John Constantine Hellblazer Books in Order

John Constantine is a chain‑smoking, foul‑mouthed magician who walks the line between the everyday world and the occult. In her Hellblazer run, Denise Mina drops him into a distinctly Scottish nightmare, where old magic, new politics and personal guilt are tangled together.

The storyline collected as Empathy Is the Enemy begins with a seemingly harmless spell gone wrong. Chris Cole, an ordinary man looking for a shortcut, unleashes a curse that spreads like a sickness. Constantine, still bruised from earlier battles, realises he’s been handed a problem he can’t simply bluff or bully his way through.

Heading north with Cole, he finds a cabal rooted in centuries of Scottish mysticism and evangelical spectacle. Mina uses the road trip to move Constantine out of his usual London haunts and into service stations, council estates and bleak rural churches, all humming with resentment and half‑buried history.

The follow‑up arc, The Red Right Hand, deals with the aftermath. A wave of suicides and self‑destruction sweeps Glasgow, and the source may lie in Constantine’s own meddling. The more he digs, the clearer it becomes that magic isn’t the only thing warping people’s choices; trauma, poverty and state power do their own damage.

Throughout, Mina leans into one of Hellblazer’s core questions: what happens when you make a man known for cynicism feel the pain he usually shrugs off? Cursing Constantine with unwanted empathy forces him—and the reader—to sit with the suffering he normally witnesses from a safe distance.

It’s still a horror comic, but the scariest parts are often human rather than demonic.

For readers, Mina’s section of the long‑running series works as a self‑contained slice of Constantine’s life. You don’t need to know the full backstory to follow the plot, but if you do, you’ll spot callbacks to old allies and bad habits as he tries, and mostly fails, to do the right thing.