All throughout July we’re crowdsourcing an Extra Eisners Reading List from comics journalists and critics. Each weekday throughout the month, we’ll post a new pick we would have liked to have seen nominated for an Eisner. There are so many great comics, it’s impossible for the Eisners to recognize them all. This list is to honor and diversify the pool of work praised by the industry.

Today’s pick comes from Hussein Wasiti…enjoy!

Simon Spurrier has brought out of dormancy a style of comic booking that I thought long dead — that of the British Invasion of the late 1980s, and of the horror and humor that colored those now-classic comics. Perhaps it’s more of an attitude than a style, a willingness to stand your ground and tell mainstream comics to its face that whatever direction they’re heading isn’t one worth following. DC’s Black Label imprint as a whole has been relatively successful, but it’s actually Spurrier’s take on the cigarette chomping, trenchcoat-wearing bastard John Constantine that truly takes advantage of the creative freedom Black Label promises. It’s a bloody and dirty book that stems out of the Brexit movement in a way that I never thought I’d see in a comic put out by a major American publisher.

Throughout John Constantine: Hellblazer, Spurrier has been tackling anti-immigration sentiment that perpetuates movements like Brexit in a rather frank and upfront manner, mostly to highlight that his version of John is truly lost in a Britain he no longer recognizes. This weaving in of current political strife is exactly the kind of shock the title needed to show why Constantine always was and will always be relevant. It takes a real talent with vision like Spurrier to bring Constantine out of the decade-long mainstream DC rut that he was stuck in, forced to mingle with the Justice League and its associated characters. That’s not to say those stories were bad; it just felt wrong, seeing a neutered version of this beloved character hang out with a crowd he would otherwise try to completely avoid.

He’s also wickedly funny. His and Matias Bergara’s recent two-part Hellblazer arc, “Scrubbing Up,” was a hilarious examination of the vilification of younger generations and hipsters. His work on another Sandman Universe title, The Dreaming, also makes great use of humor in the tradition of Neil Gaiman’s seminal series.

To say nothing of the fact that he had an amazing twenty-issue run of The Dreaming that clearly felt like a sequel to Gaiman’s original series, but also let Spurrier’s voice carry through to tell a remarkably epic saga about what dreams mean to us today.

All this to say: I wish Simon Spurrier had been nominated for an Eisner. Perhaps he will some day, but it’s painful to see a writer put out the best work of his career so far and receive no accolades for it. -Hussein Wasiti

Hussein Wasiti writes about comics for The Beat and Comics Bookcase.

You can learn more about Simon Spurrier and his writing on Spurrier’s website.

Visit the full Extra Eisners Reading List!

Check out the official Eisner Nominations for 2020.