Declare Yourself A Magician (The Last War in Albion Part 62: John Constantine)

Essentially every significant figure in the War has written the character at one point or another. Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, and Warren Ellis all wrote issues of Hellblazer, as have most of the more marginal powers: Garth Ennis and Peter Milligan both have sizable runs, for instance. The only major figure not to have actually written Constantine is Kieron Gillen, who reacted to DC’s 2012 cancellation of Hellblazer by noting that “part of me also thinks ‘you’re not a real British Comics Writer unless you’ve written Hellblazer.’ So that’s me doomed,” although as Gillen has also noted, his first arc of Phonogram, “Rue Britannia may as well be Hellblazer, of course,” which is accurate enough, and applies equally well to his run on Journey into Mystery. Beyond merely having a long running comic with an impressive array of writers, however, Constantine has also proven a profitable character for DC’s larger corporate owners, who spun out a quasi-successful movie version and, in 2014, a television series based on the character.

It is also notable that for all that Moore is known to spit occasional invective at his former employers for, as he memorably put it in one interview, “going through my trashcan like raccoons in the dead of the night” in lieu of actually coming up with new ideas, Moore has never demonstrated any particular animosity over the continual use of John Constantine. As Moore himself notes, “ I understood that when I had finished with [Constantine] that it would just be absorbed into the general DC stockpile,” and even provided a blurb for Brian Azzarello’s 2000 run on the title. “I’ve never objected to that,” he stresses, in an interview where he elsewhere rails against DC’s propensity for doing “crappy Green Lantern stories” that were “based upon an eight page story of mine from twenty years ago,” further highlighting that Constantine, at least, is a character he’s at relative peace with DC’s continual profit from.

What makes this particularly interesting, however, is that Constantine is also clearly a character of considerable personal significance to Alan Moore. Although the character certainly was created in part to satisfy Bissette and Totleben’s desire to draw Sting, Moore further explains that he has “an idea that most of the mystics in comics are generally older people, very austere, very proper, very middle class 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. Someone who was streetwise, working class, and from a different background than the standard run of comic book mystics. Constantine started to grow out of that.” These are words of considerable significance coming from someone who, throughout his entire career, has vocally identified with his working class background and who, in later career, became a self-proclaimed magician. Moore’s later description of Constantine as a “wide boy occultist” furthers this sense, as does Moore’s direction in the script to Constantine’s debut in Swamp Thing #37, where he specifies that the character should carry a “faint air of menace” not, perhaps, unlike that generated by being immensely tall and having mildly terrifying quantities of hair. 

It is, in other words, not unreasonable to suggest that Constantine was always devised in part to effect a permanent alteration upon the landscape of DC Comics. Having by this point spent considerable time playing with the DC Universe’s more mystical and cosmological aspects, Moore inscribed a fundamentally new sort of character and perspective into the comics - one who was enough of a charming rogue to last and thus to provide an enduring approach to comics. If a quarter century of writers follow that approach and continue telling stories about a character whose basic iconography and philosophy are inexorably linked to Moore’s worldview, well, this is hardly something that can be called a problem or a downside. 

Certainly Constantine proved a powerful creation within Moore’s own life, in that on two occasions Moore met Constantine. The precise timing of these two encounters is difficult to pin down. Moore first described the initial encounter in a 1993 interview, saying,  “one day, I was in Westminster in London -- this was after we had introduced the character -- and I was sitting in a sandwich bar. All of a sudden, up the stairs came John Constantine. He was wearing the trench coat, a short cut -- he looked -- no, he didn't even look exactly like Sting. He looked exactly like John Constantine.   He looked at me, stared me straight in the eyes, smiled, nodded almost conspiratorially, and then just walked off around the corner to the other part of the snack bar. I sat there and thought, should I go around that corner and see if he is really there, or should I just eat my sandwich and leave? I opted for the latter; I thought it was the safest. I'm not making any claims to anything. I'm just saying that it happened.” In a subsequent 2009 interview, he dates this to the “early 80s, when I’d just introduced the character,” which introduces some confusion given that the character was first introduced in the back half of the 1980s, but would nevertheless seem to clearly date the encounter well before Moore’s conscious and active engagement with magic, and, given that Moore, in talking about the encounter, also talks about Constantine’s physical appearance “in the comics at the time” (in explicit contrast to how he may or may not look in the present comics, which Moore suggests he’s not read), it would seem to date it firmly in the 1985-86 period in which Constantine made his first string of appearances. (Moore also talks about the character traveling around the world, as he does in Moore’s Swamp Thing arc.) Moore’s second account of this encounter is even more emphatic, stressing how he did not simply feel that “this is somebody who looks quite coincidentally quite like John Constantine,” but how “it was much more exact than that, I was thinking, ’that’s John Constantine, who is a fictional character that I created.’ At that point he looked at me, smiled, winked, and walked off to take a seat around the corner.” Moore subsequently emphasizes the wink, saying that it had “an intimacy and a knowing quality to a wink. It was exactly the kind of wink that any kind of fictional character might give to their creator.” 

Moore’s accounts of the second encounter are on the whole briefer. His first description of it comes in 1999, where, after describing the initial sandwich shop encounter, he says that “years later, in another place, he steps out from the dark and speaks to me. He whispers, ‘I’ll tell you the ultimate secret of magic. Any cunt could do it.’” He follows up on this description in the 2009 interview, clarifying that the “other place” he alluded to in 2001 was in fact a magical ritual he conducted with other people. “I’d just stepped out of the room and popped downstairs to make some tea,” he explains, “and I was just passing through the kitchen when all of a sudden in the darkness on the left side of my head… it’s very difficult to describe this, but it was clearly that somebody had struck a match in the darkness, and this lit up the face of John Constantine in the sudden halo of the match flare. And he, in a typically amusing way, told me the ultimate secret of magic, very memorably, in one very short five word sentence, and then blew the match out and vanished.” He clarifies that while his first encounter with Constantine was “a real daylight event,” this second encounter was “a purely internal event that happened only within my mind, but they both seemed to be John Constantine to me.” Moore does not provide further information for this second encounter, but it must have occurred sometime between the commencement of Moore’s active magical work in November of 1993 and his recounting of it in April of 1999. 

These two events dramatically heighten the already powerful sense that Constantine serves, if not as a straight authorial insertion akin to, say, Grant Morrison’s King Mob or Kieron Gillen’s David Kohl, as a figure who is intimately linked to Moore himself. But it is also worth noting that Constantine’s life outside of Moore is a genuine one - Moore is his creator, but other writers, most notably Jamie Delano and Garth Ennis, are on the whole more responsible for the character as he is currently known. And even within Moore’s life, there is a sense of independence to Constantine. He first appeared to Moore of his own accord, and even his second, more magically significant appearance was not one in which he was deliberately and consciously summoned. But even as he suggests that Constantine independently manifested in a real and literal sense within a Westminster lunch spot, Moore also emphatically refers to himself as John Constantine’s creator. While John Constantine has taken on a life of his own in many senses, then, it is important to note that this life is one lived by someone with numerous ideological and aesthetic similarities to Alan Moore, and one that continues to haunt the corporation that Moore would eventually come to furiously shun, wrecking whatever subtle havocs he pleases. 

Given this, it is significant that Constantine’s first appearance in Swamp Thing #37 (ironically drawn by Rick Veitch, given that it was Bissette and Totleben whose desire to draw Sting led to the character’s creation) corresponds with the second of three times that Swamp Thing comes back from the dead within Moore’s run. Just as the first return in “The Anatomy Lesson” served to fundamentally reconceptualization of Swamp Thing, so too does “Growth Patterns” alter the character. Part of the alteration is of Swamp Thing’s own making - his plan to come back involves growing himself a new body, and thus much of the issue, set over the course of just over two weeks, consists of Swamp Thing slowly reforming under the care of Abby, who finds his tiny bud-like form in the swamp and brings him home to water him. These portions of the issue consist of charming and sweetly loving interactions between Swamp Thing and Abby, such as a scene in which Swamp Thing finds himself frustrated at deficiencies in Abby’s lawn care, complaining to himself that “she should water the soil and not me. If the droplets magnify the sunlight, I shall burn,” and that the insecticide she uses to get rid of the aphids (which he finds annoying in their own right) hurts. “Perhaps,” he muses, “I should concentrate on developing vocal apparatus so that I can tell her where she is going wrong,” which, the next day, he does, leading Abby, with a small smile, to quip “well, pardon me. How about ‘thanks for all the water?’”

Swamp Thing’s rebirth is narrated in parallel with sequences introducing John Constantine as he visits a number of friends and allies in pursuit of information about some unknown apocalypse, described by each of them in differing terms, which will prove to be a major feature of Moore’s run going forward. Finally, on the thirteenth day of the story, Constantine journeys to Louisiana and confronts Abby, blackmailing her into letting him talk to Swamp Thing. There he highlights the greater potential of Swamp Thing’s regrowth, pointing out to him that he can “let your body die in one place” and “regrow it in another on the other side of the country,” thus allowing Swamp Thing to instantaneously travel across the world. In doing so, Constantine suggests a much larger and more substantial conception of Swamp Thing that goes far beyond just being a mass of vegetable matter that mistook itself for Alec Holland, calling him the “last plant elemental in the entire bloody world,” a claim that also sheds light on the “Abandoned Houses” story that reprinted Wein and Wrightson’s original Swamp Thing story, and Abel’s claim that “Alec Holland was not the first thing to walk the swamps.” 

This newly established power of transportation is on one level simply Moore accomplishing one of the revisions to the character concept he decided was necessary from the start. “Another point that struck me,” Moore says, was “that we had to come up with a better way for the Swamp Thing to travel around, rather than constantly moving around the country upon freight trains or in the boot of a car or in some truck. It was tedious.” Giving him the ability to effectively teleport is, in other words, part of the steady transition away from the Wein/Wrightson approach towards the character. Even without an extended explanation or definition, the phrase “plant elemental” is evocative in terms of its potential. But that potential is a world away from “swamp monster.” The implications of this are as intriguing to Swamp Thing as they are to the reader - he’s quickly hooked by Constantine’s apparent knowledge, and agrees to Constantine’s deal that if Swamp Thing meets him in a town called Rosewood, just outside of Chicago, he’ll tell Swamp Thing more about what he is.

This serves as the beginning of the so-called “American Gothic” arc (the name was never actually used in the comics), a storyline in which Constantine leads Swamp Thing on a tour of the United States to confront various classic horror tropes like vampires and werewolves. The timing is apropos - Moore had taken his first trip to the United States in August of 1984, midway through the Arcane arc of Swamp Thing, and the same month that Marvelman ceased publication in Warrior. There he had hobnobbed with DC executives and gotten variously praised and treated as a bit of a golden boy. He hit it off some of the DC staff - particularly with his editor, Karen Berger, and with Julius Schwartz, a long time DC editor, who impressed Moore by having the signature of H.P. Lovecraft in a scrapbook, having served as his literary agent late in Lovecraft’s life. [continued]