John Constantine: Considering the Laughing Magician – Part 1

By Mackenzie and Walker • 3 years ago • Comics

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 – The Constant One

“I’m the one who steps from the shadows, all trenchcoat and cigarette and arrogance, ready to deal with the madness. Oh, I’ve got it all sewn up. I can save you. If it takes the last drop of your blood, I’ll drive your demons away. I’ll kick them in the bollocks and spit on them when they’re down and then I’ll be gone back into darkness, leaving only a nod and a wink and a wisecrack.”

If you ask us about a Constantine adaptation or reboot – and since you’re reading this we’re going to pretend you have – we are all for it.

Hellblazer fans since forever, the idea of Constantine joining the Nu52 had us enamoured and entranced at the possibilities, our palms sweating and pulses racing. The possibility of a Guillermo del Toro Justice League Dark movie starring Constantine has us from “Alright, squire?”. The idea of a Hellblazer TV show (now confirmed to at least be going to pilot) transmogrifies us from mild-mannered attorneys into gibbering loons, worthy in our single-minded rictus smiles to form the backdrop of one of John’s own grisly adventures.

The reason we get so excited about Constantine adaptations is that they are so ridiculously overdue. As a fictional construct, Constantine is very close to perfect. The archetype of the laughing magician – a working class trickster mage, choked by regret, cynicism and self-loathing and yet keeping alive a guttering flame of humanism, defiance and irreverent humour – is incredibly strong. So strong that we speculate that if Alan Moore hadn’t been looking to create a Merlin that looked like Sting for his American plant-themed King Arthur, someone else would have had to invent him. He was something the 80s, and consequently the world, just had to have.

With Constantine, a man met his moment and ushered in stories about the noirish world of street magic. DC should have had first movers advantage in what has become the booming world of modern occult. Jamie Delano’s preliminary crack at giving Constantine a solo title is raw genius, long underappreciated by the wider world. His first issues smoothly hit all the best notes of a genre that was not yet even in its infancy, mastering the balance of humour, horror, wonder and social commentary that has made urban fantasy into the glorious monster it is today. Since then, Hellblazer has gone from strength to strength under names like Ennis, Morrison, Azzarello, Jenkins and Carey. If you feel Milligan’s final fifty lost some steam, if you didn’t click with Azzarello’s spin on the character or thought Ellis’ run was overhyped, nonetheless, all comers must bow before 300 issues telling one singular and sustained story. This is, of itself, a remarkable accomplishment, and that’s without factoring in various standalones, Vertigo crossovers, novels, graphic novels, cameo appearances and so on springing up hither and yon.

Part of what makes Constantine capable of pulling this off, and pulling it off without the bells and whistles of event-driven comics, is that he is a sticky concept, a vivid character. He is anything but generic, defined by his crudity and savvy, his politics and addictions, his flaws and his triumphs. So before we spend the next few weeks pulling apart the archetype for its component parts, comparing and contrasting the Constantine of the New 52 against his antecedent self and ultimately positing what we feel are the missing essentials of John Constantine, we’re going to take a moment to look back over the narrative accomplishment of a lifetime (well, our lifetime, so don’t quibble if you are older or younger!) of stories. Spoilers ahead, but since we’re going back to before we knew how to walk, we’re making a call that the statutes of limitations have expired.

Hellblazer in Fifteen Minutes

*SPOILERS AHEAD – SKIP THIS SECTION AND GO TPB HUNTING IF YOU’RE CONCERNED*

“The past is another country, and there’s razor wire along the border and machine-gun nests every fifty yards.”

The rudiments of John’s character and motif are created in Alan Moore’s first great DC achievement (Swamp Thing). Moore’s magus is a little more self-assured, a little more inclined to the upmarket yuppie trends of the 80s than later incarnations would perhaps suggest, but as with everything Constantine, it’s important that these elements are never sacrificed as part of his character – only woven into a thicker and deeper tapestry as the years go by.

Delano brings irregularity around the edges, creating a context and motivation and history for the mage from the pages of Swamp Thing that carried right through until Hellblazer’s end. These original bold strokes are of a man already running from the trauma of his past – growing up in Liverpool without a mother; raised by a resentful and abusive father; a punk, coming up hard and poor in the shadow of nuclear annihilation. From here, he develops his basic template, so ready for flashback stories – his time in the seminal (and as such, necessarily terrible) Mucous Membrane in the 1970s; making the acquaintance of life-long best friend Chas Chandler, a neighbour who in later life would turn cabbie and provide John with his only recurring (i.e. reliable and surviving) ally throughout the remainder of his life; dipping his toes into the occult world of body-snatchers, blood-drinkers and demon-summoners.

John’s early adventures are compelled by and totemic of a legacy of which he then knew nothing: the legacy of the magical bloodline of Konstantine (ancestral spelling varies). This role as a mystical trouble-magnet is one of those conceptually perfect MacGuffins ensuring an enduring certainty that magical adventures will come to our hero, rather than requiring his to hunt them out. It underscores something essential to the best Hellblazer arcs, that John is neither cop by way of being a ersatz Sorcerer Supreme nor magical vigilante hanging out his shingle.

With a balance of anger, swagger, and style, John attempted the exorcism of a young girl named Astra, forcibly possessed by a demon in the wake of a drug-fuelled magical orgy in which the child formed a sacrifice. Though John acted from the best of intentions, he was unable to deal with the power he thought he could control: as a result, his friends died, and John was charged with murder and committed to Ravenscar Asylum for the clinically insane. Ravenscar, as a symbol, serves as a motif for countless issues, a permanent symbol of the trauma and guilt that define the character. Ravenscar becomes a coda to everything John does, a symbol for the price and the pain of magic and emphasis that Constantine is, in essence, a sad character.

Swamp Thing is the last great pillar of Constantine’s story. Many years later, when John appears in America pursuing a great work to save the world. Delano cleverly cast Constantine’s first appearance as a front, a display, a persona adopted as he pursued his own version of the grail quest. By this time, he seems competent, in command and infinitely well-connected. By trying to manipulate Swamp Thing to reorder the cosmos, John ultimately proves the limitations to his power.

And from these pieces, the character is built. The Constantine legacy is the curse and burden of family and magic, attractor of the weird and fear for the future; Ravenscar is the need to help the little guy and the curse and burden of failure; American Gothic is the archetypal story of John’s con artist desperation for one more big score, a demonstration of the hubris and deception that are never quite shaken from the character’s modus operandi.

With the character so prepared, Hellblazer was ready to soar, and soar it did. Fighting Thatcherite oppressors and yuppie demons; standing between Heaven and Hell and giving the finger to both; tuning in to chase life and love with a commune of virtuous hippies before dropping out as unworthy; wrestling with his better half, the soul of his dead twin from a timeline where the world was saved; tricking the forces of Hell into saving him from lung cancer; talking down the King of the Vampires; spoiling the machinations of his darker half aggregated into a demonic doppelganger; wrestling with the dreams of children he will never have born from the relationships he failed and betrayed; wandering on an odyssey across the underbelly of the United States in a feud with a mysterious billionaire; and so on and so on.

Eventually, the vendetta of an African shaman revealed to John the unspoken secret of his life: that his better half, the Golden Child, had never forgiven, nor forgotten, and every failure of John’s disastrous life had been a means by which the Archmage thought to force his way into the world.

For his final fifty issues (the longest uninterrupted run in Hellblazer history – if the authors’ personally least favourite), Peter Milligan took John around the curve of sixty, to India and back, through the magical revenges of Gemma Constantine and into the arms of the eventual Mrs Constantine, Epiphany Graves. After 300 issues, Constantine took his last bow.

Dissipation & Distribution

“It’s just the way of it, son. We all sell our souls sooner or later.”

Whilst 300 issues doesn’t seem like that notable achievement when compared with some of comics other long-running pieces, it should always be borne in mind that Hellblazer represented one continuous and contiguous story. No reboots. No back to basics. No preserved status quo. Twenty plus years of the life of one character, unfolding as year succeeds to year.

In these three intervening decades, however, even as John has been travelling along in his linear, real-time existence, wending his way from thirty to sixty, locked off from both the wider DCU and the world at large, his archetypal essence has been appearing wherever it was needed. The hard-smoking cynical Englishman trickster has gone into overdrive, becoming so overused that his image has dissipated into the gen pop of pop culture.

Indeed, the very necessity of such a character is a curse for those that now own the Constantine IP. He has been so hungered for that an army of cheap copies have spawned, including Willoughby Kipling and Constance Johansson, to name but two amongst the various background panel-dwellers and winking references found in comics across publisher and genre spectra. Some, like the X-Men’s Peter Wisdom, have existed for so long, they have become hoary institutions in their own right, accreting an independent existence from their hundreds of appearances. It is also no coincidence that in the time before comic book adaptations blitzed the screen at a rate of a half-dozen every year, it was Constantine that was adapted, albeit in an ersatz, American cousin fashion.

What has been far more impressive than these thin reskinnings of John himself are the raft of other, more distinctive, cynical, heroic occult detectives. These icons of the literary world, as indebted to Hellblazer as they are to Sam Spade, are everywhere. Harry Dresden, Gabriel Knight and Felix Castor are of course all unique, but it is no disservice to their respective creators to note that if a raft of square-jawed, super-moral, flying and invulnerable men with secret identities turned up in fiction, all eyes would rightly turn to Superman. In many ways, these commercial successes have spread farther and risen higher than Constantine himself.

John’s nearly unique ability to age in real time has kept him remarkably durant and relevant, but it has done so by layering rather than recontextualising. His past has not been smoothed down over time, rendered generic by the ongoing unmooring experienced by most comic book characters. He is thus a siren to those who wish to change him up, smooth him down or bring him forward, serving at once as the irresistible lure and as the force that will drown those who dare come too close. While we have time for every version of Constantine, we recognise that the reactions to the movie adaption and the lukewarm and somewhat sarcastic response to the Nu52 Constantine are proof of the immensity of the challenge at hand.

In Issue #7 of Planetary “To Be In England, In The Summertime”, Constantine (or as close to him as one of Hellblazer’s greatest, if most controversial scribes, was legally allowed to go) appears. John, on the run from an angry superhero he has “forced revision” onto, goes underground, before emerging as an ersatz version of Ellis’ own creation Spider Jerusalem. Ellis posits that John was England in the ‘80s, and for that world he represented the character which could capture that time and place. But, as he also felt compelled to state: the ‘80s are (long) over. Time to move on. While Ellis is not wrong in saying that the 80s are behind us, his more potent insight lives within the transformation. Issues of the creeping capability of authority and the divide between the haves and the have-nots are more at play than ever.

The aforementioned climax of Andy Diggle’s run, where Constantine’s journey into his own essences reveals the presence of his alternate twin looking to consume him from within is of critical relevance. The paternalistic “better angel” of John’s nature seeks to rob him of his vices which are also his strengths, to swallow him up and replace him with a man of power who will reshape the world for what he considers the right. The tired punk becomes another potential tool of the Man.

These stories provide an eerily prescient description of the crossroads John is now facing. Either his true essence will survive, washed free of his long and bruising past and evolved into something new, fresh but essentially John; otherwise, his superficial self – his name and Sting’s face and his iconic coat – will continue on, deprived of its motive force, a hollow and likely futile attempt to claw back attention by becoming a cheap copy of those characters who were once themselves homages to Constantine.

Once again, we face the moment where the man must again emerge. The time has come and Constantine is yet again on a course to be pushed back into the public eye. If Constantine is to have a future worthy of his past, it will need to be not a period piece, but a forecast for the modern age managed by a loyal and true believer. This is not the same thing as saying it should be managed by a pedantic purist and, in fact, the ideal adaption by necessity also be a reimagination.

What Byrne’s Man of Steel did for Superman and Miller’s Year One did for Batman, so too must any new Constantine project not only give us a vision of things to come, but capture the quintessential essence that lifts a character above imitators and grafts them to the popular collective consciousness.