John Constantine, Hellblazer

John Constantine, Hellblazer

By Jonathan Aquino

Saturday Stories

October 19, 2019

In 1999 before working in South Korean school as a teacher, I was already an English tutor for Koreans. I had a friend who had many pupils and he gave me some, which was good for both of us. He would conduct his classes in his condominium in Pasay, and I would be at the KFC at the corner of F.B. Harrison and Vito Cruz.

That area has a lot of good memories. I was always carrying a sketchpad, and I would draw at the nearby Cultural Center of the Philippines complex and at the Baywalk. Another favorite hang-out was the National Bookstore at SM Harrison Plaza where I would always read the John Constantine "Hellblazer" graphic novels.

John Constantine is a detective with occult powers, and evil spirits hate him. But he might be dead before they get to him because he has lung cancer, and he would be dying anyway. The "Constantine" TV series got the character right, but the film version with Keanu Reeves which had nothing in common with the source material.

And I just came across the first issue of "John Constantine, Hellblazer," after all these years. Constantine fights the hunger demon Mnemoth, who makes people eat voraciously as they slowly die. His friend Gary Lester exorcised it from a slave in Tangiers, but the demon controlled his mind, and so he bought it to England

Photo courtesy of MyComicShop