CREATOR EXCLUSIVE
Si Spurrier and Aaron Campbell are taking John Constantine on the road as they return to Hellblazer
→ THREE YEARS AFTER THEIR RUN on Hellblazer came to an end, Si Spurrier and Aaron Campbell are returning to the mage with John Constantine, Hellblazer: Dead In America, which sees an ailing John Constantine crossing the Atlantic as he flees murder charges in his native Britain.
“It’s certainly where we always intended to take him, which was John in the US on the run from the law and slowly realising that his body is essentially dead so he has to do something about that,” explains Spurrier.
“It’s all still exactly the same but with some additional, quite meaty incentivisation, which came about because we sat down and thought about a lot of the greatest hits, the things that really matter if you’re interested in the life and times of John Constantine.”
Guest-starring both Swamp Thing and the Dream King himself, the eight-parter not only harks back to Constantine’s debut in 1985’s Swamp Thing 37, but also his role in 1989’s Sandman issue three. “It occurred to me while I was plotting all this out that there were some quite significant gaps in John’s backstory, which, by miraculous convenience, allowed us to tell the same story we wanted to tell – but with a whole lot of added stakes, and the legitimate appearance of these characters that people are interested in,” continues Spurrier.
“Dream is sort of the initiator of this entire arc and Swamp Thing plays a massive role, while we’ll also bump into various other characters – that we’re not going to spoil – as both protagonists and antagonists.”
The first issue alludes to how, after being released from Roderick Burgess’s prison in Sandman issue one, Morpheus sets out to track down his missing items of power. These include the bag of sand that allows him to manipulate dreams, which had fallen into Constantine’s hands; after he failed to open it, it passed onto his ex-girlfriend, who became addicted to its narcotic properties.
“The thing that didn’t make sense to me is that if she was able to pull the strings apart in order to utilise it as a drug, then why couldn’t John – despite being a well-regarded occultist who really should have been able to do that?” says Spurrier. “The answer is, he did.
“He lied. He told a big, fat fib to Dream, who not being up to full speed at the time was totally hoodwinked by it. The fact that John at some point in the past did, in fact, have access to small quantities of this incredible magical resource speaks to a lot of the stuff that he was doing in Swamp Thing, and it fits in with what happens to him and his companions in this arc that we’re now telling.”
Taking to the road
