The villains here are all demons straightaway, and most have at least some element of comedy to them, whether the double-crossed demon club owner or the incubus who really wants to be a musician. It's in this that I think Constantine: The Hellblazer still falls short of Hellblazer before it. (Notably, as "dark" as the book gets, which isn't very, the crooked panels are almost always framed in bright white and not ominous black.) The ending cliffhanger suggests this is the calm before the storm, but for the most part despite the trademark Constantine angst here about how he's done his friends wrong, there's not much suspense or real danger in the book. But it's notable that the threat here by and large is that the demon (Constantine's disembodied ex-girlfriend Veronica) is killing off Constantine's ghost-entourage and mostly not threatening Constantine himself certainly what the last issue demonstrates is how much danger Constantine is not in and really that he's got these supernatural problems under control. Not that there's anything wrong with that, as Doyle and Tynion write a charming Constantine, and Riley Rossmo and the book's other rapidly-changing (but all tonally similar) artists keep Constantine stylish and his foes interestingly twisty and slimy.
I made the Batgirl comparison, but a comparison to DC's Harley Quinn series is also apt given the choice of moving forward by plot or fiat of character, Constantine: The Hellblazer seems to choose the latter every time. That's all before the last issue, a series of one-panel sight gags while Constantine plays exorcist-for-hire. But of those five issues, about a sum total of one issue is spent on flashbacks to Constantine's early life (perhaps not entirely unexpected), one is spent on Constantine tricked into the middle of a supernatural business dispute, and one spends an extended sequence on a tour of haunted New York. Going Down is ostensibly about a demon shadowing John Constantine and his travels from New York to London to try to get rid of it, over five of the book's six issues.
It comes off for me like John Constantine by way of Batgirl of Burnside, which admittedly might have been exactly the tone this book was going for, but the complexity isn't sufficient to stand up to those halcyon days of DC's in-universe "Mature Readers" titles. 1: Going Down is mature and clever, but also meandering and perhaps a tad too hip. Ming Doyle and James Tynion's Constantine: The Hellblazer Vol. The "DC You" Constantine series is likely closer to what ardent Hellblazer fans are looking for, but my sense is the series still has a ways to go to achieve that Vertigo tone.
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