Broken Frontier

Andy Diggle is on hand to walk you through last week's special anniversary issue of Hellblazer. The solicitation for Hellblazer #240 reads:

Vertigo’s flagship title reaches its 20th anniversary issue with “The Laughing Magician,” Part 1 of 3! The streetwise, chain-smoking con-magician John Constantine finds himself in receipt of a most perplexing birthday gift: a memory wrapped up in a warning. As Constantine tries to figure out what it means, the brutal African war-mage known as Mako hits London — and he’s taking no prisoners...

I remember voting for John Constantine as the "Character Most Worthy Of His Own Series" in the Eagle Awards back in the late 1980s and I was there at the London con when Karen Berger announced he was getting it, so it's quite humbling now to find myself writing the 20th anniversary issue of that very title. I wanted to mark the occasion by bringing a character back from the very first issue of HELLBLAZER - namely the old Sudanese shaman who bound Mnemoth the hunger demon. 

I also wanted to address the sheer number of Constantine's ancestors who have since popped up over the years, not only in HELLBLAZER and SWAMP THING but also in titles like SANDMAN, THE DREAMING, THE BOOKS OF MAGIC and so on. Surely there must be more than mere coincidence that these Constantines have always been drawn to magic... ?

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The Chan Chu ("Lucky Frog") restaurant was inspired by the Wong-Kei restaurant in Chinatown, which is notorious for having the most surly waiters in London (and believe me, that's saying something!). But as I'm using this place as the front for a whorehouse run by a Chinese "Snakehead" gang, I figured I'd better change the name so we don't get sued for libel!

Constantine is here to meet Watford, a Metropolitan Police Detective Inspector who first appeared in the Warren Ellis' HAUNTED arc. Watford's not actually his real name; it's just a nickname he picked up after some as-yet undisclosed incident which took place one night in Watford High Street. Whatever it was that happened, Constantine's been using it to blackmail him with ever since. Watford's a nasty piece of work, and a bitter little racist too, as this page demonstrates.

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Fengis is a "remote viewer" from Hong Kong. He originally appeared in one scene in SWAMP THING: BAD SEED, where I had Constantine hire him to spy on Sargon the Sorcerer. The "Blue Sun" T-shirt he's wearing is my little tip of the hat to FIREFLY and SERENITY. Yes, I am a massive FIREFLY nerd. So hey, Joss, if you're reading this and you ever need a writer for a FIRELY spin-off comic, keep me in mind, yeah...?

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This is the first sight Constantine gets of Mako, the African war mage who's hunting him, although the readers got to meet Mako in the previous issue. I wanted to create a memorable new HELLBLAZER villain, someone who'd be the polar opposite of the aristocratic and well-mannered Lord Burnham from our earlier JOYRIDE arc. Leo Manco did an incredible job bringing Mako to life; he's pretty bloody scary.

It's always tough to come up with a villain who's actually scarier than what you see every day on the TV news, so I decided to try and bring some of that real-world horror into the story. HELLBLAZER has always worked best when it mixes a bit of real-world commentary into the fictional horror.

Mako is a war mage, someone who moves from one African war zone to another, feeding off the blood and misery of the innocent to fuel his black "muti" magic. I first heard about "muti killings" in the news when a little boy's headless, limbless torso was found floating in the river Thames. The authorities named him Adam, and eventually figured out that he'd been tortured to death and various body parts excised for use in medicine magic. I'll spare your readers the details because it's frankly rather upsetting, but it goes to show that real life can be more horrifying than anything you're likely to read in a horror story. 

Mako's particular modus operandi is to devour the flesh of magicians as a way of stealing their knowledge and power. In a way this harks back to the "planarian worms" analogy in Alan Moore's original SWAMP THING run, where we learn that Alec Holland's consciousness was "absorbed" by the plants that consumed his body.

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The old Sudanese shaman refers to Constantine as "The Laughing Magician", just as he did back in the very first issue of HELLBLAZER twenty years ago. John's line about not being a "Master of the Mystic Arts" is my little tip of the hat to Marvel's DOCTOR STRANGE, and frankly I'm amazed I managed to sneak it in past DC's notoriously leery legal eagles. It amuses me to imagine that Constantine might well have read the odd issue of DOCTOR STRANGE back in his misspent youth.

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Here Constantine and the shaman are witnessing Constantine's ancestors from the dawn of time. The Pandora's Box line refers back to my earlier LADY CONSTANTINE miniseries - which gives you some idea of how long I've been laying the groundwork for this story! The demons caged within Pandora's Box also referred to Joanna Constantine as "The Laughing Magician" whom they "knew of old", and asked if she was trying to trick them by appearing in a "new form". Of course, she had no idea what they were talking about. 

Back to HELLBLAZER, and at the foot of the page we see Constantine's distant ancestor Kon-Sten-Tyn, the pagan king who sacrificed his own sons to prolong his own life, back in the first and only HELLBLAZER annual by Jamie Delano and Bryan Talbot.

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Here we have a collection of just some of the various Constantine ancestors (and one descendant!) who have appeared in other stories over the years. The tattooed man at top left is someone who was mentioned in Jamie Delano's run, but never seen - a future descendant of John Constantine, a "psychic assassin born on the moon." The jester at the foot of the page appeared in Neil Gaiman's original BOOKS OF MAGIC mini-series, and was encountered by Tim Hunter in a castle at the end of time. 

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Finally we're back with the John Constantine we know and love. He's a humanist who believes in empowering the little guy and rejecting authority, and his magic's a big part of that. He's also fiercely independent, rejects any attempt to codify or pigeon-hole him, or saddle him with any kind of pre-determined "destiny". 

Finally, he sums up his approach to magic, which I like to think grew out of the DIY esthetic of his punk youth: "Any c**t could do it." The line is actually a direct reference to Alan Moore and Tim Perkins' SNAKES AND LADDERS spoken-word piece, in which Constantine himself steps out of the shadows and speaks to the narrator. Consider it a little Easter egg for the hardcore Constantine fans out there.