John Constantine walks into a bar
Plus: Baby Swamp Thing pre-dated Baby Groot by a few decades
Here he is.
I’ve just been reading comments Moore made in the ‘80s about how you probably wouldn’t do a ‘Minnie Mouse as a prostitute’ story, and then opened my saved images to see that in his very first appearance John Constantine is wearing those weird white mouse gloves. This is only a moment of synchronicity for me, and out there in the real world the two things have nothing to do with each other, but the gloves are still weird.
I don’t know whether this was a choice by Alan Moore, or a slight misunderstanding of who the character is by Rick Veitch, who pencilled this first appearance, or what. In any case—forty years on, Constantine looks uncharacteristically posh in those gloves, with the coat draped around his shoulders. Perhaps Veitch, who’s American, just instinctively went for the usual ‘posh English magician’ thing that Moore was explicitly trying to dodge.
Here’s the classic Constantine origin story, as told by Moore to Wizard in 1993 (source):
Basically, when I take over something as a writer, I always try to work as closely as I can with the artists on the book, so I immediately did my best to strike up a friendship with Steve Bissette and John Totleben. I asked them what they would like to do in Swamp Thing . They both sent me reams of material. Things that they had always wanted to do in Swamp Thing, but never thought they would get away with. I incorporated this into my scheme of things, and tried to pin it all together.
One of the great things about comics is the way collaboration can expand the work. Moore speaking to Bissette and Totleben early on led very directly to the most enduring character to emerge from the ‘Berger books’/Vertigo line. If Moore had just written his scripts and sent them on with no back and forth, there would be no Constantine.
Anyway, on with the origin:
One of those early notes was they wanted to do a character that looked like Sting. I think DC is terrified that Sting will sue them, although Sting has seen the character and commented in Rolling Stone that he thought it was great. He was very flattered to have a comic character who looked like him, but DC gets nervous about these things. They started to eradicate all traces of references in the introduction of the early Swamp Thing books to John Constantine's resemblance to Sting. But I can state categorically that the character only existed because Steve and John wanted to do a character that looked like Sting. Having been given that challenge, how could I fit Sting into Swamp Thing? I have 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. Somebody 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.
Hellblazer, the comic that starred Constantine, launched in 1988. To me, it’s the Vertigo comic. Constantine’s the first character created from whole cloth under Karen Berger’s editorial reign that really stuck around. The series is the only one that ran for the entire duration of Vertigo’s existence, and after the line was killed off Constantine endured.
Its importance in the Vertigo world has a more personal slant for me, too. I think that Hellblazer was the first series that really introduced me to Vertigo. Some time around 1989, after my obligatory mid-teen break from comics, I wandered into Judecca, a second hand comic shop in my hometown, Wakefield. I picked up some reprints of the first few issues of Hellblazer, written by Jamie Delano and drawn by John Ridgway, with those magnificent Dave McKean covers. It was grainy, murky, slippery, and so English. You could practically feel drizzle on your face as you read it.
As it happens, Swamp Thing #37 is probably my favourite issue of Moore’s run so far. Panels of Constantine constantine-ing about are spliced with scenes of Swamp Thing regrowing himself. Tiny Swampy, with his Jiminy Cricket voice, is… cute and funny? I love the tender scenes of Abby watering him and chatting, cut against the grubby business Constantine gets up to.
And we get another great page of trippy plant business.
Good stuff.
That’ll do.
Great stuff! Don’t remember the white mouse gloves in that first appearance. In those first issues of Hellblazer they would have gotten very grimy!