in a basement due to some misadventure of Constantine’s (the friend is an innocent bystander) and pleads for Constantine to help him. At that point Constantine walks away, and tries to board a plane to leave England, and the problem, and the friend behind. He only gets stopped because his fake passport is detected, and then has to go back and save the day.
I’m not a huge Hellblazer expert, and I certainly have not read all the issues but this move really surprised me. I know Constantine is often morally ambiguous, but this really was borderline evil, and wholly unexpected (by me at least) from his character.
No, it’s not, since he’s not called out on it in the story, apparently.
But anyway, I have no idea about the context and such, but if what I remember about the character is true, it’s not so much “out of the blue” as an unexplained backslide to his earliest days.
I haven’t read Hellblazer for some time (Hrm…I think Gaiman’s issues may have been the last I read. Not that long ago - I was reading early issues about when 200 was coming out…I just never got around to the recent ones.) but it doesn’t seem terribly out of character for John - who tries to wash his hands of a lot of situations, just, either isn’t able to, or his conscience grows back at the last moment.
Also, the last Constantine story I read was in the current House of Mystery annual, which suggests John’s at a real low point, at the moment, and was pretty much entirely out of empathy - he tells a fellow to top himself, and feels guilty about it just a bit too late. (Although he says, in the narration, that he really didn’t mean it, he apparently knew the guy well enough that he should have realized he’d take the advice.)
