John Constantine

Hello! 

Welcome to Shores of Night, where I talk about probably far too many things for a blog, and where today we're talking about the character John Constantine. Last time I wrote about My Issues With Superheroes, and why I'm moving away from reading their adventures. In that piece, I mentioned my love for John, though I admit it's a relationship that's had its wobbles over the decades.  

The biographical bit is that I discovered John in 1994, in a one-shot written by Jamie Delano just after the Garth Ennis run had finished. I was hooked from page one. It felt different to everything else I'd read: raw, exciting, full of a deep, sarcastic voice. It chimed not only with who I was at the time, but also with the country I came from. More than that, the story was small, intimate even, worlds away from the superhero epics I was used to, in the best possible way. John was smart, and he had a sort of sleazy charm I wasn't used to seeing. He cared about people, not in an abstract way of "it's for the greater good" but in the sense of trying to look after his friends. 

Of course, anyone who's read Hellblazer knows that usually ends badly, if only because writers tended to clear the decks of their supporting casts and leave the next creative team to introduce new characters. Hence, the rotating cast of characters and John meeting old friends we'd somehow never heard of. 

The character's Britishness was also really important to me. Partly that was because it was nice to see a British character who didn't just say "bloody" all the time or sound like someone who doesn't really know how British people speak, trying to write British dialogue. I know that sounds slight, but I was used to the likes of Captain Britain, whose voice always sounds like an aristocrat. The problem was that almost every other superhero character from these isles also sounds like that, and so few people in real life actually talk like that! So, John speaking like an actual person from the UK was a breath of fresh air.

Of course, the character was edgy, and I went on to learn that he'd been that ever since he'd appeared in the pages of Swamp Thing. That wasn't the only reason I enjoyed his adventures, though. Picking up trade paperbacks, I learned that the character was intrinsically political, and that spoke to me as well. I'd grown up in the 1980s, and I remembered the Miners' Strike and how the Labour Party transformed from a strong left-wing party into something more moderate. I'd studied Politics at A Level, and I was doing a degree in the same subject. Politics was really important to me, and it still is. The world of superheroes, broadly, feels detached from the subject, but John lived there, in all its messiness and difficulty.

His adventures always touched on the real world. He was grounded in my culture, in my politics, and I could see my world in the pages of his book. Importantly, he was different to the other characters I'd identified with. Archangel, my favourite Marvel character, was a portrait of a damaged psyche, and still is. Jack Knight, the Starman of the time, was interesting, but he lived in a purposefully retro world more or less divorced from everything else. 

In contrast to both characters, John lived in real time. He aged and had regular birthdays. That he wasn't stuck at a particular age or stage in life felt natural. With the 10th anniversary edition, Paul Jenkins assured us that the readers only knew the stories John chose to tell us, and we saw a curated version of his life. That made him bigger than the book and made him more interesting. 

His growth and ability to change made him feel real.

Eventually, my path parted from John's at the end of Mike Carey's run. Suddenly, I'd had enough; I'd grown out of that part of my life. Honestly, I forgot to cancel the book from my pull list and ended up buying it for another year, but the new run went unread. It's taken some time to enjoy his stories again and grow to appreciate how important a figure he is in comics, not because he is a superhero, but because he walks among them as a counterpoint. Where they are idealistic, he's cynical; where they are separate from the world, he still walks within it. He may not have his own book anymore - the comics market has moved on - but John haunts the edges of DC's comics. He's still realer than the men and women in spandex, still standing in the street as they fly or swing overhead. They have the luxury of distancing themselves from the world, but that's where he thrives. 

There's power in that, and it's what makes John significant. It's what makes him interesting. We need more characters like that.