In the pipeline for a while now, we’ve been collecting our thoughts on the premiere magician of the comic-book world: John Constantine, the dangerous, cynical magus who could be argued to have forged a genre. With a(nother) Constantine adaptation in the works, Hellblazer TPBs being reissued and a few months to consider his role in DC Comics’ reimagination, we present a two part look at the character, who he has been, what he has meant, and what he might become. (Part 1 – here)
PART 2 – The Ever-Changing Face of the Eternal Champion
In March 2013, DC pulled the trigger, simultaneously killing off the 24-year run of Hellblazer and sounding the starting pistol for Constantine, the new self-titled monthly integrating John Constantine back into the DCU. Early promises that the two comics would run in parallel were patent falsehoods, but one can hardly grudge DC editorial for wanting John as frontman for their revamped subset (and sub-setting) of occult superheroes.
The image of DC editorial permitting Batman to spend time with a married septuagenarian leftie working a Crowley-esque street-magic of sex, drugs and demon-summoning from his flat in London is pretty close to the antithesis of DC’s house style. Even if it wasn’t, it makes sense that two decades of backstory are far too heavy to carry across from Vertigo. Changes were therefore inevitable, and we were excited to see what they might be.
We deliberately waited for the first several issues to be penned before analysing the transplantation from Hellblazer to Constantine. Jeff Lemire took up the title and its sister-piece, Justice League Dark, efficiently and evocatively establishing the key features of the new mould. Assisted by an Issue #0 story covering Constantine’s background and enough crossovers and team appearances to make Batman jealous and Wolverine dizzy, Constantine is once again established as a character.
John is young once more, back in his 30s. He is established in New York, within spitting distance of Gotham and Metropolis, but is more wide-travelling, ready to hop a jet for magical hijinx around the globe. Despite protestations of reluctance, he has a mission and team affiliations, like any good superhero. He is less raw, less realistic, with his stories directed at the indistinct malevolence of super-villainy rather than tilting at the true to life windmills of social injustice where John once spent his energies. And what they have kept is as telling as what they left behind. They have put their efforts into retaining the aesthetics, the in-setting disreputable prestige and the duplicitous, world-weary cynicism.
At first glance, this all seems pretty intuitive. If you give any fan five minutes to flesh out how they would reboot Constantine, I’d wager a fair chunk of them would return something pretty similar. But this is the issue with decisions you reach with but five minutes thought – while this seems intuitive, it is sad to say we feel these choices are dead wrong on all counts.
Rebel Yell
“Thought we’d miss a Tory government something chronic, you know? But this new lot… Great stuff. Things get worse every bleedin’ day. It’s like Maggie never left office. Lovely jubbly.”
When it comes to aesthetics and attitude, the New 52 Constantine was a far greater failure that the controversial redesign of Superman ever was. Apart from his iconic coat, the new Constantine is indistinguishable from a hung-over stockbroker, his attire consisting of rumpled shirts, bland ties and a pair of casual slacks. Constantine’s attire is no longer that of a disillusioned rebel, but instead something softly anomalous – counter-culture couture rather than true disestablishment symbolism. Lemire certainly points that way by making his iconic coat an inheritance of a mentor-turned-enemy, a wizarding analogy to Marv from Sin City. Everything else about the man has been muted somewhat – gone are the sparking white gloves and pinstripe suits, gone are the glimmering punk earrings and peroxide poisoning of the hair.
The brilliance of Vertigo’s Constantine (or, as a separate point of reference, Spike from Buffy who also did the coat-stealing thing) is that the way they dressed spoke to who the character was. The faded but present remnants of their punk wardrobes associated them with a particular time and place, emphasising they were men who remembered the failures and successes of counter-culture movements of the past. While the crumpled shirts may not have been entirely out of place in the final run of Hellblazer, in that case, it very clearly spoke to the loss of John’s romantic idealism and the gaining of world-weary experience.
With Constantine moved forward in time, we agree wholeheartedly that he cannot simply resume wearing his costumes of yesterday. Constantine, at his core for the last 30 years, was a creature of the counter-culture movement against Thatcherite Britain. His punk music and lone earring, his larcenous tendencies and history with forbidden occultism, his constant battles against police brutality and corporate greed, and his egalitarian connectedness with Crowleyites, priests, bikers and barrow boys were far more real and raw than the mystical sages like Baron Winters or the Phantom Stranger. Like the Punisher severed from his relationship with the Vietnam War, a John suddenly unmoored from the world of strikes, Sex Pistols, yuppies and the Battle of the Beanfield is a very different creature and needs to be treated as such.
After all, if Constantine is now in his thirties, marginally older than Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent, then Sid and Nancy had likely died by the time the guy was being born. Hell, Kurt Cobain was likely dead around the time he kissed a girl and if he attended a political protest, it would have been against the Labour government committing troops to the second Gulf War. If the guy is meant to be counter-culture and under forty, someone who has met the current generation of rebellious ‘youth’ should perhaps speak up.
But here lies the nub – is this new Constantine even meant to be counter-culture? Or is he simply a magician, his low-class slang and chain of cigarettes grandfathered in as occult affectations? We may have already passed the point where these things come off as merely quaint, like Dick van Dyke and the chimney sweeps from Mary Poppins.
If this is DC’s choice, unconscious as it may be, it is a great loss. The modern image of a wizard is at base at elitist one. Even when the heroic wizard was one of the people, as with Harry Potter, the tools of the trade are those of the High Church. The magician is associated with large libraries and speaking Latin and secret societies and cups of tea and ever-so-much power. His fundamental blue collar nature differentiated Constantine from other wizards in their definitional ivory towers. John’s magic is anything but filled with pomp and circumstance, drawn more from Leary, Crowley and deLint than from the traditions of Lewis, Tolkien and Lovecraft.
Constantine used to represent something notably rare in the world of comics: someone born to everyday Western misfortune, and unhappy about it. Where magic is so often portrayed as a shortcut to another world, Hellblazer reinforced time and time again that there is no escape from our shared social troubles via platform 9 and ¾. John isn’t any sort of Randian overman, risen to great things by the sweat of his brow or the luck of his mystical inheritance. He is no doctor, no billionaire industrialist, no president or intelligence agent. He doesn’t dress or act in a manner conforming to the trappings of power that the media so readily present. His heroics, insofar as he was a hero, were grounded in his ordinariness, his dissatisfaction, his fellow-feeling with the have-nots. Vertigo comics that came afterwards certainly adopted these elements and themes, but most of them were adopted after the fashion of John. Once that is stripped from him, it is hard to say what he has left.
Everybody Knows Your Name
“You belong here, don’t you, Constantine? This is your world. Eyelids slit off and babies on hooks. Guttings and rapings. I swear to #^{%, yours is the kind of life serial killers wank off to.”
Everyone loves that scene from the Books of Magic (see above) where Constantine enters a room of the most powerful and cruel magicians and monsters and, despite having nothing up his sleeve, wards them off based entirely on his reputation. That blaze of reputational bravado underpins characters from Danny Ocean to the Doctor to Mike Carey’s Lucifer. It appears numerous times in Hellblazer, so much so that it could be said to be the principal weapon in the characters arsenal. Based on John’s encounters with the Justice League Dark, it seems that this exceptionally potent reputation is something the powers that be very much want him to retain.
The thing about that scene is that it needs to be earned. It wasn’t something Alan Moore just pushed as we grew to know the character – he began as a figure of worrying mystery, not assumed legend. It was introduced in layers, emerging organically from Swamp Thing, from the First of the Fallen, from preventing various eschatons from immanentising and so on. There was certainly work added at the margins, exploits implied and outright lies grandfathered in to what people saw Constantine as capable of, but we understood how people could think these things about Constantine. The marks of climbing the occult ladder were writ across the character himself – the John of the present was a scarred and impressive figure, deep where his younger self was callow, reflective where he was once aggressive, bone tired where he once was exuberant.
To that end, Lemire did his best to retain that flavour without explicating the connections or hardening up exactly what John has achieved so far. This ambition to build on sand so as to be able to insert the foundations and, possibly, an entire basement level at a later date has been at the heart of DC’s post-Flashpoint approach to continuity. Where the results have been frustrating with Batman, damaging with Wonder Woman and just plain confusing with the Teen Titans, it has been utterly devastating for our experience of the new Constantine.
Scratch a Cynic, find Truth, Justice & the Moving to America Way
“Now I’m just like the bastards I’ve hated all me life.”
For his introduction into the DCU proper, one thing was certain – John was going to hang out with people in spandex. If you were one of that tribe of purists that object to this sort of thing in principle, you were never going to be satisfied. You were also ignoring Constantine’s background in things like Crisis of Infinite Earths. Crotchety as this article may make us sound, we are of a shared mind that DC once benefited greatly from cross-pollination with Swamp Thing and Sandman and the Doom Patrol. Thing is, we thought these things were good because they made the DCU that bit stranger, dragging the sensibilities of those fantastic and fantastical horror and occult writers of the era into the world of four-colour superheroics.
Now, we feel like our wish has been granted by a monkey’s paw. The New 52 has, to varying degrees, brought the early 90s weirdness in line with their apocalyptic soap opera house style. John has been transplanted to the Big Apple – no more “here I stay: haunted by London. And London, haunted by me” – where he can be a stone’s throw from that whole capes-and-mask experience. He has the running of a government-backed superteam, and when they aren’t mind-controlled into throwing down with the Justice League, they have crime-fighting adventures.
Worst of all, John has a mission statement. Every issue of Constantine provides a quick summary that tells us that John “fights to maintain balance and prevent anyone from becoming too powerful”. It should be noted that the DC house style preference for bombastic summaries is derived from attempts to replicate for each character Superman’s beloved credo – itself taken in its most iconic form from a family radio broadcast from the 1940s. John’s new “mission” is embodied, so far, with his work-for-hire job for ARGUS and his crusade against the Cold Flame, a cult of nefarious mystic bigwigs the powers that be clearly hope can be crafted into a sort of rogues’ gallery for the guy.
Constantine has tried for grand plans before. In his first appearance, his canny and amoral manipulations of Swamp Thing were in pursuit of an entirely new supernatural world order; it isn’t too much later he is up to his neck in the Crisis on Infinite Earths. What stories about John with a plan, afire with a higher purpose, all have in common is 1) the plan always fails; 2) they show John giving in to his worst instincts. The issue with John having a Cause (however abstract) and a team (however reluctantly) is it pushes him into being everything he stands against. He is already a bastard – we know he is ready to risk the apocalypse to save himself, run from rescuing to save his soul and able to send his friends into certain death if it gets him where he wants to go. We as readers can see ourselves in that desperate, personal necessity – and despair for him and ourselves in equal measure. If he does these things because it is his mission, because it is for the greater good, then he is lost to us.
If having a mission is objectionable, the specifics of the chosen mission do nothing to alleviate our issues. The general ethos to “prevent anyone from becoming too powerful” might speak, on the surface, to egalitarian roots, but once that becomes part of “maintaining the balance”, it becomes highly suspect. The balance of magic, by its very nature, is a null concept. Magic, not to put to fine a point on it, does not exist. Its balance therefore is something left entirely to the taste of the writer, stripped of referents much in the same way Batman’s struggle against the Joker generally doesn’t require exploration of America’s criminal justice system. Indeed, it has been made explicit that the balance will most often be restored by kicking the ass of whatever sorcerer or diabolic fiend most threatens the status quo this week. This means, ipso facto, John Constantine has been reduced to spending his time serving as a defender of the status quo.
Take issue 10 from the mega-crossover Trinity War: Blight as a case in point. The Phantom Stranger takes John to heaven so he could demand answers about the nature of evil. It was unquestionably the high point of Fawkes run so far. John’s voice was certainly reminiscent of Hellblazer, and the story deliberately parallels the Paul Jenkins issue where John meets and questions a apparition of a caretaker in the woods (spoilers: it’s God). The issue cleverly used the massive, fairly generic event raging in the background as an opening to explore some interesting questions about where Constantine and his ethos fit into a world of supernatural superheroes.
And the answer? That Heaven has a plan for John. That God is compassionate, his wonders to perform, and John’s objections, denials and sarcastic interjections are ultimately hollow bluffs before he falls into line as the agent of a greater order. This was the issue where we threw in the towel. When contrasted with either Jenkins’ scene in the woods or Gabriel’s patronising paean to divine justice in Dangerous Habits, it becomes clear how far Constantine’s apple has fallen from the Hellblazer tree. Regardless of your personal politics, surely this is as aberrant to everyone else as it is to us? When, in the past three decades, has Constantine’s story ever been so anemic? John, at heart, should be a very angry rebel, suspicious of power, suspicious of systems – divine or diabolical – that ameliorate the breadth and uniqueness of human vice and human grace.
Magic in the world of Hellblazer has always stood-in via shorthand for the allocation of power. When you talk about “preserving the balance of magic”, you’re talking about preserving the balance of power in the world, about supporting an intrinsic idea that the allocation of power between the haves and the have-nots, as it stands, is worth defending. That John Constantine is defending it. In a world with the income, health and safety inequalities that our world has, the New 52 posits that John Constantine thinks things are where they should be, right now.
That’s the great travesty of this construction. We’re not saying John should to be out to save the world: far from it. He’s often only out for himself and his own. But that’s because his cynicism masks his disappointed idealism. His belief that the world should be better than this has until now never gone away, he’s just been unconvinced of his ability to fight for it. Now, instead, he’s certain he can make a difference, and that difference is to prevent a difference being made.
John has always been a soldier of the little cause, of the small virtue, and of a right kicking to the many bastards who try to keep you down, no matter how much they claim to have your best intentions at heart. John, more than any character in comics, should deal with the triumphs and the challenges of seeking to be captain of your own soul.
Related posts:
You Might Also Like
