John Constantine has a long history across every version of DC’s expansive universe. But what
are his true origins? And was he actually the reason Swamp Thing was able to have a daughter?
Stay tuned to find out!
Before we get into the in-universe history of DC's unluckiest mystic, it's worth taking a
look at the behind-the-scenes story of how he came to be. After all, while most of the UK's
famous fictional spellcasters descend from the tradition of Merlin, our boy John was inspired
by a very different British hero: Gordon Sumner, better known to the world as Sting.
The story behind John Constantine's first appearance in Swamp Thing #37 is pretty simple.
When writer Alan Moore asked artists Steve Bissette and John Totleben what they’d like
to draw, they told him they wanted to draw Sting or at least someone who looked like
him. Moore thought Sting's striking look would work for the charismatic,
manipulative magician that he had in mind, and thus, John Constantine stepped onto the page.
As for the specific visual references that Bissette and Totleben were drawing from,
the long coat and suit look that would become John Constantine's trademark was inspired by Sting's
appearance in 1979's Quadrophenia — based on the Who album of the same name. Another inspiration,
though, was much more esoteric: a 1982 TV movie called Brimstone & Treacle, where Sting played a
disturbing, fourth-wall-breaking character who may or may not have been the devil. Pretty fitting,
all things considered.
Saying that John Constantine has had a rough life is putting things pretty mildly. There are
very few characters in comics who've had quite as much misery heaped on them over the years.
In John's case, as revealed in Hellblazer #39, it started even before he was born.
As a child, John occasionally had visions of what he called the "Golden Boy." He was
essentially just that: an "imaginary friend" made up of shining golden light that John both loved
and hated for his seeming perfection. After he grew up, though, John learned that he was neither
imaginary nor a friend but a parallel world echo of the twin brother he never even knew he had.
The existence of a twin wasn't just news to him; the doctors who delivered John as a baby were also
pretty surprised when it turned out that Mary Anne Constantine had been pregnant with a second child.
The other brother was so sickly and underweight that he'd gone
unnoticed. The healthier child didn't make it, though. He'd been strangled in the womb,
and neither he nor Mary survived the birth. The other baby was, of course, John. His childhood
was marked by intense hatred and resentment from his father, who made it very clear that he wished
John had been the one who'd died instead.
John and his father, Thomas Constantine, didn't get along while John was growing up.
Not only did Thomas blame John for Mary's death, but he was also disappointed in him
for other reasons. Thomas wanted a "normal" son who would fit in with the other kids at
school rather than a young weirdo who spent all his time on books about magic and demons.
The elder Constantine burned a stack of his son's books in a fit of anger,
hoping to drive him away from sorcery. This might've worked out for the best, but John
was furious. He decided to get back at his dad, so he cursed him by binding his soul to a dead cat.
Before long, Thomas was wasting away from an inexplicable disease as the feline corpse rotted,
but John was left feeling guilty about what he'd done to his old man. Since the spell couldn't be
reversed, he preserved the cat in formaldehyde, stopping his father from degenerating any further.
Cut to a few decades later, and Thomas finally died, only for his soul to be stuck on Earth. He
terrified John's niece Gemma until John realized that as long as the preserved cat was around,
Thomas would be bound by it and would continue suffering. To free him, John
dug up the cat from under his mother’s tombstone where he'd buried it. He then burned the corpse,
finally setting his father free.
If John Constantine has an origin story in the traditional superhero sense,
then it's what went down with the Newcastle Crew's disastrous attempt to help a young girl.
The gory details are in Hellblazer #11, and they are not for the faint of heart.
It happens early on in John's career as a freelance magician when he hears about some
bad stuff going down at the Casanova Club. The club's owner was involved with the same sort of
shady magic scene as John, but his proclivities were far more disturbing, including the abuse
of his daughter, Astra Logue. Eventually, Astra manifested a monster called the "Norfulthing." And
after being summoned, the Norfulthing does to the club owner and his "guests" exactly what they did
to Astra. It also tore off their heads and turned the basement of the Casanova into a charnel house.
To deal with the Norfulthing, John gathered six other occultists
to form the Newcastle Crew. From there, he came up with the not-so-brilliant plan of summoning
a powerful demon to kill Astra's monster. "When John found out what was happening with the
girl, he decided that he was going to save Astra." It did not go well. While the ritual was correct,
Constantine got the wrong name for the demon. Since the name is the thing that
provided the control, he essentially unleashed a horrifying and hungry
force on himself, his friends, and poor Astra. The demon, Nergal, did destroy the Norfulthing,
but it then turned on John and his friends. John was forced to lead Astra through Hell itself in
an attempt to save her soul. And while he held tight to her hand for the whole trip,
said hand didn't stay attached to the rest of the girl. She was dragged to Hell, and the rest of the
Newcastle Crew was left traumatized. They all met grisly fates before their souls were condemned to
Hell. As for John, he managed to avoid eternal damnation, but he wound up suffering his own
personal hell for the next few years.
The contingency plan for summoning the demon at the Casanova was one that we can probably all get
behind: blowing it up with a very enthusiastic round of arson. Unfortunately for John,
setting things on fire tends to be very effective at both solving problems and creating them.
When this bizarre magician emerged from a fire, clutching a severed hand and ranting about a demon
that dragged him to Hell, he wound up being taken to the Ravenscar Secure Hospital — a miserable and
disreputable asylum for the criminally insane. The chief problem for Constantine was that
while he was certainly traumatized, he wasn't hallucinating. There was a demon that was after
his soul. But the only thing that the staff and inmates of Ravenscar knew was that all this bad
stuff happened and John was involved. As a result, Constantine was beaten by the inmates and tortured
by the doctors under the guise of "treatment," with electro-convulsive "therapy" being a favorite
tactic. All of this only served to amplify his self-loathing and the guilt he felt for his plan
going so horrifically wrong. As Hellblazer #50 put it in one of its typically cheerful moments,
"The only reason he hated them was that they wouldn't cut his throat and end the agony."
John's tenure at Ravenscar lasted two years. But the memory of both the events that led him there
and the treatment he received in its walls would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Like a lot of comic book characters,
there are different versions of John Constantine's backstory depending on what comics you're reading,
but his path is weirder than most. When he was introduced in the pages of Swamp Thing, it was
as part of the DC Universe. Most of his series, however, was published by DC's Vertigo imprint — a
line initially focused on horror titles for adult readers that was separated from the bright,
superheroic world of the main DC comics. Eventually, after about 20 years of being
sequestered in his own supernatural universe, Constantine was folded back into the DCU proper.
His origin was then revised, with a little less of the disturbing darkness involved.
The new origin story that led Constantine to join the Justice League Dark and deal with the
DC Universe's magical threats still wound its way through Newcastle, Astra Logue's damnation,
and a stint in Ravenscar Asylum. This time, though, things started to go bad much earlier.
In Constantine #14, readers learned that at a very young age, John encountered
some sinister demonic force that offered him magical power. John eagerly accepted, but as
is usually the case with this sort of thing, he wasn't told about the price of this power
until it was too late to do anything about it. The price, in typically tragic fashion, was John's
home and family. In his first use of magic, Constantine burned down his childhood house,
standing untouched in the center of the flames while his mother and father were
burned to death in front of him.
There is one element of Constantine's pre-trenchcoat life that's consistent
among various versions of the character. Before he started skulking around in his iconic duster,
manipulating swamp monsters into doing his mysterious and vaguely sinister
bidding, he was into some really disreputable stuff: rock 'n' roll.
In his younger days, Constantine, under the not-so-great stage name "Johnny Con-Job," was
the lead singer in a punk band called Mucous Membrane. According to Constantine himself,
they weren't very good when it came to the actual music. But their brief time in the
grotesque spotlights of British punk clubs did see them find some success. Of course, that had a lot
less to do with their musical talent than it did with the undeniable charisma of their frontman.
The reason that Mucous Membrane broke up varies from one series to the next. In the current DC
Universe, it was prompted by Constantine's use of magic as part of his stagecraft. It caused his
bandmate and lover, Veronica Delacroix, to fade away from the physical world until she became a
disembodied spirit. In the classic Vertigo comics, it had more to do with the Newcastle incident and
John's subsequent commitment to Ravenscar. At one point, an amateur documentary crew trying to find
out what happened to Mucous Membrane starred in a story that ran through Hellblazer #245 to 246.
In this arc, they were all violently murdered by the remnants of Astra's terror elemental,
the Norfulthing.
Another one of the more consistent elements in Constantine's life is his romantic history with
stage magician, legitimate sorceress, and Justice Leaguer, Zatanna Zatara.
The backward-talking spellcaster predates John's portrayal in comics by 20 years, but their pasts
have been depicted as being intertwined since very early in Constantine's existence.
"Zee, are you alright?" "Yeah, as soon as you get off me."
"I should have known you were the reason I'm not back in London enjoying a pint."
Sadly, the way their lives are tangled together is about as tragic as everything else in
Constantine's past. While they do maintain some level of affection for each other,
there is a pretty big sticking point in their history that prompted their initial breakup:
Constantine killed her dad. He didn't intentionally end John Zatara's life,
but he was the driving force behind a magic ritual that resulted in her father bursting
into flames and dying in front of them. In the original comics, this was an attempt to deal with
the mystical side of the multiverse-shattering events seen in Crisis on Infinite Earths. But
a similar event exists even in the current continuity where the Crisis didn't happen.
Before they broke up, Zatanna cast a spell on John, telling him "You need to be a better
person," though of course, she said it in her backward way of spellcasting. That would explain
why Constantine is less of a loner and a bit more eager to help these days, wouldn't it?
Constantine was originally introduced as a supporting character for Swamp Thing, and while
he's had plenty of success on his own, he's always had that association. There's another reason that
those characters will always be inextricably linked, though. Believe it or not, the saga
of Swamp Thing is, at its heart, a romance between the eponymous muck monster and his wife,
Abby Arcane. At one point, after the creation of a "seed" that would combine Swampy's plant-based
essence with a human soul, Abby and the Swamp Thing decided to have a child of their own.
The problem was that Swamp Thing was not human and didn’t have the right…equipment, for the job.
What he did have was the ability to take over someone else's body using
semi-mystical plant spores and a person who owed him several favors. With that in mind,
Swamp Thing took over John Constantine's body, flew to Louisiana, and then used him to
impregnate Abby with their daughter, Tefe. After Constantine manipulated him into several dubious,
semi-sinister errands of his own, Swamp Thing felt justified in his actions as a means to an end.
The tree that Swamp Thing got tattooed on Constantine's rear end while he was piloting
the guy's body, however, was pure revenge.
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