Obsessed with John Constantine since 2007.
Revived my account after seeing there's a little bunch of Hellblazer fans here and would like to share my fav panels while re-reading the comics.
I thought of another argument for the 'Constantine is NOT a sex maniac'
(why is this conversation constantly active its insane)
In the comics John fucks, sure! That is true!
But- but have you considered that all the moments he points out are always romantically intimate? All of the moments with his partners and the climaxes of the relationship stem from some sort of intimacy and not from sex.
Which you would say, yeah?? Duh?? Thats like?? Normal? Not to fanon-likers it isnt
Sex can be used as a way to connect but it doesn't have to be the primary one and for him it surely isnt even third.
Let's review: (literally a recollection of the most intimate moments beetwen his partners up to Dani)
One of the most intimate moments in the first half od Delanos run is Zed and John who hug. She says she loves him and he says he loves her too, that he'll love her forever. That! That is the point. He'll forever hold her in his heart and Id bet that the moment he started loving her was when she helped him find Gemma.
I would say that the moment he cherishes the most with Emma would be the mornings where she'd draw and he'd lay in bed.
Can't forget about Marj and Mercury.
They provide him stability and a sense of peace. Its the closest he got to in the og run to having a actual family of his. He does everything he can to help the both of them, even if he cracks in the end. His final moment of vulnerability? Asking Marj to hold him while hes terrified to shits.
Moving on, we've got Kit!
Their relationship is all over the place but the sweetest and the most important moments are those where they're NOT HAVING SEX.
When she beats him in the drinking game, that whole page expresses how he feels like hes a teenage boy falling in love again. How she makes him feel jittery and nervous.
There are often these one page silent moments of the two just existing and being happy together.
He says hes lucky as he watches her draw (or settle his papers? Honestly i forgot). He says hes lucky as he watches her exits near him. The kiss is just a way to show the intimacy.
My favorite panel is the three-day they spend in bed. Sure its about sex but its not really about sex is it?
They lay together, in each other's arms, away from the world. Wouldn't you want to literally spend a day in bed with the person you cherish? It represents the world stopping, enveloping eachother fully.
Also issue 50 is probably my favorite issue of the entire series. It explicitly explains John and what he cherishes about the world hes in.
Now onto my favorite relationship, Dani!
Dani and John are something really special to me because i feel like they're endgame. Its not about how they love eachother but how she tries to understand him emotionally and to support him through things she doesn't quite understand him. She doesn't have a idealized version of him. She tells him how it is and thay insistence on her teaching him to let others carry the load is the point of the Jenkins run.
you can't like john constantine if you don't support social issues, cause like yeah, most people in comics do support social issues (heroes at least, even if john is more like an anti-hero) and yet people manage to beat around the bush with them, but john? john character is directly tied with social issues of all kind, some that affect him directly, and he cannot be a separate character from it.
i always rember a small panel on delano's hellblazer run in which he goes through his old things and a pin of "Rock Against Racism" can be seen, his comics address plenty of things some more obvious like discrimination against working class or how the elites try to squeeze them dry, homophobia, the bad buch of skinheads (could be applied with far-rigth movements today tbh) or others a bit more subtle like racism, or, in a way, mental health and the stigmatization against it.
john is elbow-deep in all of that, and if you strip him from those, you strip him of his identity.
He’s literally disabled. He was institutionalized. He endured severe medical abuse at said institution.
He’s unable to drive or maintain traditional employment. (I don’t believe all of it is him “sticking it to the man” or enjoying bossing Chas around- I think he’s unable)
He self medicates with drugs and alcohol, both of which has made him physically disabled on top of the addiction.
And I feel like this gets written off as him being some kind of good time party boy, or a lazy bum who’s just a leech on the “real” heroes. But given how far the writers have gone to show that so much of his lifestyle is literally beyond his control, it starts to feel like a knee jerk “poor people are icky” when the JLA turns their noses up at him.
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