The JC Story, Take Two

Hey, all:

Sorry for such a long time between emails! As the subtitle suggests, I totally kept this one under wraps until today and I also knew it was the next one I wanted to write. And what’s kind of nice about that is I think I’ll have another update relatively soon of me talking about life stuff.

Annnnd, in fact, this might be the start of some themed posts over the next month….but maybe not, because I thought of it and went, “oh that’d be a very fun thing to do multiple posts on…” and then that multiple is currently capped at…two? So, yeah, maybe not.

But also maybe so? Because today I wanna talk about my Constantine pitch, in part because it’s one again relevant/possible.

As I recall, the pitch came to me when it was already too late, the story equivalent of l’esprit de l’escalier: the perfect reply thought of too late (literally, on the stairs while leaving). It’s weird happenstance that the pitch is again relevant and perhaps my returning to tell it slots in perfectly for what that’s the case. But I’ll give you the pitch and then you decide.

The pitch was this: back when the film Constantine was in development, I thought what Vertigo should do is announce they were going to make big changes to John Constantine. Comic book John Constantine was a british magician modeled after Sting; movie John Constantine was an American played by Keanu Reeves. Hard to square that circle when fans of the movie came into the comic book store wanting read more adventures of that John Constantine.

And so, DC/Vertigo would trumpet in their press release, they’d be having John Constantine take on an apprentice—an American apprentice that looked, y’know, Keanu-adjacent. Because the old Constantine was going to be going away for a while…straight to Hell, because that old Constanine luck had run out.

From the press release to the story: I imagined at leasts a year worth of stories (or maybe 18 months, because that’s three trades worth)—in a way, the farther out the better—that set up the premise and played it out. Constantine is called in to help with a violent exorcism of an old friend’s dauther (maybe even again at Newcastle, because why not?). And in the course of this painful, drawn-out process, the demon that slowly reveals itself is one that knows Constantine—in fact, it’s a demon that owes Constantine a favor. Constantine being Constantine, he’d long ago done this demon a rather savage and unsavory solid and in exchange this demon would essentially be JC’s inside man: privvy to the inside court of Hell, and with instructions to let Constantine know if a very fraught power dynamic were to change.

And so the demon had come to reveal exactly that—the tri-fold power balance of Hell was slowly changing, and it would be only a matter of time before Hell once again had a single master. This was very bad news for Constantine, as he had sold his soul to each of the three masters of Hell and it was only the fact that none of them were willing to go to war that kept any of them from whisking him away to the pit.

But, the demon revealed to him, that dynamic would be undone soon, and when it did, at the top of the new ruler’s to-do list was to take that shit to Hell and give him the extra-VIP treatment.

(And, in true demon-to-Constantine fashion, the demon didn’t have to possess Constantine’s buddy’s daughter and torment her mericlessly, and put the whole family through a painful exorcism in which all case of family skeletons were uncovered more or less destroying the friend’s marriage and his relationship to his daughter. But of course JC hadn’t bothered to specify how the demon was to tell him the info he’d been tasked with reporting. So, really, wasn’t it Constantine’s fault for all of this? And the friend for being friends with Constantine?)

The bad news in place, another dear friendship destroyed, Constantine finds himelf wondering what to do with his time left—like a man who thought he’d beaten cancer only to find out years later it was in remission and had now returned stronger then ever and inescapable. (And if you recognize the Constantine story I’m following up on, you get how on-the-nose that analogy is.)

Searching for some kind of—pity? advice? help?—from friends and peers (human, superpowered, angelic), he gets dressed-up versions of the same thing: we told you so. Really, it was only a matter of time.

Only The Swamp Thing gives him something different—in his slow, halting way, Swampy talks about the consolation he takes that his temporal existence is just one of many that do the same thing—he’s not the first Earth Elemental, and he’s not going to be the last. His goal isn’t to change the planet enough so he can live forever; it’s to change it so the next bud can sprout. “In the scope of things, nothing sets one blade of grass apart from another.”

Hearing this, Constantine thinks and comes to a realization: he will take on an apprentice who will take over for him.

Unsurprisingly—to those who’ve read the press release—that apprentice is handsome American Johnny Nevada, a small time grifter fleecing the rich with his gift for cold reading, his elaborately staged sceances, and his latent occult aptitude. Not unlike Constantine, we meet Johnny just as his luck appears to have run out for good…until the smug shit in a trenchcoat shows up to offer him a way out.

And from there, you get an occult spin on the “old con artist takes in an apprentice con artist” story—Johnny learns from John, but in a way that also has Constantine semi-fleece his apprentice at every angle: even as he gives his student new substantive lessons in the world of magic, he relieves Nevada of his remaining money, his love interest, his beloved car. When called out on it by Johnny, Constantine can only shrug sheepishly. He just can’t help it; it’s his nature.

However, it’s also Johnny Nevada’s nature. Even as he learns, he uses on his own without Constantine’s knowledge. He has his own conversations with the demons, the mages, even the Phantom Stranger, all of whom say the same thing: watch out for Constantine. You’re risking your soul running with a marked man. Marked by who, Johnny wants to know, and equally importantly: how much is that marker worth?

But as they adventure together, they’re forced to rely on one another, care for one another. Constantine learns that Nevada is also haunted by his own version of Newcastle: a shitshow he inadvertantly caused that cost him nearly everything, and cost all of those he cared about absolutely everything. He’s a good man playing the role of bastard because it’s the only role he believes he deserves.

And that’s the point where Constantine knows he’s found his true apprentice: “I’ll teach you how to play that role, Johnny. I’ll teach you how to play bad so well you can use it to do good. I’ll teach you to be John Constantine.”

And so each stops conning the other and the apprenticeship begins in interest. Until finally, the time comes. Hell is literally at their doorstep: JC and JN are holed up in a ghost town motel, haunted by all the ghosts of those who died after coming to watch the A-bomb tests. Nevada is ready to take over, to be in his own handsome American Keanu-like way, John Constantine. “I may look different on the outside, but on the inside—in every way that counts—I’ll be John Constantine. I’ll do it, despite the cost. I’ll do it for them, for me…and for you.”

“Yep.” Constantine smiles sadly. “For me.”

And the demons of Hell break through, and drag Johnny Nevada to Hell, calling him Constantine all the way down.

Because Constantine realized that, just the way he can’t tell one fucking blade of grass from another, how the hell can a demon tell people apart? What are their distinguishing characteristics? It’s not how they look on the outside; it’s how they look on the inside. And as Nevada said, he had become John Constantine “in every way that counts.”

Constantine feels shitty about it, of course, but that’s what he does. “He just can’t help it. It’s his nature.” And he knew more about what had happened with Johnny Nevada’s Newcastle incident—the same way Nevada had asked around behind his back about JC, JC had asked around about him…and discovered from one of the poor souls Johnny Nevada had damned that it really hadn’t been as inadvertent as Nevada had played it. In fact, it really wasn’t inadvertent at all and there was a difference between regret and repentance, the latter of which Johnny Nevada had never done at all. So that hellbound trip? It was only a matter of time.

So. That’s the pitch.

You probably saw it coming from a mile away, but what I thought would make it work would be DC’s press announcements: the hype, the interviews with the creative team and the editors assuring you that yes this was really happening and it was going to be great. (The smart thing would be to have someone in the chain make noises off the record like, “well sure, this is what the suits demanded but what’s great is, like, it’s comics. We can bring back the original John Constantine in, like, a decade or something. You know, probably when they do a reboot of the Keanu movie and cast some A-list blond British actor orsomething.”)

Playing to comics fan’s most cynical beliefs about the industry? I think it could work, especially if it was spun the right way, if everyone could nail that “we were giving you a handful of horseshit, but really it’s been a gift. Because we’ve totally figured out a take that’ll transmute this horseshit into storytelling gold.”

Lord knows this was in the era when Marvel was walking around giving bullshit press conferences about The Sentry, a character Stan Lee supposedly created and then forgot about. (Stan Lee creating a character was maybe the first tip that the story wasn’t legit.) So it’s not people would’ve really called foul on DC for doing what Marvel had already gotten away with—though me typing that is ignoring exactly how many times comics fandom have done exactly that.

If it was sold right and the story was good, I think it would’ve been a really fun Hellblazer run. Because it would look like Constantine had not only beaten the devil (again), he would’ve beat DC Editorial. “Well, we really thought we were replacing John,” would’ve been the editor’s quote in the day-of press release, “but apparently he conned his way out of it. Damn him.”

LIke I said, l’esprit de l’escalier. I thought of all of this after it was too late to pitch. Probably somehwere between walking out of the theater after watching Constantine and the next time I picked up Hellblazer, or thereabouts. Nothing to be done now, I thought. And would think every time I remembered the pitch.

Until I forgot the pitch. Until—well, I’d like to say until I heard they were doing a sequel two decades after the fact, but I’d honestly be lying. It wasn’t until I watched a teaser trailer for Constantine 2 on YouTube and went, “wow, that looks like utter shit” that I remembered.

And, in what can only be the perfect grace note for my story pitch that never was about con men fooling con men—that trailer is a fake! Even beter, I only thought so because I jumped over to YouTube to re-watch the trailer and watched something entirely different (and better) that I went, “oh shit, this is the real trailer, what I watched was a fan-made bullshit.” Nope! There’s three different trailers on YouTube and they’re all fan-made bullshit.

Anyway, my original ending was going to be me talking about my pitch for the return of the (comic) JC based on the return of the (film) JC, sent on the day celebrating the return of the (divine) JC…only to realize just now my inspiration came from something I thought was legit but was in fact fan-made bullshit.

Truly, faux-clever agnosticism at its dumbest.

Happy Easter, all. Another one of these soon, assuming I recover quickly enough from my embarrassment at this one.

-Jeff