With a name like Hellblazer, this trope would seem to come naturally...
Spoilers below
- In the very first issue, John Constantine drops by to visit his friend Gary "Gaz" Lester. Letting himself in, he finds that the place has an awful stench and hasn't been cleaned in weeks. The syringe he finds with tiny bug carcasses suspended in fluid is disturbing, but when he enters the bathroom and finds Gaz sitting in the bathtub complaining: "... it feels like there's bugs all over me
", it's pure Nightmare Fuel. What's causing Gaz's problems is even worse: he's become the target of a famine demon who causes people to literally consume the objects of their desire, i.e. start gobbling up money or jewelry as if it's the last, most delicious food on earth note . One disturbing panel shows a bodybuilder chewing on his own muscular arm. The only way to keep innocent bystanders safe is for Constantine to seal Gaz alive in a wall. - "Early Warning"/"How I Learned To Love The Bomb", a two-part Grant Morrison story which culminates with John and a friend trying to save a village from a mind-warping pagan festival with masks involved. Those big, hideous, over-the-whole-head ones. And guess who's the only survivor.
- It specifically brings up the effects of Margaret Thatcher's politics on rural Britain, and how the working class had been reduced to barbarism and turned on each other.
- "Archbishop Bomb. Archbishop Bomb. Archbishop Bomb."
- The Son of Man arc? Back when John was still in Ravenscar, he got sprung (unwillingly) by a psychopathic mob boss who demanded John resurrect his dead boy, and John was too loopy to think of a way out except for conning his friends into helping him summon a demon into the child's body. Which he left there, to do whatever it wanted for the next twelve years. And then the story gets really nasty.
- Also the flashback when he's begging to be allowed back into Ravenscar, even though they torture him on a nightly basis in there.
- The Horrorist, where John has stopped even caring about the awful things he sees.
- From the same story, there's Angel, the eponymous Horrorist. Essential an anthropomorphic personification of human misery, determined to balance the karmic scales by bringing suffering everywhere she goes: just by walking through a town, Angel causes famine, oppression, serial-killing and insanity to erupt across the area without any logical origin. As if this wasn't creepy enough, Angel's appearance has Humanoid Abomination written all over it: a seemingly ordinary young woman with an eerily-beautiful face, unblinking "black hole" eyes, and a curiously detached demeanor.
- In Hard Time, what he does to the prison.
- Highwater, guest-starring some of the crowd from Preacher. (Not really, but they might as well be.)
- More recently, the Scab storyline, where John is addicted to putting on a monster's skin.
- The Newcastle Incident itself. It's not what happened that's so bad (we've seen worse since), but what's haunting about it is that it all happened because of recklessness and ignorance.
- The man with the hole in his head, from Damnation's Flame. Dear God...
- The monstrous elite club where Britain's upper class indulge in all manner of horrible depravities, including cannibalism, devil worship and murder. One man, implied to be Prince Andrew, snorted his uncle's funerary ashes. What's worse is, they don't see the SLIGHTEST problem with this and just excuses themselves with the idea that England's aristocracy has always "fed" on the poor.
- John's actor friend who has been the inspiration for so many fictional characters that the universe now classifies HIM as a fictional character and thus tries to balance itself by drawing him into the realm of fiction rather than the real world, and does this by sending all manner of characters after him, including Blind Pew, Sherlock Holmes, and Bill Sykes. He's finally captured and sentenced to the Vault Of Minor Characters where forgettable minor characters are consigned to limbo. The person who draws him there? Winnie the Pooh.
- A boy heavily implied to be Peter Pan is murdered by a man with a hook...
- Bill Sykes killing his prostitute girlfriend for warning John.
- What happens to the souls of children consigned to Hell through no fault of their own.
- "You wanna know how I got him pregnant? I slit a hole in his belly and fucked him through it." said by a daemon who is called a Fuckpig and was possessing the body of the man's 5 year old son, with a 3 foot long penis it uses to rape its victims to death with...
