CONSTANTINE #1
What did the
iFanboy
community think?
Pulls
Art by Renato Guedes
Cover by Ivan Reis
Size: 32 pages
Price: 2.99
In the first issue of Hellblazer back in the year of our lord 1988, John Constantine uses one of his “friends” to serve his own purposes in order to dispose of a demon. That friend of course ends up dying – just another pawn in JC’s game of a diabolical chess. A friend that will end up as one of the many ghosts that haunt John. Ghosts that he lives with everyday of his life. This is Constantine’s curse. His penance.
In the first issue of Constantine in the year if our lord 2013 John Constantine one of his friends to serve his own purposes……well, you get the idea. What is old is new again so to speak.
This isn’t your fathers John Constantine.
Alan Moore created this character in the pages of Swamp Thing to be a surrogate for us the reader. Swamp Thing is of course a monster, not someone that we can really identify with. You see Swamp Thing, in the beginning of Alan Moore’s run, found out he wasn’t Human. He ( It ) was never human. He was a vegetable that thought it was a man. So now, the readers who previously had hoped that Swamp Thing, Alec Holland, would find a way to restore himself to normal could no longer amalgamate with the titular character. Enter John Constantine. Here was a guy that would show this new Swamp Thing the ropes – how to use his powers, what missions were best suited for his abilities, covering his back when villains came gunning for him. He not only Swamp Things guide, he was the readers as well.
Constantine #1 wastes no time in establishing that John is our avatar into the world of magic. He will be our guide and show us things we have never seen or would never want to see. Jeff Lemire has set all elements in place, just as they were 20 years ago by Jamie Delano. And while we may not get the level of horror and adult themes that Hellblazer brought us, with a great character like John Constantine, well, I’ll take what I can get.
cheers mate
“The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.”—Aldous Huxley
Art: 4 - Very Good
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“Alan Moore created this character in the pages of Swamp Thing to be a surrogate for us the reader.”
No he didn’t. Constantine was human but he had a great arcane knowledge of anything and everything, including powers that Swamp Thing didn’t know he had — and the reader didn’t know any of this stuff either. The reader was literally as lost as Swamp Thing was while Constantine orchestrated events around him. That doesn’t make Constantine a reader-analogue at all; it almost turns Swamp Thing into a reader-analogue. Constantine was more like an analogue for Alan Moore the wizard-writer who understood everything beforehand.
I don’t disagree with your review of Constantine #1, though. It’s refreshing. Good review otherwise.
After “Anatomy Lesson” we the reader were left with a vegetable that really wanted nothing to do with the “DCU” or to battle vampires and werewolves. Without John Constantine showing up Swamp Thing would have just faded into the bog.
No my friend, JC made the comic book Swamp Thing more accessible to us – more “human”.
In those early issues of Swamp Thing JC never used any “arcane magic” or displayed any otherworldly attributes – he was just a bloke in a trench-coat that had this uncanny knack for uncovering the sinister that lay beneath the moss.
JC, in my opinion, became our way “into” the world of the Swamp Thing. Our eyes and ears. He was, like I said, our avatar.
But I understand were you are coming from and I do agree with your statement about JC being an analogue for Alan Moore. Thanks for the well thought out and precise disagreement.