John Constantine

• 1. Introduction

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  According to Alan Moore, John Constantine once walked up a flight of stairs into a sandwich bar in Westminster, London. Moore told Wizard magazine about it in 1993. The man wore a trenchcoat and a short haircut, and Moore said he looked exactly like John Constantine, the character Moore had helped create. The stranger stared Moore straight in the eyes, smiled, and nodded almost conspiratorially. Then he walked around the corner. Moore wondered whether to follow, and decided the safest move was to eat his sandwich. His own verdict was plain: "I'm not making any claims to anything. I'm just saying that it happened."

  Constantine, also known as Hellblazer, is a working-class warlock, occult detective, exorcist and con man from Liverpool who is stationed in London. He is cynical, deadpan and almost never without a cigarette. He also badly wants to do some good in the world. The people around him tend to pay for his schemes.

  This documentary follows a handful of questions. Whose face did his makers borrow, and why? How did a supporting character in someone else's comic grow into the longest-running title at his imprint? What does it cost to bargain with the lords of Hell? And why do the writers who work on him keep reporting that they have seen him in real life? The first answer begins with two artists and a rock band.

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• 2. Sting's Double

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  Stephen R. Bissette and John Totleben, the artists on Swamp Thing, were fans of the band The Police. They told Alan Moore they would love to draw a character who looked like the band's singer, Sting. They had already tried it once, in Swamp Thing #25, with a briefly glimpsed background figure in a black-and-red-striped T-shirt. Moore later said the character existed only because the pair wanted this. The idea, he said, was "purely to get Sting into the story". By the 1985 San Diego ComicCon he admitted, "It's turning into something more than that now."

  Moore treated the request as a puzzle. He called it a "big intellectual puzzle" that also involved ideas about serial killers and the Winchester House, and Constantine was the result of fitting it all together. The look came from Sting as he appeared in the films Brimstone and Treacle and Quadrophenia. The personality came from a different itch. Moore felt that comic book mystics were mostly older, austere, proper and middle class, and not at all functional on the street. So he imagined an "almost blue-collar warlock", streetwise and from a different background than the usual mystic.

  Moore also wanted a character with an enormous address book. He pictured someone charismatic who "knows nuns, politicians, and bikers" and is never at a loss for what to do.

  The official debut came in Swamp Thing #37 in June 1985, drawn by Rick Veitch and Totleben. Veitch's contribution was an earring, which he considered risque for 1985. Two weeks later, Crisis on Infinite Earths #4 shipped with a cameo written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by George Pérez. In that issue Constantine wears a green suit, instead of his more familiar black suit and tan trenchcoat.

  In Swamp Thing #51, Constantine appears on a boat with the name The Honourable Gordon Sumner on the bow. Sting's childhood home of Newcastle was also worked into the character's story. Years afterward, Moore told Wizard that DC seemed terrified of being sued, and that the publisher began erasing the Sting references from the early Swamp Thing books. By Moore's account, Sting had seen the character, told Rolling Stone he thought it was great, and was flattered.

  In 1985, Moore was asked whether Constantine copied Baron Winters, the schemer from Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan's Night Force. Moore said he was a big fan of Wolfman and Night Force and had no intention of ripping Winters off. He did concede that both men are manipulative and have agents working for them. Constantine and Winters would eventually meet, first during Moore's own Swamp Thing run and again in Neil Gaiman's The Books of Magic.

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• 3. Vertigo Years

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  Constantine won the Eagle Award for Favourite Supporting Character in 1986, and won it again in 1987. He had arrived as a supernatural advisor to Swamp Thing, and he played a pivotal role in the storyline known as American Gothic. Readers wanted more, so in 1988 he received a comic of his own, titled Hellblazer. When DC launched its Vertigo imprint in 1993, Hellblazer became an official Vertigo publication. It was the longest continuously published Vertigo title.

  Grant Morrison ran into the limits of this arrangement. Before the Vertigo line existed, Constantine had appeared in several DC Universe titles. Afterward, for many years, editorial policy forbade him from appearing outside Vertigo. Morrison wanted him as a supporting character in Doom Patrol, but the policy kept him out of extended superhero appearances, for fear of spoiling the realism of Hellblazer. Morrison invented the magus Willoughby Kipling instead, and Hellblazer #51 revealed that Kipling and Constantine had met.

  Phil Foglio's Stanley and His Monster limited series met the same wall. A character named Ambrose Bierce was meant to be Constantine, but the name was changed at the last minute because of editorial policy.

  The policy was reversed in 2011, when a version of Constantine appeared in the DC Universe crossover series Brightest Day. That same year Peter Milligan placed him on the first roster of The New 52 series Justice League Dark. Milligan was still writing Vertigo's Hellblazer at the time. He told Newsarama he felt bad about sitting on panels and giving interviews without being able to mention the new job. He insisted the two versions should stay separate. The DC Universe version, he said, was younger, and "definitely not married".

  Beginning with Justice League Dark #9, Jeff Lemire took over the writing, while Milligan stayed with the Vertigo title. Lemire called the series his dream gig at DC Comics, because Constantine is one of his all-time favourite characters in all of fiction. He said Zatanna and Deadman would remain on the roster, but that the team would change and expand in his opening arc.

  As for the older Vertigo version, his childhood was a blank in the early appearances. Jamie Delano's Hellblazer stories would be the ones to fill it in.

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• 4. Newcastle's Shadow

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  John Constantine was born in Liverpool on the 10th of May 1953, the son of Mary Anne and Thomas Constantine. Mary Anne died giving birth to John and his stillborn twin brother. An earlier abortion, forced on her by Thomas, had weakened her womb. Thomas could not accept responsibility, so he blamed his son, and father and son lived in mutual dislike. In the womb, John strangled his twin with the umbilical cord. In a parallel universe, that twin survives and becomes the well-loved, well-adjusted magician John never was.

  His older sister Cheryl shared the household. The two children briefly lived with an aunt and uncle in Northampton to escape their father's alcoholism and imprisonment, then returned to Liverpool when Thomas was released. John's bloodline was known as the Laughing Magicians, legendary mages with power over synchronicity who were infamous for bluffing and tricking gods. As a child, he hid his innocence and vulnerability in a box to be rid of them. In the 1960s a botched curse left his father withered and frail, and the teenage John ran away. He made London his permanent home in 1969, rooming with Chas Chandler.

  The 1970s found John deep in London's occult circles. He travelled abroad and, in San Francisco, dated the magician Zatanna Zatara, whom he had met in New York City. After seeing the Sex Pistols at the Roxy Club in London in 1977, he cut his long hair short and called himself Johnny Con-Job. His band was Mucous Membrane. Chas worked as roadie, alongside a drummer named Beano and fellow Liverpool native Gary Lester. They released an album called Venus of the Hardsell. In the 1980s John also performed as a stage magician, and became famous for predicting the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan.

  His first venture into occult heroism was a disaster. On tour at the Casanova Club in Newcastle upon Tyne, John found the aftermath of a magical ritual gone horribly wrong. An abused child named Astra Logue had conjured a monster, which took revenge on her father, the club's owner, and the other adults tormenting her. The monster refused to leave. With typical recklessness, John recruited his bandmates and several occultist friends to summon a demon to destroy it. The demon turned on them, tormented his friends, and took Astra to Hell.

  John later realized he had summoned the demon with the wrong name. Its true name was Nergal, and using the wrong one had given it the power to cross freely into the human world. Nergal went on to be a regular antagonist. John suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to Ravenscar Psychiatric Hospital, which he drifted in and out of over the years. Guilt over Astra hung over him for a long time. Dream eventually relieved him of the nightmares that followed, after helping Dream retrieve his sands from John's dying ex-girlfriend Rachel.

  The survivors, nicknamed the Newcastle Crew, were left scarred in body and mind. Years later John reconvened them to investigate the Brujería cult in Swamp Thing, issues 37 to 49. The cult murdered most of them, including John's then-lover Emma. The dead, and others who died through his carelessness, keep appearing to him as silent, reproachful ghosts. Chas Chandler is the rare human friend to have survived a long association with John.

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• 5. Deals With Hell

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  In 1991, in his late 30s, John contracted terminal lung cancer. A dying friend named Brendan had sold his soul to the First of the Fallen, the most powerful lord of Hell. John tricked the First into drinking holy water, which left him helpless when he came to collect. The First answered by promising John unprecedented torment in Hell when he died.

  John's solution was to sell his soul a second time, secretly, to the other two Lords of Hell. When they found out, they realized that letting him die would force an all-out war over his soul. The only winner of that war would be the Lord of the Hosts, meaning God and his angels. They were too proud and stubborn to form an alliance, so they cured his cancer instead. The First then plotted a grand revenge. John manipulated him, through an ally named Ellie, a succubus, into a trap. The plan barely worked, and many of John's friends were killed.

  Later, John freed Astra and every other child trapped in Hell, but the cost was the First returning to power. As part of the scheme, John's worst attributes were given a separate existence as Demon Constantine, which meant John himself could not go to Hell. Trying to regain his nastier edge, he used Ellie, and in 1998 she took a revenge that forced him to ask the First for help. Ellie ended up in Hell, and several of John's oldest friends left him.

  Tired of it all, John contacted God, and the two talked beside a campfire. John warned that if his soul were ever sent to Hell, he would easily take over. He would release the demons and lock Hell so that the damned could not enter and would have no resting place. That was the blackmail: keep his soul away from Hell. God, knowing what John could do, agreed, but warned him about what would come next.

  John returned to Britain in 2003 and reconciled with his sister Cheryl, who had believed him dead. He then learned that his niece Gemma, whom he had wanted to keep away from this life, had become a witch. To recover his memories after a battle, he spent a day in the service of the demon Rosacarnis, who had him father three demonic children. They went on to massacre anyone who had known him. Cheryl was among the dead, because one of the sons had pushed her husband Tony into seeing her as a witch.

  John travelled to Hell with Nergal, the demon he thought he had killed, to bring Cheryl's soul home. At Rosacarnis' hall, the First of the Fallen killed her instead, because John's soul was his by "right of insult". Cheryl's soul was pure and did not belong in Hell, but the First offered her a devilish deal. Tony had killed himself with her blood still on his hands, making him twice damned. If she stayed of her own free will, the First would share his punishment between them. Despite everything, Cheryl still loved Tony enough to accept. John, unable to look at Gemma's tear-filled eyes, ran barefoot down the stairs and into the Liverpool night.

  He later revisited Ravenscar, where he had been thrown after being framed for Astra's murder. Every mistreatment and every guilt came back to him. The weight took the form of a baby, the sum of all his guilt and self-hatred, and John threw it off a cliff near the asylum and into the sea. Freed, he grew cockier and returned to his earlier look: a double-breasted blue suit under the trench coat, and slicked-back, gelled hair.

  A war-mage named Mako then came for him, because John is the Laughing Magician, also called the Constant One. John was pulled into the presence of his unborn brother's soul, which claimed that it should have been the one born and asked to merge with him. John concluded that this soul had caused his cancer and his failed relationships, to weaken him until merging was possible. So he cut his brother's soul out of his own.

  In the 2010s, John fought the ghost of a British soldier of the Sepoy rebellion in India. He had his thumb cut off to contact Shade, the Changing Man, and he married Epiphany Greaves, the daughter of an infamous gangster. By 2013 the Three Fates told him he would die in five days. Having lived a good and adventurous life, he accepted this instead of fighting it. On the fifth day, a gangster ambushed and killed him in his own home. Many friends and family attended the funeral, but he had faked his death again.

  He chose to keep a low profile so as not to hurt people again, and he visited Gemma. She told him her life would be better without him. She pointed a revolver at him, closed her eyes, muttered "Damn you, John Constantine" and pulled the trigger. When she opened her eyes, he had vanished. The last scene shows him in the Long Journey's End bar, holding a glass of liquor with a vacant look.

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• 6. Rebooted Johns

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  When The New 52 relaunched DC's line, Constantine became one of the leads of Justice League Dark, and his history shifted slightly. He now met Zatanna in New York instead of San Francisco. A new character, Nick Necro, was implied to be John's mentor and the original owner of the trenchcoat. The Forever Evil: Blight storyline later revealed a pact and a love triangle among the three, which fell apart when Zatanna left Nick to pursue John. Nick says, "We were all in love, and you two shut me out!"

  During the Trinity War between the three Justice Leagues, John tried to trick Shazam, the 15-year-old Billy Batson, in order to steal his magic. He failed, and Billy became even more distrustful of people than before. In Constantine #14, a young John casts his first spell at the cost of his parents' lives and his house burning down. The teacher was Tannarak of the Cult of the Cold Flame, who became one of his primary enemies along with Mister E and Sargon the Sorceress.

  The most brutal story in that series sent John to Earth-2, a world under siege from Darkseid and his Parademons. There he met his counterpart, a happier John surrounded by friends and even married. The escape spell required one Constantine to die. John kissed the other John, took his hand, and drove a knife into his heart. The Earth-2 family called him Devil. When Darkseid pursued him, he cast a spell called the Ring of Dolus, which spent every happy memory and pleasant thought he had on a web of lies to fool the god. At the end, on England's Jurassic Coast, Thomas Constantine pointed a gun at his head and could not fire. John saw that he was no hero, but he was the only one willing to trade a hundred people for the safety of 6 billion.

  The New 52 series ended at issue #23 and relaunched in June 2015 as Constantine: The Hellblazer, by Ming Doyle and James Tynion IV. In the Secret Origins story, a group of Liverpool kids summoned a creature called Legendbreaker to learn his true origin. It told three conflicting stories: one with a dead mother and an abusive father, one with a loving family, and one with a mad older sister. The real John showed up, chased it away and told the kids that his origins would forever remain unknown, "but it does not matter".

  The DC You version gave him a new outfit and a new hairstyle, and adventures unrelated to superheroes. He met Oliver, a single father of two daughters, and ended up in a fight with the demon Blythe and the schemer Neron. John conned Neron into leaving New York for good, at the cost of Oliver's soul.

  In DC Rebirth, John returned to London to remove a curse that made him physically ill on London soil. Chas met him at the airport. The curse came from a demon called Laughing Boy, whose real name turned out to be Nybbas. John used that name to take control of the demon, while a ritual threatened to deflect the curse onto 8 million Londoners. Later, Swamp Thing asked for his help finding the missing Abigail Arcane, and the trail led to a djinn named Marid.

  In the Sandman Universe, an alternate, older John offered to save the dying younger John, if the younger one would become the best version of himself. John woke in Ravenscar Asylum and found Chas dying of lung cancer, plagued by demons drawn by years near John. Along the way he met Nat, a Glaswegian bouncer and martial artist. He also met a Duke, an allegory of the former Prince Andrew, whose plan to breed a majestic creature produced a grotesque thing that stabbed its way out of its mother and killed the other mares at the stable.

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• 7. The Con Man's Craft

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  Issue #69 of Hellblazer holds the line that sums him up. The King of Vampires killed the man sleeping beside John, and casually asked whether he had been a friend. John answered, "Must be. He's dead." Constantine is a compassionate humanist who struggles against the influence of both Heaven and Hell over humanity, yet he is also a foul-mouthed, disillusioned British cynic. His motivation has been put down to an adrenaline addiction that only the strange and mysterious can satisfy. He makes friends easily, with a wide and international circle of contacts. Those friends inevitably suffer or die for it.

  He has a reputation as one of the most powerful sorcerers in the world, yet he rarely uses magic. His family tree is tied to the occult, which is why he is called the Constant One. Some ancestors appear in other works, such as Batman: The Order of Beasts, The Sandman and The Books of Magic. His specialities include demonology, illusions, divination and demon summoning, with necromancy and mediumship besides. He can travel through synchronicity waves, which gives him exceptional luck and the power to shape events in his favour. A blood transfusion from Nergal once gave him tainted blood with healing and age-managing effects, though he lost these abilities after an encounter with the Upside-Down Man.

  His best weapon is deception. He is widely regarded as the world's greatest con man, and he has fooled the First of the Fallen, The Presence, Batman and Superman. He also has stage-magic skills: hypnosis, sleight of hand, pickpocketing and escapology. His arsenal includes the House of Mystery and a trench coat with powerful demonic properties. His limits are real. His healing cannot conventionally cure cancer, and he is surpassed by Doctor Fate, Merlin, Zatanna, Darkseid and Wotan. Against stronger foes, he uses trickery and alliances, even at his allies' expense.

  Unusually for comics, Constantine has aged in real time since his creation. During the first year of his solo series he celebrated his 35th birthday, and five years later he turned 40. In Hellblazer, demon blood from Nergal was said to possibly affect his aging. In a 2011 interview, DC co-publisher Dan DiDio said the Vertigo Constantine is in his 60s, while the DC Universe version is markedly younger.

  His early look was a blue pin-stripe suit, a tan trench coat and occasional gloves. As the series progressed, the coat got grungier, and the outfit settled on a white shirt with a black or red tie. He smokes Silk Cut cigarettes, about 30 a day. He also occasionally breaks the fourth wall, talking to the reader and narrating his own story.

  Constantine is bisexual. A 1992 comic first established it, referring offhandedly to his male and female exes. Early stories had shown him dating women only, but Ashes & Dust in the City of Angels, during Brian Azzarello's run, showed him with men, and it drew controversy. The 2015 relaunch Constantine the Hellblazer #1 reaffirmed his bisexuality through his interactions with male and female characters.

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• 8. Sightings and Legacy

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  Moore met his creation again, in art if not in life. Eddie Campbell's 2001 book Snakes and Ladders adapted one of Moore's performance art pieces. In it, the figure steps out of the dark and whispers that the ultimate secret of magic is that anyone could do it, in far cruder words. A third meeting came in Hellblazer #120, when author Paul Jenkins wrote Moore into the story. Moore sits in silhouette at the back of a bar as Constantine, on a pub crawl with the reader, raises a drink to him.

  Other writers claim sightings too. Jamie Delano says he met Constantine outside the British Museum during his run. Peter Milligan saw him at a party around 2009 and rushed after him, only to find he had disappeared. Paul Jenkins and Rick Veitch say they spotted him at East Croydon station. Brian Azzarello saw him in a Chicago bar and kept away, saying, "the thing about John is, the last thing you'd want to be is his friend." A rumour has long claimed that the Liverpool occult writer Tom Slemen was a model for Constantine, which Slemen has always denied.

  Rankings followed. Empire magazine placed Constantine third in its 50 Greatest Comic Characters, Wizard ranked him No. 10 among its Top 200, and IGN listed him No. 29 among its Top 100 Comic Book Heroes. IGN wrote that "Constantine is a byproduct of both the punk rock era and Margaret Thatcher's Britain." TopTenz.net put him at No. 5 among comic book anti-heroes, and in 2013 ComicsAlliance placed him at #30 on its list of sexiest male characters.

  Hellblazer boosted the occult detective genre and shaped it into its modern form. Hellboy, Supernatural, Grimm, The Originals and The Dresden Files have all been influenced by the character. Imitators included Criminal Macabre, Gravel and Planetary. In Planetary, by Warren Ellis and John Cassaday, the character Jack Carter fakes his death and says it is "time to be someone else", which has been read as Ellis criticizing Constantine for being tied to 1980s politics. Ellis also created Constance Johanssen for Marvel's Pryde and Wisdom, described as an occult detective who has "a habit of getting her friends killed. Two hundred at last count." Actor Misha Collins has said that Castiel's wardrobe on Supernatural is based on Constantine's.

  On screen, Keanu Reeves played the character in the 2005 film Constantine. Matt Ryan played him in the television series Constantine, travelling across the United States with Chas and a young woman named Zed. Ryan later reprised the role in Arrow, Legends of Tomorrow, The Flash, the Harley Quinn episode "It's a Swamp Thing" and several animated productions. Damian O'Hare voiced him in Justice League Action. A series set in the DC Extended Universe was in development by 2021 before being cancelled the following year.

  In The Sandman in 2022, Jenna Coleman played Johanna Constantine and her identically named ancestor, adapting both Constantines' roles from the comic series. In October 2022, Coleman confirmed that she, Neil Gaiman and co-developer Allan Heinberg had discussed a spin-off about her character. She called it a "good idea" and said they were "really behind" it.

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