A Wake For Hellblazer
Jamie Delano, Brian Azzarello, Mike Carey and Peter Milligan pay tribute to “blue-collar warlock” John Constantine.
“It’s better for the long-term health of the book to re-invent it periodically,” said comics writer Warren Ellis in 1999, as he took over the reigns of DC Comics’ flagship horror title Hellblazer. Fast-forward fourteen years, and his words had a particular resonance, since Hellblazer was about to undergo the most radical and controversial shake-up in its history. In fact, while its central character, the cynical, manipulative, trench-coated, chain-smoking magician John Constantine would remain part of the DC Universe, Hellblazer itself was ending. Issue #300 marked the climax of the comic’s extraordinary 25-year run. Constantine lived on, but Hellblazer, sadly, was no more.
John Constantine first appeared in issue #37 (more or less) of Alan Moore’s famous Swamp Thing run in 1985, as a supporting character. His unremarkable first words were, “He’s coming back, Judith.” Later in the same issue though, comes a speech bubble that reads now like a mission statement: “If you want answers, you’ll have to keep up with me. Maybe I’ll give you the answers. Maybe I won’t.” He introduces himself to Swamp Thing’s squeeze Abby as “a nasty piece of work.”
Moore claims that the character arose from a request from Swamp Thing artists Stephen Bissette and John Totleben to write them a Sting-like character to draw (maybe they were big Police fans). “How could I fit Sting into Swamp Thing?” Moore mused in 1993. “I have an idea that most of the mystics in comics are generally older people, very austere, very proper in a lot of ways. They are not at all functional on the street. It struck me that it might be interesting for once to do an almost blue-collar warlock: somebody who was streetwise. Constantine started to grow out of that.”
His initial story arc saw him manipulating the Swamp Thing — he told the creature to think of him as his manager — in a crusade against the Brujeria: an insidious black magic chaos cult who had quietly taken over the world and were now embarking on the destruction of Heaven. It was Swamp Thing’s title, but the scene-stealing Constantine was immediately the story’s engine. “It was a great moment,” remembers Carey. “I was like, wow, who’s this guy? I was completely sold on Constantine immediately, and when they gave him his own title I was right in there.”
He grew to the extent that, in 1988, DC Comics gave him his own series (initially to be called Hellraiser until a certain Clive Barker film forced a re-think). With Moore disinclined to write it himself, the job fell to a fellow resident of Northampton, England: Jamie Delano.
“Alan had already given me an introduction at Marvel UK in the early 80s where I succeeded him in writing Night Raven and Captain Britain,” Delano recalls. “But if, as I suspect, he put in a word in my favour when [editor] Karen Berger was looking for a British writer to develop John Constantine at DC, he was gracious enough not to mention the fact. Karen Berger has never been a pushover, so I assume she saw at least enough merit in my outline to give me a shot at working it out.”
Constantine as embellished by Delano took in the small bits of background that Moore had sketched: in particular a disastrous episode in Newcastle involving a magical ritual, a demon, and the death of an abused child, which caused the young magician to suffer a nervous breakdown and spend time in a mental institution. But it was Delano that told us Constantine had been born in Liverpool; that his mother had died in childbirth and his twin brother had died in the womb; that he had a fractious relationship with his father; that he’d pursued his sorcerous education in London and San Francisco in the 1960s; and that in the ’70s he’d been a member of a punk band called Mucous Membrane. “Alan gave me invaluable advice and insight,” says Delano, “but Constantine pretty soon took over those mentoring duties himself, and from then on I just wrote down what the bastard told me.”
Delano’s run is viciously satirical, deeply rooted in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain of the 1980s, and taking in neo-Nazis, demon city-boys in London’s financial district and evil freemasons in the British Parliament. Constantine also goes on the road with a group of traveling environmental activists: the so-called “New Age Travellers” vilified by the British tabloid press in the late ’80s and early ‘90s.
“I write through a desire to explore and reflect — in a weird distorting mirror — the world I inhabit,” Delano shrugs. “Humanity is benighted by religion and political ideology. That makes me angry. Anger provokes the energy I require to write.” Subsequent Hellblazer writers Garth Ennis and Brian Azzarello would touch on, respectively, the Troubles in Northern Ireland and neo-Nazis in the States, but the comic was rarely as political again.
“Those early issues were utterly fucking glorious at the time,” says Carey. “There was one that ended with John hanging upside down watching Margaret Thatcher romp to another election victory. I used to show that book to my friends who didn’t read comics, and say, ‘This is what you’re missing!’ But that run particularly, and even a lot of Garth’s stuff, is so much of its time that you kind of need Cliff’s Notes now to get all the references unless you lived through it. I’m a political animal, but I deliberately did not go topical with Hellblazer. I kind of wanted the stories to be free enough of context that people could come back to them in ten or twenty years.”
John Constantine then, trod more fantastical ground under the aegis of Delano’s successors. He fought vampires, and butted heads with the devilish First of the Fallen during Ennis’ run (it would have been Lucifer, but a clash with Neil Gaiman’s epochal Sandman, running at the same time, meant another devil had to be substituted). Paul Jenkins delved into English history and mythology, using Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Arthurian legend. Warren Ellis’ brief run involved an Aleister Crowley-like magician (Ellis quit when a story about a school shooting was pulled in the wake of Columbine; he will still no longer talk about Hellblazer and politely declined an invitation for this feature). And Carey’s epic stint — essentially one story that took four years to tell — involved mystical artefacts, a beast seeking to control the consciousness of the whole of mankind, a psychic serial killer, and a demon who bargained with Constantine for control of (a very long) 24 hours of his life.
The only real divergence from the supernatural thrust of the series came courtesy of Azzarello, whose hundred issue 100 Bullets series perhaps provided a clue that he was more interested in crime writing and real-world horror. Constantine had spent time in Hell, and even visited a space station in his Swamp Thing days, but Azzarello kept his feet firmly on the ground. “Demons and monsters… yawn,” he explains. “Human beings are the most horrific things on the planet. Real horror comes from the idea that these terrible characters can be just like you and me. They have beliefs, and they love their families. That’s what’s scary.”
Constantine under Ennis, Jenkins and Ellis had built up something of a support network: a kind of “Hellblazer family”, of recurring characters, including Constantine’s own sister and niece, and long-suffering cab driver Chas and his clan. Despite the fact that people close to him tend regularly and inevitably to get killed (and on more than one occasion doomed to eternal suffering and damnation), he’d even had love interests, like Ennis’ feisty Kit.
“I wanted to bring the mystery back to him as a person,” says Azzarello. “and some of the moral ambivalence. After being around for such a long time, I think he kind of became a hero, for want of a better word, and I don’t think he ever should have been that. He’s not somebody you should like. Even if he’s your friend, he’s still the kind of guy that you go ‘oh shit’ when he shows up, and start looking at your watch. What was so effective about him in Swamp Thing was that he always knew more than everybody else, and we didn’t know what he knew. Prior to me in his own book, we were privy to his internal monologues. A conman’s only effective if you don’t know what he’s thinking.”
Carey agrees… to a point. “I’ve always loved John as the kind of ‘laughing magician’”, he says, “the smartest guy in the room who wins not by magic — although he can do magic if he needs to — but by bluff, and inspired improvisation. There was a scene in Freezes Over [issues #158–#161], which is my favourite moment in Brian’s run, where John persuades a guy to bleed to death, and it’s psychology as much as it’s magic.”
Having said that, Carey did want to return magic to the book, and bring Constantine back among people. “I wanted to re-state this version of John as the con-job: the plausible, ruthless, charming anti-hero,” he recalls. “He is a social animal. He uses people, but he does like to be around them. He forms fairly intense relationships even though he can turn his back on them when he needs to, and I think he’s most interesting in the context of those relationships.”
After shorter runs by Denise Mina and Andy Diggle, Peter Milligan was left on Constantine’s chair as the music stopped, his own approach to the character having been to smooth off even more of the rough edges.
Over Hellblazer’s two-and-a-half decades, Constantine aged in more-or-less real time, and age it seems, had softened him even to the point where marriage didn’t seem unthinkable. “I wanted to explore that emotional area,” Milligan explains. “His growing relationship with Epiphany Greaves was part of that. A lot of people see Constantine as a real bastard, but the more I thought about that the less I agreed with it. He can be selfish and thoughtless and pretty immoral, but, but I’ve known a few out-and-out bastards in my time and it struck me that Constantine was more nuanced than that.”
John Constantine then, has always meant slightly different things to different writers, but Milligan doesn’t believe that’s a problem. “I think the trick is to make him your own, while maintaining a continuity,” he explains. “He has inconsistencies, yet he’s always managed to feel like the same person.”
For a time that seemed to be the key to Constantine’s future. Hellblazer was ending, but Constantine himself was set to continue in the relaunched “universe” of DC’s New 52. But fans greeted the news that the character was to be reclaimed from DC’s more mature Vertigo strand and absorbed back into the wider superhero mainstream with, at best, indifference. The rebooted Constantine lasted for just 23 issues, remixed again in 2015 as Constantine: The Hellblazer, and then again a year later for The Hellblazer: Rebirth. The latter limped on until July 2018: its fate sealed a year earlier when writer Tim Seeley (Hack/Slash) was hired specifically to wind it down.
As of now, the spring of 2019, Constantine’s only regular appearances are as a team member of Justice League Dark — although it seems likely that he’ll show up at some point within the pages of the recently revived Sandman Universe titles. A TV series also choked early, although that Constantine (played by Matt Ryan) has since been a guest on Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow.
Carey, Azzarello and Milligan see no reason why the mainstream and more visceral versions of Constantine couldn’t have continued to co-exist. “I’ve worked Vertigo and I’ve worked DCU, and I honestly don’t change my approach,” Azzarello says. “For the DCU the language has to be less coarse, and some of the violence I guess has to be off-panel or implied. But do blood, guts and swearing make it ‘adult’? I think they make it juvenile.” He laughs: “I’ve got a couple more stories I’d like to tell, but they’d have to be Vertigo. They’re much too juvenile!”
“My initial response, which I tweeted, was, ‘the pricks could at least let Constantine drop dead coughing his heart up between drags on a cigarette, not reduce him to some anaemic rebrand,’” says Delano. “In the long run though, the huge creative energy invested in Moore’s intriguing character by numerous fine artists and writers still exists.”
Hellblazer is dead, but a depleted John Constantine still clings to life against all odds. Somehow that seems appropriate.
This is an updated version of a feature first published in Fangoria in 2013. Like many other Fango writers of that era, I was commissioned for an agreed fee but never paid. The NEW Fangoria, however, does pay its writers and is a whole different thing. Please give it your support.
