Constantine: The Hellblazer

Brooklyn-based comics convention Flame Con hosted some of the industry's most prominent and prolific creators this year, such as comics writer James Tynion IV. In just over four years, he's written on Batman, Constantine: The Hellblazer, Talon, and several series at Boom Studios. He currently writes Detective Comics, The Woods, and his new queer-inclusive Boom series The Backstagers with Rian Sygh. In the first of a series of interviews from Flame Con, Comics Alliance got the chance to sit down with Tynion to talk about queer comics, Boom Studios, and... world domination?

On this day in 1985, a man walked into a bar. It was a punk bar; this was 1985 in comic-book London, after all. The man was named John Constantine, and he was there looking for a friend who had information about the end of the world. It all happened in the pages of Swamp Thing #37, written by Alan Moore with art by Rick Veitch and John Totleben; the "American Gothic" storyline was beginning in earnest, and Moore's legendary run was kicking into high gear. According to Moore, the character of Constantine owes his debut to the fact that Swamp Thing's regular artists, Totleben and Stephen R. Bissette, were big fans of the band The Police, and they wanted to draw a character who looked like the lead singer, Sting. Even though it ended up being Veitch on the pencils for Constantine's first appearance, he is unmistakably a dead ringer for the British musician.

When you think about John Constantine, you probably imagine his more sinister, conniving feats of magic, like that time he tricked the devil himself into drinking holy water, or that time that he tricked three other devils into curing him of cancer, or that time that he somehow managed to not look like a complete dork while wearing a trenchcoat and smirking for something like thirty years. What you don't think about, I assume, is that he might be in life-threatening danger from a magical land of fairies where a pegasus bleeds rainbows. That's exactly what happens in Constantine: The Hellblazer #10, by Ming Doyle, James Tynion IV, Travel Foreman, Joseph Silver, Ivan Plascencia, and Tom Napolitano. The book finds everyone's favorite magician on his own in a world full of tinkerbells (tinkers bell? Let's go with tinkerbells), being hunted down by his arch-nemeses. Check out a preview, but be warned: There is explicit pegasus violence involved.