It's hard for a book to recite its own tagline without sounding like a pretentious adolescent. I love the X-Men with all my heart and soul, but whenever one of the characters actually *says* "we're hated by a world that fears us," (or some variation thereof, you know what I mean -- ) I usually giggle. But when Map says "you walk the synchronicity highway," I did a little fistpump of joy. Yes. That's Constantine, that's my man -- dealing with the devils and always paying the price, but not the price meant for him. (John Constantine, Supernatural Futures Trader. "I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger I will eat today . . . ") But John knows something bigger than him is coming down the pipe, and he needs to up his mojo. So he finds one of the most powerfully fraught magical symbols in the Western Hemisphere. He finds a talisman wired into the belief-net and he takes it into himself. He makes the power his own. And the last panel had me laughing in manic glee. The last panel, in which John Constantine *snorts the powdered bones of Santa Claus*. Oh yes. Oh my. Oh my, my, my. Constantine, you irreligious bastard. I love this guy. I love how he thins sideways to the world. How he knows the system in which he moves so damn perfectly that he can do an end-run around almost everything. And when he can't figure out how to get around something, he figures out how to go through. And when he can't go through . . . Well, Constantine always figures out a way. The joy in this title is in seeing how far down John gets before he figures out how to get up. The joy is seeing him lose everything and *still* walk - or crawl, or slither - away. Constantine is the cleverest of clever men, the kind of trickster you never want to meet because merely meeting him means that someone is going to have a wretched day. This issue is a promise by Andy Diggle. In this arc we're going to see Constantine get in over his head. We're going to see horrific things happen. We're going to see John's arrogance help him screw up. And we're going to see him weasel out as he has before, because he walks the synchronicity highway. What goes down always comes up, especially if what fell is named John Constantine.