Vertigo to Publish Canceled Comic Hellblazer: Shoot

Vertigo announced today that they are beginning a new series called Vertigo Resurrected, which they will use to showcase some of their impressive archive of “horror, crime, war, western, fantasy, urban memoir, science fiction or reality based” stories; resurrecting, if you will, some of their greatest “rarely seen tales.”  First off the bat is a story that actually can’t be resurrected, because it was never published in the first place: Hellblazer: Shoot, written by Warren Ellis.

Hellblazer may be more recognizable by the name of its main character: John Constantine, who got his own enjoyable but not particularly faithful movie adaptation with Keanu Reeves and Shia LeBeouf.  Ellis was the writer on Hellblazer only briefly, because of Shoot.  From his blog:

SHOOT was about schoolyard slayings in the United States. It was completed before Columbine happened, but scheduled to appear not long after. The regime at DC Comics at the time decided that it could not be released in its completed form. I refused to go along with the changes they wanted to make. They decided not to publish the book at all. I quit.

The exact story in Shoot begins with the woman put in charge of investigating a rash of American school shootings for the US Senate, with the goal of finding the common cause or theme between them.  The only thing she finds is our good friend John Constantine.  Though unpublished, pages of the comic can be found online with a little industrious Googleing.

We look forward to picking up a legitimate copy in October, along with stories by “Brian Azzarello, Grant Morrison, Garth Ennis and artists Jim Lee, Phil Jimenez, Bernie Wrightson.”

(Vertigo via Comic Book Resources)