VERTIGO: RESURRECTED Featuring "Shoot"

VERTIGO: RESURRECTED is out today in North America, tomorrow in the UK. This collection contains, among other supposedly obscure bits from the Vertigo imprint of DC Comics, the story "Shoot", which I wrote and Phil Jiminez drew (superbly) and which never saw print because it was about schoolyard shootings in the States and Columbine happened a couple of weeks before publication.

Being an episode of longrunning supernatural series JOHN CONSTANTINE, HELLBLAZER, it's a horror story. At the time — and since then, as "Shoot" leaked out to become something of an internet samizdat text — people didn't necessarily get that. Some people think it's a sociopolitical tract. Some people think it's making a single statement intended as uninflected truth. It's a horror story. It's intended to chill and disturb. It was, I was told, a little too chilly and disturbing for the time. I disagreed, and still do.

It's very old work to me now, and I don't intend to look at it for fear of wincing at all the bad writing. I mean, god, it was written in 1999. But you may find it interesting.

(My actual published HELLBLAZER work was collected into two volumes: HELLBLAZER: HAUNTED and HELLBLAZER: SETTING SUN.)