John Constantine

46 years ago - John Constantine is born in Liverpool, England alongside his stillborn brother. His mother dies in childbirth, and his father blames him for their deaths.

38 years ago - 8-year-old Constantine first sees the Golden Boy, a mysterious wraith, by his mother's grave.

37 years ago - 9-year-old Constantine begins practicing the occult. He hides his childhood innocence in a box.

29 years ago - 17-year-old Constantine's father burned his occult books. He curses his father, binding him to a dying cat, but botches the curse when the cat dies, leaving his father a withered husk. He preserves the cat in formaldehyde and buries it by his mothers grave to keep his father from dying.

27 years ago - 19-year-old Constantine moves to London with Francis Chandler & begins to explore various occult groups.

24 years ago - 22-year-old Constantine cuts his hair & starts his band Mucus Membraine.

23 years ago - 23-year-old Constantine's band releases their album 'Venus of the Hardsell'.

21 years ago - 25-year-old Constantine and his bandmates attempt to save Astra Logue, an abused girl being chased by a demon, by summoning a demon of his own. They botch the summoning when another demon, Nergal, answers and breaks out of their containment. He tortures John’s friends, and drags the girl to Hell. John attempts to follow to save her but cannot willingly walk into hell, returning with only her arm. He is placed in the Ravenscar Mental institution.

19 years ago - 27-year-old Constantine is again approached by the Golden Boy while in Ravenscar Mental Institution. He learns that it is the spirit of his deceased twin brother, who was meant to be the heroic Laughing Magician. He wants to merge his soul with Johns. John refuses, claiming that he does not want to give up himself to his brother, but secretly knowing his own soul would corrupt them both.

18 years ago - 28-year-old Constantine's release from Ravenscar Mental institution is arranged by gangsters who force him to bring the son of their boss back to life. John cons them, summoning a low level demon to possess the boy.

17 years ago - 29-year-old Constantine meets John Zatara, learning Homo Magi spellcraft. He also meets his daughter, Zatanna Zatara.

15 years ago - 31-year-old Constantine travels into hell to bargain with Blathoxi, a soul-trader cornering the market on wealthy British souls. He offers to sell his own soul, cheap. Blathoxi declines, sensing a deception, but knowledge of the offer travels through hell, causing a huge dip in the value of souls as everyone attempts to divest. Constantine joins the 4th Shadowpact, comforting Zatanna Zatara after the death of her father, John Zatara.

14 years ago - 32-year-old Constantine has a brief affair with an Zatanna Zatara.

13 years ago - 33-year-old Constantine discovers the demon Nergal playing competing apocalypse cults off of each other, both of them vying to take control of Mary Martin, a psychic destined to give birth to the new Messiah. To stop Constantine, Nergal infuses him with his own demonic blood. Constantine sleeps with Mary, corrupting her with Nergal’s blood, making the birth of the new Messiah impossible. Constantine outwits Felix Faust's attempts to sell his soul in a bargain to gain power.

12 years ago - 34-year-old Constantine reaches out to Swamp Thing as he discovers the truth about himself, and helps him keep his sanity by showing him his purpose, and helping him find the Parliament of Trees.

11 years ago - 35-year-old Constantine tracks the demon Nergal’s cult using his former bandmate Richie Simpson’s Quantum Magic to explore the entire web, leading to Richie being immolated and trapped in the internet. Constantine lures Nergal into the computer as well, leading him through a maze of Quantum Magic, tricking him to violate the Covenant of Hell by breeching Heaven, where he is destroyed.

8 years ago - 38-year-old Constantine is contacted by his former bandmate Gary Lester. He has accidentally freed Mnemoth the hunger demon, who is feeding off of Lester’s heroin addiction. Constantine brings Lester to Papa Midnight in New York. They use Lester as bait, allowing Mnemoth to possess him, and then trapping the demon inside him, leaving him a desiccated husk, sealing him inside a brick wall.

6 years ago - 40-year-old Constantine is diagnosed with lung cancer. He sells his soul to the three different demons in the Triumvirate, Lord Satanus, Beelzebub and Azazel, and cuts his wrists. They each cannot relinquish their claim, which will lead to war in hell and to the end of the Covenant with Heaven, so instead they violently cure him of his lung cancer.

5 years ago - 41-year-old Constantine is forced to choose between sacrificing himself or the daughter of his valet Chaz to Buer, a hell-lord who collects the souls of wrongfully damned children. John uses the Buer's magic to create a homunculus of himself, divesting himself of his demon blood and the broken parts of his own soul. Tricked and terrified to take ownership of this abomination, Buer attempts to bargain with John, releasing the souls in its collection. Including Astra Logue.

4 years ago - 42-year-old Constantine and Xanthe Zhou stop the Sorceress Wan Yujing from consuming spirits to gain the strength to challenge the Jade Court, defeating the Sorceress in the Jade Tower.

3 years ago - 43-year-old Constantine meets Epiphany Greaves, an alchemist and the daughter of crime boss Terry Greaves. Their casual friendship evolves as she becomes a regular ally and resource for him. He tries to push her away in fear that she will suffer because of him like everyone else he’s loved, but she doesn’t let him.

2 years ago - 44-year-old Constantine is cursed by one of the orderlies from Ravenscar Mental institution. Isolating the curse in his hand, he cuts it off. He invents new magic to transplant a new hand taken from the victim of a car accident, but finds his new hand haunted, and has to solve the mystery of who plotted its original owner's death.

1 year ago - 45-year-old Constantine unbinds dozens of demonic wards, unleashing them to combat the influence of Mageddon.

now - 46-year-old Constantine is confronted by an elderly version of himself who tricks him into relinquishing his soul to save Epiphany Greaves. John discovers that, while fighting Mageddon, he created a tulpa, an idea made real, of himself surviving to old age. He attempts a con, but his elderly self outwits him, getting John's soul, only to be unable to contain his shame.

John Constantine is easily the most popular character of DC's Vertigo line, but as much as everyone loves the character, I don't know how many people have actually read this book. It's easy to go back and enjoy the spectacle of Sandman or the obvious poetry of Swamp Thing, but Hellblazer was not a series that was built to pull you in. It almost repulsed, with its dense readerly narrative, it's unflinching horror, and its long periods of characters just... talking. Because John is so beloved, however, the book is LOADED with moments you immediately recognize, both huge in scope like the Newcastle Incident or John selling his soul to multiple demons, or tiny ones like him trapping a spider in an empty glass filled with cigarette smoke. John himself is such a mythic figure at this point, and reading his adventures and trying to adapt them in a way that does justice to the scope of these stories becomes an almost epic undertaking.

John Constantine's Comic History

John Constantine's first appearance is in Saga of Swamp Thing #37 in 1985. Coming out of the early arcs of the series, John arrived as a new character meant to give Alec some direction, but to also challenge him as an unreliable guide. There's been a lot of talk about the creative influences that went into his early design. Steve Bissette and John Totleben essentially asked to draw a character that looked like Sting, and Alan wanted to break the mold of traditional comic book mystics and create a "blue-collar warlock". He was meant to have an atmosphere of menace, like he often drew supernatural events to him in a way that seemed dangerous and streetwise.

John continued to be a regular part of the Swamp Thing series right through to the end of Alan Moore's run and continuing under Rick Veitch. In 1988, DC introduced the series Hellblazer (originally Hellraiser, but the movie of the same name came out the year before), following Constantine back to London where he was used, at first at least, to tell some truly twisted horror stories. The character was written by Jamie Delano, one of the British new wave of writers who was personally handpicked by Moore. He wrote with a distinctly Raymond Chandler style, grounding Moore's previously wisecracking character as a much more gritty and down-and-out character taken right out of an LA crime novel. Those early Hellblazer stories are some of the most effecting comics you're going to read; I often find myself having to look away.

Constantine continued to appear in Swamp Thing fairly regularly; notably acting as a surrogate for Alec when he and Abigail Arcane needed to have a child. Over time, however, his focus was on his own series as it gained in popularity, these two series serving as benchmarks of the more mature voices of DC Comics. A veritable who's who of British writers would take their turn helming Hellblazer, making it operate a lot like the popular British hero Judge Dredd, in that everyone seemed to have something to say with him. In 1991, Constatine appeared in the miniseries Books of Magic, a sort of travelogue of the Magical realms of DC, as one of the Trenchcoat Brigade, the magical guides of series star Tim Hunter.

In 1993, Hellblazer transitioned to become the flagship Vertigo series. Issue #63, the first under Vertigo, is considered to be a seminal issue, but I also think it's very telling that this issue is about John's 40th birthday, and primarily features characters milling about and talking. Being published under the Vertigo imprint meant the characters could swear now, and we could see the occasional nipple, but the series certainly never had breaks on it when it came to depicting gore and horror imagery... and later on when DC started to create magic teams like the Sentinels of Magic or Shadowpact, John Constantine was conspicuously absent, because he was no longer part of the main DC Continuity.

Hellblazer continued to be published for a staggering 300 issues, which amounts to 25 YEARS of publication. What's even more interesting is that the book's continuity played out in real time; meaning that it started with a 35-year-old John and ended with him at 60. During that time there were a ton of writers doing a lot of stellar work, but just by virtue of the amount of time involved, toward the end you do get a distinct sense that they were simply running out of new stories to tell. The final writer, Peter Milligan of Shade the Changing Man fame, did a really admirable job of finding new life in the character; creating a new love interest in Epiphany Greaves that, unlike all his previous partners, actually seemed to thrive in his strange world. John had dodged death so many times that ending the series was certainly a challenge, but he did so with an enigmatic and unclear ending that does a great job of upending expectations.

This ending happened in 2013, a few years after the New 52 had rebooted DC Continuity and re-integrated the Vertigo characters. A younger, more heroic John Constantine had already been appearing in the series Justice League Dark, where he was actively working with superheroes. This is the version of the character that got his own TV series on NBC and would go on to appear on the CW. In the aftermath of Hellblazer's cancellation this younger and more heroic Constantine would appear in a new series under his own name.

Most recently, DC's new adult imprint Black Label started to publish stories nominally in the Sandman universe, effectively suggesting that this is a return to Vertigo. It features a young Constantine again, but the book played creatively with the end of the original Vertigo Hellblazer series. I won't be too much more specific as to how, because I really do want you to read all of this.

Our John Constantine Story

There is something going on in the Hellblazer series that is really hard to specifically pinpoint, but it is unmistakably happening, and I think anyone that reads the series over its whole arc would be able to recognize. In the beginning of the series, John is very much our viewpoint character into this bizarre world where these horrific stories take place. He's certainly the protagonist, and as we watch his journey unfold he develops this incredible personal history that feels twisted and knotted around the darkness of the world he occupies, but I would say that his role is actually much more to be our stand-in in these stories.

Over time, though, as John cleverly navigates this world of demons and other horrors, something happens. He starts wearing suits less. He moves through the world less and less like an observer, and more and more like a gruff antihero. He looks COOLER. Threats that once would have sent him running from the room and puking into a filthy bathroom sink are now confronted with a devil-may-care, middle-finger tossing badassery. He becomes less and less of an occult Philip Marlowe, and more and more of a magical Wolverine.

If I had to pinpoint the specific turning point, I believe it's in the climax of Garth Ennis's Dangerous Habits storyline, one of the best issues in the series when John cons his way out of death by selling his soul to the three Lords of Hell. It's a FANTASTIC concept, and from that point on, John had essentially transitioned from being just one occult conman to THE occult conman, regularly besting the most powerful demons in hell.

We obviously love the version of Constantine that feels like an untouchable badass, but I also have a real affection for those early stories where John felt like he was way out of his depth and at the mercy of forces far beyond his ability to handle.

We went through as much of the Hellblazer series as we could, pulling out events that we felt best articulated the version of the character we love, but also tried to depict some of his evolution over time. We stayed largely faithful to the original stories, reworking them a little so they would fit together in this new format, and in some cases moving them around in his timeline. There are 25 straight years of content, so of course a lot of it was left out, but what we have here is a very dense timeline with a ton of content, and hopefully it's doing a good job of articulating this very particular characterization of an incredibly popular character.

John Constantine's Look

I did briefly mention this earlier, but part of the transition that you see John undergo as he evolves from a crime novel protagonist that just happens to live in a horror world into the grungy occult Wolverine that he becomes is very clearly depicted in his costuming. In the beginning, he wore his trenchcoat in the same way a normal person might... as outerwear. He would otherwise dress normally and often quite stylishly. In his very first panel appearance he was even wearing white gloves.

As the early issues of the book went on. He was often depicted in a variety of outfits, ranging from jeans and a t-shirt to a turtleneck and slacks, often wearing a wide variety of sunglasses. They would often reference his past as the punk rock lead singer of Mucus Membrane. Overall he was just a PERSON, the clothes he wore were always cool but they varied as a normal person's might. The trenchcoat was an obvious throughline, and he was seen more often with it than without, but It was by no means a requirement for the character.

Over time, of course, John became a sort of mythic figure in and of himself. The book was less and less about the world he occupied, and more about HIM. I often refer to the later issues of Hellblazer as "The Adventures of Trenchcoat Man", but I'm being overly critical when I do so. These are still good stories, but the vulnerable character of the early series has simply started to fade away in the face of the incredibly popular and badass figure of the grungy antihero that he's become. When the new 52 introduced a new younger Constantine who was built to operate alongside other Superheroes, It almost feels like a completely different character.

For our take, we do of course want to acknowledge that John's modern look is, at this point, incredibly iconic. We want the trenchcoat, we want the loosened tie over the disheveled button up shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Not doing so at this point would be like Superman without his trunks. At the same time, however, we'd like for our version of John to retain that original feeling of a character out of his depth, navigating the near constant barrage of horror in his life, overwhelmed and often terrified... and also capable of wearing other clothes. Despite the prevalence of what is essentially his costume now, he can also take the coat off. He can wear a turtleneck. The characterization of John Constantine is so strong, it needs to be able to operate regardless of what he's wearing.

John Constantine's Future

The Vertigo series struggled with this question... John was 60 years old by it's end, and had dodged and cheated death so many times it was almost impossible to create a satisfying end to the series. It did so by creating a very bold, ambiguous end, but it also spent some time creating interesting new developments that suggested that John was finally seeing some character evolution.

To me the introduction of Epiphany Greaves, a mobsters' daughter and alchemist and eventually John's wife, actually felt like it was pushing him in some new directions. John's utter shame in his entire life was one of the most driving elements of the character for so long, that he was lost in an ocean of self-loathing and unavoidable misery... maybe it's just me and my penchant for uplifting endings, but I really am interested in finding out what a John Constantine who is navigating those feelings might look like. Of course... it has to be done in a way that honors what John has always been, keeping that unique voice as a core part of the mainstream DC continuity.

Related Characters