Years ago, when my brother finally got me to read the first volume of The Sandman by letting me know that John Constantine, a favorite comic character of mine, appeared early on in The Sandman‘s history, I was worried how Gaiman — typically a less dark writer than Preacher‘s Garth Ennis and some of the other writers who contributed to Hellblazer‘s pages — would portray Constantine. Then, as now, I was impressed.
Gaiman’s attention to detail, his obvious love of characters from a number of genres, and his ability to fit these characters, even if rather briefly, into the development of his own character, Morpheus, is something to behold. Gaiman demonstrates a considerable knowledge of the characters he weaves into Sandman, one of my favorite instances being the humorous aside of J’onn J’onnz’s/the Martian Manhunter’s on p. 147: “Come, Scott Free; let us hit the kitchen. I have a secret stash of Oreos of which you are welcome to partake.” Throughout his take on Constantine, Gaiman references key parts of Constantine’s own history: on the first page we see Constantine, we first have a shot of a pack of Silk Cut cigarettes (82), the brand Constantine smokes roughly 30 a day of; Constantine’s “relationship” with London is shown on p. 83; Constantine’s old punk rock outfit, Mucous Membrane, comes up on 84; and, to avoid making too long a list, Newcastle — one of the major trauma’s that repeatedly haunts John Constantine early on in Hellblazer — is wonderfully woven into the final page of his cameo, 104.
More tellingly than the details sprinkled throughout Constantine’s role in Sandman is the use of Constantine himself. Not uncommon for John, someone has helped themselves to something of his, something often that Constantine himself has no urge to mess around with. And in complete harmony with Constantine’s dark world, it is an ex-girlfriend and a junky who has taken Morpheus’ bag of sand and is using it as a drug, killing herself in the process. The ending of Constantine’s chapter demonstrates Gaiman’s respect for the character: Constantine, bastard that he often is, cracks a little, demonstrating that there is a human heart (though with demon blood pumping through it) and human emotions (though wrought with trauma) within him. And, again a major trope of Constantine’s own title, he loses a friend; the best he can do for Rachel is ask Morpheus to allow her to die peacefully, not painfully.
Interestingly, even keeping with what Freud wrote, it is through John’s perspective that I felt anything close to the uncanny. Despite Morpheus’ and Constantine’s worlds being rich with magical, animistic elements, there are still things that frighten John, and when Morpheus tells us that Rachel’s father’s house is not safe for humans, we know he isn’t lying. By following Morpheus into the darkness, we get a fine take on Constantine — his love of his friends, ones he often puts directly in the way of danger, his past, and the adrenaline rush he often gets from being involved in dark matters — and we get a slight uncanny sensation: we may know there are monsters in the dark in Constantine’s world, this isn’t a feeling or thought process we’ve “surmounted,” yet we don’t know what these monsters will look like or what they can do. The shot of the house having become a living creature is well done, demonstrating something that perhaps we knew, but didn’t want drawn into the light.