Spoiler warning
John Constantine’s ancestor Johanna first appeared in the Sandman story ‘Men Of Good Fortune’. Dream of the Endless meets his friend Hob Gadling at the same inn they’ve been frequenting for centuries when Lady Johanna shows up. She attempts to bully Dream like she would a human or a demon but things go well for them anyway. She has a rather more swashbuckling vignette later in ‘Thermidore’.
Johanna has had guest appearances in various Hellblazer stories but these four comics from early 2003 are her only solo ventures to date.
Since discovering ‘Dead in America’, I’ve read a chunk of Jamie Delano’s original Hellblazer run. I last left off at the end of the latter-day epilogue of the Newcastle incident, which alternates with Swamp Thing’s succession story. I didn’t care for the simultaneity of those two arcs: they seemed to step on each other’s toes rather than dance together.
So. Two short stories from The Sandman are Johanna Constantine’s actual point of origin. If we go into this with Hellblazer goggles though-
John Constantine is a mess of a wizard who is known to do the right thing occasionally. He’s just as dangerous whether he is or not, though, and has a near-endless capacity for moral hairsplitting.
In Lady Constantine, Johanna is poor, hunted and desperate but nowhere near the hot mess of her twentieth century descendant.
She travels with a girl she calls Mouse, with whom she is firm but nurturing. Mouse has typical, child-like outbursts but never cuts loose hard enough to cause trouble: Mouse might know the practicality of survival firsthand, Johanna may have taught her well or both. A belligerent landlord kicks in the door, demanding rent. So far, so sympathetic. When she later looks Mouse in the eyes and says “trust me”, you could just about see her as the kind of hero who whose intentions always keep pace with their abilities.
The name of the comic has a point, btw: this short would-be opening arc ends with the restoration of her family’s title and estates. Johanna thereby acquires the wealth and proximity to power she has in The Sandman at a thematically appropriate cost.
Because of the gritty chaos of early Hellblazer, a fragmented delivery of John’s early encounter with the demonic at Newcastle makes sense. It is a bad memory that refuses to stay buried.
Relative to the original Hellblazer, Lady Constantine is an eighteenth-century period piece. Rather than a buried memory, Johanna’s binding guilt unfolds in the narrative present. Does she then have her own “Newcastle”?
You could say that. The haunting debt and the lingering question of whether or not it could ever be paid would be the jumping-off point for whatever happened next, rather than a long dark shadow from the past.
Another temporal reimagining: the relationship with ‘Swamp Thing’, here called Jack In The Green. The money and the political connections come later. Before then, Johanna exists much like her descendant: living on the harvest of the last con long enough for the next. One major asset she does have is leverage over Jack In The Green.
At the start of Lady Constantine, Johanna has been doing this for a while and Jack is losing patience. Since Jack is our Swamp Thing, he is capable of coming and going from plant matter or anything made from it, such as boat wood. The last few drops of grace left in the friendship is the only reason why Johanna is able to accept a contract to salvage a sunken ship.
That sounds like a retrospective comment on John during his first appearance in the Swamp Thing comics. John trades on his name a lot and on circumstantial leverage. Yes his influence in the American Gothic arc turned out for the better but all he ever had were the other people he was roping in…and he only roped them in because he extorts and pieces out information.
If a story has both a version of Constantine and a version of Swamp Thing, then there will probably be astral travel. While we don’t see Hell here, we see a rough equivalent. The box that Johanna’s been tracking the whole story contains a host of eldritch horrors. The ex-custodian of the box, Pandora (ta-da!), wants to drag it up and break it open.
That person is connected to the Wych Cross property which ends up awarded to Johanna at the end; to be renamed Fawny Rig, after the means which led to the contract. That could have implications for the old British mage families like the Burgesses and the Cripps, if DC/Vertigo ever cared to flesh it out. In the twentieth century, Fawny Rig is known as the historic home of the Burgess family, where Dream was imprisoned. Perhaps the Constantine bloodline had something to do with that development- even if it’s losing the place to someone else.
The plight of the kiddo who gets trapped in the box had a lot of potential for future stories, to. It makes sense that John Constantine would have a mage or two in his lineage. It also makes sense that he would have ancestors with personal memories of infernal dimensions, such as Johanna’s daughter.
AilixChaerea 