Goodbye, Constantine (#SFWApro)

As you may have heard (or possibly you never noticed), NBC axed Constantine after 13 episodes. Nor will the show return unless (the last hope) SyFy picks it up. While it’s not surprising that not every comics property that jumps to TV is a hit, I think a big part of the problem is that what made John Constantine a comics star simply doesn’t work as well on the small screen.

John Constantine debuted in 1985 during Alan Moore’s classic run on Swamp Thing (cover by Steven R. Bissette, all rights to current holder). An enigmatic British occultist who seemed to know a lot about what was happening around Swamp Thing during Moore’s American Gothic arc, he was quite unlike anyone else I’d seen in comics: snarky, surly, manipulative, completely disrespectful of authority, and hard drinking, chain-smoking womanizer. Very much an anti-hero.

The unshaven, perpetually rumpled working-class wizard would go on to star in his own long-running series, Hellblazer, though it’s never really grabbed me. The stories (at least the ones I’ve read) tend to present John as a cool guy (smoking! Drinking! Womanizing! Disrespecting stuffed shirts!), rather than a self-destructive dick. He’s just too big a jerk for my taste when taken in large doses.

But I think the failure of the TV series has more to do with the fact that while Constantine was striking in the comics (and maybe even in TV if he’d shown up back then), TV has no shortage of self-destructive, dangerous, tormented characters. A bigger problem is that in this century it also has no shortage of demon-slaying occultists. There’s little going on on Constantine that couldn’t have been an arc of Supernatural, which also has tormented heroes, moral compromises and flawed characters (based on reports by friends—I’ve never really gotten hooked on the show). Constantine doesn’t offer anything different other than name recognition, and even with the Keanu Reaves movie, that probably wasn’t much.

All that said, I enjoyed some of the name dropping of DC sorcerers. And I’d have loved to see Jim Corrigan become the Spectre, or learn what Zed’s dark secrets were.

But I think I’ll sleep soundly despite never finding out.