John Constantine

Is he a magician, a magus, a sorcerer or a wizard? What's the difference between those four things anyway?

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IIRC he's a magician because he relies on trickery and 'smoke and mirrors' more than actual magic.

He's a not of your facking business luv.

Magician's more closely associated with parlour trick entertainer. Sorcerer, wizard and mage is probably like a ranking thing.

Presentation.

I should probably finish reading hellblazer. I think I was at around 200.

He's more of a petty dabbler.

According to John, all people who would called themselves any of the above are "wankers".

According to Jamie Delano, John's main writer, John is, or will one day be, a "magus".

According to modern media, he's a powerful sorcerer akin to Dr. Strange who uses Naruto-style hand gestures to create portals to other dimensions and make enemies disappear into thin air and is also a master swordsman and can blast people with Kamehamehas.

All hail the New Constantine.

I gave up when I realized Constantine wasn't going to change. It was a cycle of abuse.

Less a cycle of abuse, and more a cycle of addiction. John keeps doing it because he's addicted.

>uses Naruto-style hand gestures to create portals to other dimensions and make enemies disappear into thin air and is also a master swordsman and can blast people with Kamehamehas

I remember back in the early 2000s hating the Vertigo "off limits" policy that prevented characters from that imprint from appearing in other DC media like cartoons and TV shows and even DC imprint comics.

But seeing what's become of Constantine now that the "off limits" rule has been lifted, I long for those bygone days. The Vertigo characters were kept away from DC writers for a damn good reason.

He's just some cunt

I actualy admire how they handled him in justice league action. Knocking those grunts heads together to finish them off insteaf of using magic for it was a nice touch.
I have fallen behind on that show so maybe they fucked it up later.

>Reminder that only fat, stupid Americunt wankers pronounce it "Constan-teen".

If you ever encounter a piece of Hellblazer media that pronounces it "Constan-teen" then you know it was made by burgers and is rubbish by default.

>No Season 2
It fucking hurts.

He's a con artist first.

>magician
illusion magic, some telepathy, some clairvoyance, some polymorphism, some alchemy, some shamanism. poor mans sorcerer, jack of all trades.
>wizard
use of fetishes, wands, totems, tomes. shaman skills, some elemental, ritual magic.
>sorcerer
alchemists, elementalists, divination, "blood magic", greater polymorphism, greater ritualism. more raw strength than a magician. able to do naturally what a wizard needs preptime for.
>magus
best combination of wizard and sorcerer. natural talent of sorcerer combined with learning and paraphernalia of wizard. disdainful of magicians, shamans, witches. god tier summoners.
Constantine is most definitely a magician, but a powerful one. I believe he's actually referred to as 'the laughing magician' a couple times. If you were to stat him in an RPG his luck would be 10/10. fights above his weight class all the time and pisses other users off.

I liked how there was a slow increase in his power level as hellblazer went on and he got older.

I don't like how they overdid it in later stuff.

He's a con man

"No."

Prove me wrong, murrican.

Why is it that the English are so fucking poor pronouncing things properly?

I pronounce it

Constant - taint

They don't so much as speak the language but murder it..

Oi, lock-gat da lattle b'haybee

Came here to post this

>Why is it that the English are so fucking poor pronouncing things properly?

I like how the British add a "-r" to any word that ends with an "-ia" or "-ea".

"Arear."
"Cafeteriar."
"Paraphernaliar."

It's their own language and they're so bad at it.

>What's the difference between those four things anyway?

Magician is someone who uses cheap illusions and other tricks

Sorcerer is someone born with magic in their blood

Rest are gay

I want to read this, but the size of it makes it really intimidating. I think it's 300 issues and I'm afraid I won't remember most of it.

Wasn't it Paul Jenkins who really pushed the "he's the Magnus" stuff? The only thing I remember from his run was the Aboriginal Dreamtime stuff in Australia, and Mike Carey went back to that years later.

It was explicit since the beginning that Constantine can't change. He fucked up once, and when you mess with dark you open the door to everything related to the mystical world forever, like a disease that never leaves your body, and his family was cursed since generations before him.

All the other mages and people related to magic that he knew comic died with the course of the history and ended up in hell, knowing this John just accept that this was also his fate and he could just avoid it for as long as he could

I'd like to see some sorcerer/magus characters on the JL. Its a bit too stacked with Flying bricks, I'm glad Mera is on there. She really adds some diversity to the power sets.

>>ITT Amerifats trying to tell Englishmen how to speak English

Hilarious. You're the ones with the accent, burgers. Not us.

the trades are pretty cheap and have a lot of issues. So it's pretty easy to collect.

Or just start and stop when you feel like it. It's pretty solid but I haven't read it all yet either

The series really does break down into little chunks with each author since there were so many over the two decades. You could easily just read it run by run and take breaks. I've seen the opinion on Sup Forums that the series really dives following the end of Carey's run at 215, and the last chunk of Milligan's run at the end is a bit of a mess.

Andy Diggle confirmed and doubled down on it, making him a physical embodiment of a magical archetype.

Honestly only Delano and Ennis' runs are mandatory.

You can continue or quit depending on your mood.

There's always Fate. Looks like he's back to being god-tier powerful in Blue Beetle.

I can definitely see how he'll become a magus. He has a centuries long history of magic in his blood, with his father's generation the only one that ignored the legacy. So, you add to that everything that he's learned and then everything that he has in lock-up, then you wait until he's faced down enough apocalypse-level crises and he'd definitely be up there with Fate.

For the time being, he's content with what he has and what he is. Being a magician and con artist is getting him by just fine for the moment.

Fates a bit boring visually though. Golden light blasts with the occasional ankh thrown in. I was thinking it would be cool to have someone of a more classical wizard trope. Fireballs etc. like Benders or Warcraft

I really wish I can remember which run had an arc end with John in the ruins of a castle/church, with several people gathered near him wondering if he was their saviour of something. I think that's where the "Magnus" designation first appeared.

What are some Hellblazer essentials?

Turns out it was the end of Delano's first run

I can't remember if Ennis actually followed up on this golden boy/magnus stuff. I only remember him writing John as a con man

Choose an author and go. People mostly like the Delano and Ennis runs, while the Azzarello run is a little more divisive. I liked the Carey run, and people seem to like the Milligan run before he was told to wrap it up at 300, and things got messy.

Delano's run.

The cancer arc, holy shit.


Also Moore's Swamp Thing, where Constantine first appears, is one of the finest superhero runs ever put to paper. Absolutely read that too.

there is a much more powerful option

When was the last time that he was spotted? Was he in early Justice League Dark? I honestly can't remember.

Even Hickman might have used him more recently than anyone at DC

I have fallen behind on comics for the last 4 or 5 months. Is mera on the league now? That's pretty cool.

I really need to catch back up on everything.

I did not actualy mind what little I read of the new hellblazer. Is that still running?

The current Hellblazer book is getting a new writer (Tim Seeley, Hack/Slash, Nightwing, Grayson) at #14 I think.

Mera being on the league is from the issue today

>Mera
Possibly? today's issue and the Aquaman arc would seem to be setting it up, so its pointing that way.
As for catching up, most of the recent JL stuff has been self contained stories, so if anything todays issue is the only one you need to read, depending on where you jumped off.

>Is that still running?
dccomics.com/comics?type=comic&seriesid=396186#browse

Cool.
Aquaman is my favorite so I will probably catch up on him, constintine and the young animal stuff stuff then jump into newer issues of everything else.

The word you're looking for is "asshole", OP.

Aquaman just had a GOAT issue a last week, so defo worth catching up on. Superman is doing great too.

aquaman is at a good jumping on point. went from twice a month to once and got a new artist.

This, OP. He's not the typical *pew pew* kind of capey magic user, or at least he wasn't. I haven't been following him much since New 52 onward, gonna be honest.

New 52 was a bit silly (although as much as he should not be a blasty character I kind of like that he learnt to summon a knife) but dcyou was decent and the con at the end of the arc is one of my favorites.

Oh also at one point he
tricks darkseid into fucking off reading that issue I knew I should have hated it but it was really well written.

It doesn't get mentioned a lot, but Diggle's run is excellent, and All His Engines, a one-shot by Carey, is also well worth your time.

The thing I like the most about Diggle's run is that, by the time it ends, it's pretty clear that's just a lie he tells himself. He's way too good at what he does to be 'just another cunt.'

As mad as I am that shoot was pulled it really was not very good.

I gave up when he shacked up semi-seriously with a Negress. No amount of suspension of disbelief was going to compensate for that.

>English deliberately mispronounce it
>think they're right
Fuck off. Constan-teen is closer to the origin of the name than Constan-tyne. The US is more respectful to the Latin than Alan Moore's mushmouth ever has been.

Constantine rhymes with 'fine'

from Hellblazer #232

Says the mongrel that altered their own accents because some strumpet at court told them to. A backwater hick from Alabama speaks better English than a Cambridge grad, and is more faithful in accent.

He's Wizard, because his life is the showtime.

that's not too bad. He's tricked the devil a few times too
it was getting better and I loved how every episode they pushed it a bit further to see what they were allowed to do. By season 2 it would have been pretty good I think

He was last spotted in Marvel comics getting BTFO by Dr Strange

There was also a Future's End one-shot where he straight up beat Nabu, and did it old-school Hellblazer style with a con and a bluff. It was really damn good.

>it was getting better and I loved how every episode they pushed it a bit further to see what they were allowed to do
I mean Shoot. The issue of hellblazer that went unpublished for years.

It isn't the magic, user.

At the very end of it, John just never learned how not to be a cunt.

DC will never use Harry Potter ever again.

See Now go back to McDonalds, Amerifat.

Oh and as well as a brilliant con there were also some classic consequences in dcyou.

Timonthy Hunter is FAR more powerful than Dr Strange. He can just conjure entire realities

>According to modern media, he's a powerful sorcerer akin to Dr. Strange who uses Naruto-style hand gestures to create portals to other dimensions and make enemies disappear into thin air and is also a master swordsman and can blast people with Kamehamehas.

I'm ok with that in Justice League Action because it's a kids show and it's fucking amazing Constantine is even IN that, plus the writing on him is consistently funny.

But when they did that shit in the Justice League: Dark straight-to-DVD movie? Or when they do that in the modern DC comics?

Absolute balls.

I still need to watch the jld movie.
Did they tone down the runes? I like runes but it sounded like they were going to have them on every single spell.

The only thing is flung was fire, at the beginning he was using a wand. and I'm ok with him using wands
I really liked it. Batman was just there to sell the movie but it was a Constantine/Zatanna movie first and formost

That and the being an adrenaline junkie

When he gambled the soul of New York for his new boyfriend and his family? Classic Constantine

Yep
But not before said new boyfriend had already sold his soul to protect his daughter from the threat john got rid of.

>Timonthy Hunter is FAR more powerful than Dr Strange
>"FAR"

Someone has never read classic Dr Strange

I have, but let me be honest, user, DC Magic is higher-end than Marvel Magic.

...

Tim created an entire universe and separated it from the main DC multiverse

Magic is not something to be taken lightly in DC. You're messing with the primal forces that make up all of reality. If you don't know what you're doing, you could cause all manner of horrific damage. John is, believe it or not, on a scale with other responsible magic users because he has a healthy fear and respect for it. Felix Faust is a good example of someone on the opposite end.

>some telepathy, some clairvoyance, some polymorphism, some alchemy, some shamanism

I'd prefer magician being what the person you see on You Tube videos do card tricks or in Vegas/Reno/Atlantic City, etc.

Real telepathy doesn't exist and if it did, even at some level (ditto even a bit of clairvoyance or some alchemy) would be far more than the average person who can do fast card tricks or coin tricks in front of your eyes can honestly manage.

I think the distinctions that's often made in some things (such as Seven Soldiers, for example, or as was talked about in the original version of Zatara in the Golden Age run of Action Comics) are the one thing, whereas say Zatara or Zatanna are wizards.

I think the rest of the definitions are just hair splitting. Is Homo Magi a sorcerer or not? Ditto for Wizard or Magus?

Remember John's greatest nemesis?

Yeah he's great in Justice League Action.

>>wizard
>use of fetishes, wands, totems, tomes. shaman skills, some elemental, ritual magic.
that's a Warlock

If it's DnD rules, then original John was a wizard, as he learned magic through books and artifacts. I think since joining DC, John is a homo-magi, or magical human, which means he was born with magic, making him a Sorcerer

>I can't remember if Ennis actually followed up on this golden boy/magnus stuff.
Nope, you have to wait until Andy Diggle until somebody remembered that storyline. It seems like not everybody liked it, but I did.

Anyway, John is not the Magus. The Golden Boy was meant to be the Magus, John is just Danny DeVito from Twins.

Fucking hilarious issue.

I don't quit remember... did he fuck it?

Alright, short storytime

It wanted to fuck him

...

One of the best parts of Hellblazer was definitely the aging. Everyone aged in real time, and we got to see Chas' daughter have a kid and grandkid

John's greatest fear: families

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