Posted in: Comics, Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh, Recent Updates | Tagged: hellblazer

Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh #66: The Constantine Meme

"Of all the stories told in these islands, few are more strange as that of William Palmer.  Cursed, apparently, on the road to Canterbury in the Spring of 1185 for denying the presence of the other world by the king of the Grey Folk, or Faerie, himself, and compelled to walk from that day to this between the worlds of Magic and of Men, and subsequently known in all the strange and wonderful lore of the mysterious William Palmer… as Pilgrim." – Introduction to PILGRIM by Sebastian Baczkiewicz

This week sees the broadcast of the last episode of the second season of PILGRIM, BBC Radio 4's supernatural detective series.  William Palmer is the latest supernatural detective character that's really a play on the same archetype established by John Constantine the 1980s.

The occult detective started as far back as 1910 with characters like William Hope Hodgson's CARNACI THE GHOST FINDER (recently revived in THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN: CENTURY)  or 1906 with Algernon Blackwood's JOHN SILENCE, PHYSICIAN EXTRAORDINAIRE.  Both characters were considered minor works by the authors and overshadowed by their more famous ghost and horror novels, and they combined the fireside ghost tales with detective stories as established by Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, only here given a supernatural twist.  They generally followed the Victorian and Edwardian literary tradition of have the title characters tell their friends of cases they investigated.  These characters tended to be posh, gentlemen of leisure or 'talented amateurs' who dabbled.  The most notable modern iteration of the character in the 70s was KOLCHAK THE NIGHT STALKER, a down-on-his-luck reporter who keeps stumbling on vampires, werewolves and the like while searching for his big scoop only to find that nobody believes him.

When Alan Moore created John Constantine, he introduced a few fresh innovations to the archetype: he wasn't posh, he was working class with a Cockney accent and something of a manipulative con man who lied, bribed, cajoled and blackmailed to get his way if he had to, an outsider and proud of it.  He was more seedy anti-hero than outright good guy even though he was out to save the world or help people, but the way he want about it tended to leave a lot of people dead who didn't deserve it, though he never meant for that to happen.

I guess it took the late 80s and all of the 90s for the HELLBLAZER comic to embed Constantine in the popular consciousness, as the first decade of the 21^st century has seen a minor explosion of other series featuring a Constantine-style hero.  We've had Mike Carey's CARVER HALE from 2000AD, a small-time East End gangster who knows magic which served as a testing ground for Carey's own run on HELLBLAZER and then his own prose novel series featuring Felix Caster.  Jim Butcher's HARRY DRESDEN novels are practically an American version of Constantine with the hero having to deal with tangled political relationships in the supernatural world.  Science Fiction author Richard Kadrey recently entered the arena with SANDMAN SLIM, re-imagining Richard Stark's hardboiled Parker character by crossing him with Constantine to get Stark (in tribute), a hardcore magician out for revenge against the other mages that screwed him over.  Even in Japan, there's KARA NO KYOUKAI's Touko Aozaki, who even goes as far as to wear a raincoat and chain-smoke, though at one point she pulls a stunt with a life-size doll of herself that makes her far nastier and scarier than John Constantine ever will be.  I don't know if Nasu Kinoko ever read a HELLBLAZER comic, but it's clear that the archetype has made it as far as Japan.  And now there's PILGRIM.  I'm sure there are a few others, but these are the most prominent I've come across.  I'm not even talking about TV shows, which invariably water down the sensibility, though SUPERNATURAL is very clearly influenced by HELLBLAZER and skates pretty close to the dark, gritty stuff you find in the comics, taking in the folksy pop feel of Stephen King along the way.

In just ten years, that's quite a list of 'Constantines with the serial numbers shaved off''.  What they all prove is how robust the basic 'magician detective' archetype is.  Each writer has to create their own mythology and continuity for their character, of course.  Hell, every writer on the HELLBLAZER comic created a new cast of supporting characters and themes to explore in order to make their stints on the book more personal for them.  The basic conventions of supernatural fiction remains consistent, though: variations on magic, spells, rituals, vampires, werewolves, powers, the social and political hierarchies of magical society.  Unlike CARNACKI or JOHN SILENCE, which followed the Victorian literary model, the Constantine format follows the American private eye narrative model: the main character is generally that outsider who walks the streets exposing secrets and shaking up the status quo

Rich called PILGRIM "Constantine meets FABLES", though to me, the series feels very English in its use of folklore from the British Isle.  There's a dark, dense, inescapable sense of history that reminds me of the novels of Alan Garner.  Like the books of Alan Garner, Pilgrim creates a world of an England whose forgotten history still lives in the stone and the wood, the air and the water, and people pay a heavy price for unknowingly crossing the folk who still live in the land and treat humans with contempt the same way the upper classes treat everyone else.  William Palmer is probably the most reluctant of the Constantine manqués.  He regrets being cursed with immortality and resents being pestered by the Grey Folk to do their bidding and solve their problems, and looks upon the chaos they wreck on the lives of the people unlucky enough to stumble across and inadvertently cross them with a mixture of pity and disgust.  The series isn't perfect.  I found the first series from last year fresher and Palmer was a more proactive investigator, whereas the second season has been a bit bogged down in his being manipulated and led around by the Grey Folk kidnapping his loved ones and his own irrational refusal to explain what's happening to anybody, which would have prevented a lot of the grief he and they would have ended up suffering.  But still, as an example of the Constantine-style drama in a medium other than comics or books, it's worth keeping up with if only to imagine what a proper TV series of HELLBLAZER might feel like.

Being utterly unmagical at lookitmoves@gmail.com

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© Adisakdi Tantimedh

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