page_title: John Constantine
section_title: Creation and conception
hierarchical_section_title: John Constantine / Creation and conception
caption_attribution_description: Sting, Drammenshallen, Norway
context_page_description: John Constantine is a fictional anti-superhero and mystic appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics and its alternative imprint Vertigo. The character first appeared in The Saga of Swamp Thing #37, and was created by Alan Moore, Rick Veitch, Steve Bissette, John Totleben, Jamie Delano and John Ridgway. He serves as the lead character of the comic books Hellblazer, Constantine, Constantine: The Hellblazer, and The Hellblazer.
  The titular Hellblazer, Constantine is a working class warlock, occult detective, and con man from Liverpool who is stationed in London. He is known for his endless cynicism, deadpan snarking, ruthless cunning and constant chain smoking, but he's also a passionate humanitarian driven by a heartfelt desire to do some good in his life. Originally a supporting character who played a pivotal role in the "American Gothic" Swamp Thing storyline, Constantine received his own comic in 1988. The musician Sting was visual inspiration for the character.
  The Hellblazer series was the longest-running and most successful title of DC's Vertigo imprint.
context_section_description: John Constantine first appeared in 1985 as a recurring character in the horror series The Saga of the Swamp Thing, in which he acted as a "supernatural advisor" to the main character.
  In these early appearances, Constantine was depicted as a sorcerer of questionable morality, whose appearance was based on that of the musician Sting (specifically, as Sting appeared in the films Brimstone and Treacle and Quadrophenia). Alan Moore created the character after artists Steve Bissette and John Totleben, who were fans of The Police, expressed a desire to draw a character who looked like Sting. They had already drawn at least one character in Sting's likeness, a briefly glimpsed background figure wearing a black-and-red-striped T-shirt in Swamp Thing #25 (1985), who was later retroactively declared to be John Constantine. In his earliest Swamp Thing appearances, the character is drawn with a marked resemblance to Sting, and in Swamp Thing #51, Constantine appears on a boat with the name The Honourable Gordon Sumner on the bow.
  John Constantine's official debut was not until Swamp Thing #37, when he was drawn by Rick Veitch and John Totleben. Crisis on Infinite Earths #4, his second official appearance in a cameo role, shipped two weeks prior to the release of Swamp Thing #37. In Crisis on Infinite Earths #4, written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by George Perez, Constantine is wearing a green suit as opposed to his more traditional black suit and tan trenchcoat ensemble.  Moore describes Constantine as being drawn from a number of "really good ideas... about serial killers, the Winchester House, and... want[ing] to draw Sting in a story." Calling these disparate strands a "big intellectual puzzle", Constantine was the result of "fit[ting] it all together." Initially created "purely to get Sting into the story", by the time of the 1985 San Diego ComicCon, Moore stated that "It's turning into something more than that now." Veitch's contribution was to give Constantine an earring, something he considered risque for 1985.
  Asked in 1985 about the similarities between John Constantine and the character Baron Winters (from Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan's Night Force), Moore revealed that he was a "big fan" of Wolfman and Night Force, but that there was "no intention to rip off Baron Winters". He said:
  With Constantine, I don't know who I was thinking of. I just wanted this character who knows everything, and knows everybody—really charismatic. Who knows nuns, politicians and bikers, and who is never at a loss for what to do. I suppose there is a similarity with Baron Winters in that he is another manipulative character who has a bunch of agents working with him.
  Constantine and Winters met each other during Moore's run on Swamp Thing and again in Neil Gaiman's The Books of Magic.
  Speaking to comics magazine Wizard in 1993, Moore elaborated:
  One of those early notes was they both wanted to do a character that looked like Sting. I think DC is terrified that Sting will sue them, although Sting has seen the character and commented in Rolling Stone that he thought it was great. He was very flattered to have a comic character who looked like him, but DC gets nervous about these things. They started to eradicate all traces of references in the introduction of the early Swamp Thing books to John Constantine's resemblance to Sting. But I can state categorically that the character only existed because Steve and John wanted to do a character that looked like Sting. Having been given that challenge, how could I fit Sting into Swamp Thing? I have an idea that most of the mystics in comics are generally older people, very austere, very proper, very middle class in a lot of ways. They are not at all functional on the street. It struck me that it might be interesting for once to do an almost blue-collar warlock. Somebody who was streetwise, working class, and from a different background than the standard run of comic book mystics. Constantine started to grow out of that.
  In 1988, Constantine was given his own title, Hellblazer. In 1993, at the launch of DC's
caption: The singer-songwriter Sting was the visual inspiration of the character.[4]
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