John Constantine showed up in the pages of Swamp Thing in 1985 looking like Sting from The Police and talking like a Liverpool dockworker who’d read too much Aleister Crowley — and within a few years, he’d outgrown DC Comics entirely. Or maybe DC Comics just wasn’t big enough for what he was becoming. What followed is one of the stranger, more fascinating stories in mainstream comics publishing: a character who got his own imprint built partly around him, spent nearly three decades in a creative exile that wasn’t really an exile, and then came home to a DC Universe that wasn’t quite sure what to do with him. Constantine’s publishing history reads less like a business decision and more like something Constantine himself would engineer — full of smoke, misdirection, and a payoff that arrives long after you’ve stopped expecting one.
Who Is John Constantine, Really?
Before we get into the publishing politics, it helps to understand why Constantine is the kind of character who causes trouble wherever he goes.
John Constantine was born in Liverpool in 1953 — the same moment his mother was dying in childbirth, a detail that haunts the man metaphysically, not just emotionally. He came up through the British punk scene, taught himself magic not through ancient grimoires but through street-level desperation, and spent his early career burning bridges with everyone who trusted him. His most infamous early act — the Newcastle incident, referenced obliquely across dozens of issues before it was fully shown — involved the soul of a young girl named Astra being dragged to Hell because Constantine’s exorcism went catastrophically wrong.
He’s been trying to outrun that ever since. Not to make it right — Constantine rarely believes redemption is on the table — but because motion is the only thing keeping him sane.
Alan Moore created him in Swamp Thing #37 as a supporting character, a shadowy figure who showed up, dispensed cryptic warnings, and vanished before anyone could hold him accountable. The design was deliberate: Moore modeled him on the musician Sting not because he particularly wanted a rock star in the book, but because he wanted someone whose face the reader’s brain would fill in automatically — familiar, but unknowable. The name Constantine came partly from Moore’s own instincts and partly from fellow writer Steve Bissette, who wanted a roguish English magician in the book and had been sketching character ideas.
What nobody expected was that Constantine would immediately feel more real than most characters who’d been around for decades.
From Swamp Thing’s Shadow to His Own Stage
By 1987, the argument for giving Constantine his own book was overwhelming. Moore had moved on from Swamp Thing, but the character lingered in readers’ minds like a half-remembered dream. DC knew they had something. The question was what, exactly, and how to package it.
Hellblazer launched in January 1988 under the DC banner, written by Jamie Delano — a British writer whose sensibility matched the character’s perfectly. Delano didn’t try to soften Constantine or make him more palatable. If anything, he doubled down. His run on the book dragged Constantine through Thatcherite Britain, through apocalyptic visions of capitalism as demonic infection, through personal betrayals so thorough they read almost as black comedy. Constantine smoked. He drank. He slept with people and left them worse off than he found them. He made deals that cost him pieces of his soul and then made more deals to claw them back.
This wasn’t standard DC fare. Superman didn’t do this. Even Batman, in his darkest portrayals, operated within a moral framework that the reader could recognize. Constantine operated in a framework where morality was a chess piece rather than a foundation, and that created a very specific editorial problem.
How Constantine Went from DC to Vertigo and Back Again
The Birth of Vertigo: Building an Imprint Around the Uncomfortable
By the early 1990s, DC had a cluster of books that didn’t fit neatly into their superhero publishing model. Hellblazer was the clearest example, but Sandman — Neil Gaiman’s mythological dream epic that launched in 1989 — was doing something equally strange. Animal Man under Grant Morrison was deconstructing the very idea of superhero comics. Doom Patrol, also Morrison, was doing something that defied easy description.
These books shared readers, sensibilities, and a general atmosphere of: this is not for children, and we mean that seriously.
Karen Berger, who had been shepherding many of these titles as an editor at DC, proposed and developed a solution. In 1993, Vertigo launched as a DC imprint — technically still under the DC umbrella, using DC’s distribution and resources, but operating with its own editorial identity and a crucial distinction: Vertigo books would carry a “Suggested for Mature Readers” label and would not be subject to the Comics Code Authority.
That last part mattered enormously. The Comics Code Authority had been throttling comics content since 1954, restricting depictions of violence, sexuality, drug use, and moral complexity to such a degree that it had functionally defined what mainstream American comics could and couldn’t say for forty years. Vertigo stepping outside that framework wasn’t just a business decision. It was a declaration.
Hellblazer moved to Vertigo at launch, making it one of the imprint’s cornerstone titles. Constantine became, in many ways, the face of what Vertigo was trying to do — a character who existed in the DC universe but increasingly wanted nothing to do with it. Crossovers with the main DC continuity quietly stopped happening. When other DC heroes encountered magic, they called Zatanna or Doctor Fate. Constantine existed in a different register entirely, one where magic was dirty and expensive and came with a body count.
The Unwritten Rules of Vertigo Constantine
The separation between Vertigo and the main DC universe wasn’t officially absolute — Vertigo was always technically an imprint, not an entirely separate company — but in practice, certain rules developed organically and then hardened into something approaching editorial law.
Constantine could not appear in DC proper titles in a way that was recognizably him. The reasoning was partly practical (you didn’t want a chain-smoking, morally ambiguous occultist showing up in a Superman comic aimed at younger readers) and partly about preserving what made Vertigo work. The whole point of the imprint was creative freedom from exactly the kind of content restrictions that mainstream DC operated under. Bringing Constantine back into regular DC continuity would compromise that, or so the thinking went.
Writers who tried to reference Constantine in mainstream DC work during this period learned quickly that the character was effectively off the table. Even when DC published stories set in the dark corners of their universe — stories involving magic, demonology, the supernatural — Constantine was conspicuously absent.
For nearly two decades, this arrangement held. Hellblazer became the longest-running Vertigo title in history, running for 300 issues across 25 years. A remarkable roster of writers moved through the book: Delano, Garth Ennis (whose run is arguably the definitive take on the character), Paul Jenkins, Warren Ellis, Brian Azzarello, Mike Carey, Andy Diggle, Peter Milligan. Each one brought something different. Each one left Constantine recognizable — which is itself a kind of miracle, given how much the character was put through.
Ennis’s run in the early 1990s gave Constantine his most famous arc, “Dangerous Habits,” in which Constantine outsmarts Hell itself by contracting terminal lung cancer and then giving himself the blood of three demons, creating a supernatural legal standoff that not even Satan wants to adjudicate. It’s the arc that most directly captures what Constantine is at his core: not powerful, not good, but clever in ways that embarrass the powerful and unsettle the good.
The New 52 and the Decision That Ended Hellblazer
In 2011, DC undertook a publishing initiative called the New 52 — a company-wide relaunch that rebooted most of their characters and streamlined continuity. It was a controversial move among readers for many reasons, but for Constantine fans, one consequence was particularly stark.
Vertigo was not part of the New 52. The imprint continued to operate separately. But DC decided they wanted Constantine back — not just as a Vertigo character, but integrated into the main DC universe. In February 2013, Hellblazer published its final issue, #300. The book ended not because it had run out of stories, but because DC had decided Constantine’s future lay elsewhere.
The following month, Constantine #1 launched as part of DC’s mainstream line. The new book featured a version of Constantine who was technically the same character — same name, same general history — but visibly cleaned up for mainstream consumption. He looked younger. He was more conventionally heroic. The cigarette, that defining visual shorthand for the character’s self-destructive recklessness, was gone in many depictions due to DC’s content guidelines about depicting tobacco use. He was also folded into DC’s “Justice League Dark” — a team of supernatural heroes that positioned him as a reluctant team player rather than a lone operator.
Readers were not uniformly pleased. For many, the move felt like everything that made Constantine interesting had been traded for accessibility.
The Critical Reception and The Case for Both Versions
Here’s where the story gets more honest than simple hagiography would allow: the mainstream DC Constantine wasn’t without its defenders, and the criticism of it wasn’t always fair.
Writers like Jeff Lemire and Ray Fawkes brought genuine craft to the new book. Constantine as a DC character could do things Vertigo Constantine couldn’t — he could credibly share pages with Batman, with the Justice League, with DC’s larger cosmological architecture. The new version had room to grow in directions the Vertigo version, by design, had avoided.
But something was missing, and it wasn’t just the cigarettes. The Vertigo run of Hellblazer had been built on a specific premise: that Constantine’s world was our world, grimy and specific and believable, into which the supernatural had intruded. DC continuity is the opposite — a baroque universe of gods and aliens and city-sized robots where the supernatural is one element among many equally impossible things. Constantine in that context lost the quality that made him feel necessary. He became another specialist in a world of specialists.
DC tried various approaches over the following years. The character appeared in Futures End tie-ins, in multiple Justice League Dark iterations, in a solo title called The Hellblazer that launched in 2016 under the DC Rebirth initiative and attempted to restore some of the character’s Vertigo flavor — including, notably, the cigarettes and the grim British atmosphere — while keeping him in DC continuity.
Where Constantine Stands Now
The oscillation hasn’t fully resolved, which is perhaps appropriate for a character who has always existed between states.
In recent years, DC has acknowledged what many readers have argued for some time: that Constantine works best when he’s allowed to be the version of himself that Hellblazer spent 25 years developing. Current iterations have leaned back toward the gritty, morally complex, perpetually-compromised bastard of the Vertigo era. The question of how you integrate that version into a universe where Superman exists is one that writers continue to navigate with varying degrees of success.
The television adaptation on NBC (2014-2015) and Constantine’s subsequent appearances in the Arrowverse on The CW pulled more directly from the Hellblazer era, casting Matt Ryan in a performance that many fans consider the definitive live-action portrayal — scruffy, funny, exhausted, and genuinely threatening in ways that the 2005 Keanu Reeves film, whatever its merits as a standalone piece, never quite captured.
The 2005 film, directed by Francis Lawrence, deserves its own note here. It transplanted Constantine to Los Angeles, changed his background from British to American, and made him significantly more conventionally heroic. It made money and has its passionate defenders, but it represents a third, distinct version of the character — neither the Vertigo Constantine nor the New 52 version, but a Hollywood reworking with its own internal logic.
What Hellblazer Was Actually About (That Often Gets Lost)
Strip away the supernatural trappings, the demonic politics, the cosmic stakes — and what Hellblazer was doing, particularly in its early runs, was something quite specific. It was a book about working-class British life, about the damage left by the Thatcher era, about men and women who’d grown up in the punk moment and were now watching that energy calcify into cynicism or desperation.
Constantine wasn’t just a magician. He was a particular kind of British man — smart enough to know he was being lied to by institutions, angry enough to have once believed he could do something about it, and old enough now to work the angles rather than fight the battle he knows he can’t win. His magic wasn’t the elegant spellcasting of Doctor Strange. It was con artistry with metaphysical stakes. He bluffed Hell. He lied to angels. He talked his way past things that should have killed him.
That specificity — of character, of place, of class — was part of what the Vertigo arrangement protected and what was inevitably diluted when Constantine moved back into the DC mainstream. DC’s universe is, by necessity, universal. It doesn’t belong to any particular city or country or decade. Constantine, at his best, belongs very specifically to a Britain that felt like it was rotting from the inside while pretending everything was fine.
The Legacy Question
Hellblazer ended 25 issues shy of averaging a full year’s publication for every year of Constantine’s in-universe age at the time. That’s a remarkable run for any series, and an almost unprecedented one for a book that was never about superheroes, never about the kinds of characters that comics had been built on.
The writers it launched, supported, or gave space to — Gaiman and Ennis and Morrison and Ellis and Carey and dozens of others — went on to reshape what comics could be. Vertigo as an imprint, with Constantine at its spiritual center, demonstrated that comics could sustain long-form, literary, mature-readers storytelling over years and decades, not just in prestige limited series but in ongoing monthly books.
Constantine himself remains a peculiarly indestructible creation. Every version of him — the Vertigo original, the New 52 reboot, the TV versions, the film — confirms something that Alan Moore stumbled into when he sketched out that first appearance: there is something about this particular type of person, the clever bastard who knows too much and cares too much while pretending to care about nothing, that resonates across every context you drop him into.
He’s too specific to be universal. But somehow, universally, people recognize him.
