Hellblazer Cover Research

Thursday, 12th of April

Research: Background and Imagery

I have definitely picked the first issue of Hellblazer to illustrate the cover for. It is part 1 of 2 of the storyline "Hunger". The story is about John Constantine, a moody chain-smoking anti-hero, who is tracking down the cause of strange occurances. He discovers they are linked to the hunger demon Mnemoth and then continues to contain the demon in the second issue.

To start I looked up Mnemoth, I was curious whether he was actually a historically listed demon or devil. I discovered he wasn't but was in fact created by the writers in this very episode of Hellblazer. The demon causes people to devour what they desire (food, comics, women, themselves etc.) with full compulsion and they eventually die from starvation as the demon drains them of their life force. Mnemoth appears in the form of a monstrous giant fly or a swarm of locusts.



With a real interest in this character I want to focus on Mnemoth and these themes in Hunger. First of all you see here the original cover, with and without the text. I have also added the pages that refer visually to Mnemoth and some pages of the hunger compulsions. I picked out a few existing covers to put on my first research page as well. I discovered that Constantine is always on the cover (except on two or three of the more recent covers, out of more than 150 indiviual paper comics this is pretty minimal) whether in the foreground or in the background. On one of them he's in a mugshot lying on the table with someone else sitting behind the desk. So he doesn't need to actually be on it personally to on the cover.



As always I also made a mind-map of my thoughts and research discoveries.



While searching through the National Geographics I found an article on "Flies that Fight". I thought this was a pretty good visual source to keep at hand. I also researched other source pictures on the internet.



I finished off my research by making a collective page of images relevant to the atmosphere needed for the cover. Colour wise it seems to have come out at mainly greeny-browns with hints of red. Naturally it is of a very dark atmosphere and mainly creature/people based.