Look what they did to John Constantine

The SixPack comics by Garth Ennis, John McCrea and Russ Braun came out about a decade ago to resounding indifference. A dubious spin-off to the still highly-regarded Hitman series by Ennis and McCrea, the adventures of SixPack, Dogwelder and the other assorted miscreants of Section Eight were full of puerile humour and a resounding lack of respect for some of DC's biggest spiritual entities (The Phantom Stranger's gangsta rapping skills were certainly... unique.) 

It's all generally harmless, even with one of the characters fighting evil with the power of perversion, and another character literally just a pile of guts, but there is enough sharp humour, and the tiniest pieces of pathos in the sad story of a hopeless alcoholic.

The best parts in the two series that we somehow got were when Ennis got in some nice biting of the hand that fed him, with the Batman imploring that he's not a racist as he tries to get out of a parking ticket, and Superman cheerfully giving a hopeless alcoholic a bottle of booze and telling him that everything is going to be okay.

The most biting part is for poor old John Constantine. In interviews talking about the character and his work on it in the past, Ennis was always clear that Constantine was one of the most interesting characters in mainstream comics - a chancer, a lurker, someone who is very much not a hero, but will ultimately try to do the right thing if he has to, (and often totally fails to be both good or useful).

The world improbably got 300 issues of Hellblazer with that character, with some very good and very not-good issues in that run, but Constantine was always clearly the same man. And then they refolded him back into the DC universe and he was hanging out with the Justice League again and firing magic bolts of energy from his fingers like a right dickhead.

This clearly did not sit well with Ennis, who wrote Hellblazer at an astonishingly young age and clearly has fondness for the fuckup that is John Constantine. So in the the SixPack and Dogwelder comic, Constantine shows up riding a cosmic surfboard and wearing a stupid fucking helmet

The character is self-aware enough to realise that he doesn't really work when he has to use his Hellblazer pistol to weave his magic, and spends his entire appearance moaning about his current situation (while still manipulating the team into saving the world when all the other superheroes are just bloody useless). 

It's all there to drive home the point that they had a truly great character and have just wasted it, and now John is just another tit in the crowd in the big crossovers. There has been some attempts to return Constantine to his darker roots, most notably in some excellent comics by Si Spurrier and Aaron Campbell, but that just further proves that John doesn't belong in a room full of spandex..

At least we did get one last Steve Dillon drawing of Constantine, crying on the cover of #2 with his cigarettes between his fingers like he's Wolverine. That's something.