Greetings and welcome to yet another amazing video.
Today’s topic is Johanna Constantine, a polarizing and contentious character from the recently released Netflix series The Sandman. If Johanna Constantine was a stand-in for John Constantine, it was not immediately clear from the casting. In the Sandman comic books, he is depicted. Early interviews conducted before the show’s premiere further hid Johanna Constantine’s connections to the characters in the original DC Comics plot that the series depicts.
So relax and get ready for a thrilling journey!
Explaining The Origins of Johanna Constantine
There is a relationship between John Constantine and Johanna Constantine. She is a distant relative of John Constantine and carries all of his intelligence. Neil Gaiman also created Johanna Constantine as a tribute to John Constantine’s creator Alan Moore.
In The Sandman #13, a story that also featured William Shakespeare’s first appearance and the introduction of another well-known character, Hob Gadling, Johanna Constantine, a creation of Neil Gaiman and Michael Zulli, made her debut.
When they were traveling through England in the fourteenth century, Dream and his sister Death stopped at an inn. Hob Gadling was heard saying that he would not die because humans only died when everyone else did. When the man returned to the inn a century later, Dream recommended him to talk about the situation further. Because of this, Dream and Hob would talk once every hundred years. Lady Constantine unexpectedly attended their reunion in 1789.
She thought Dream was the devil after hearing about his travel misadventures. Hob confused her for the Wandering Jew (an anti-Semitic stock character from European folklore). Dream reassured her that her suspicion was unfounded before using his authority to render her helpless. This plotline is also present in the Netflix series.
Dream asked Lady Constantine for assistance in retrieving the head of his famous Greek poet son Orpheus, who was Dream’s son. After failing to save his beloved Eurydice from Hades during the Reign of Terror, the latter’s body had been eaten.
Later, when Constantine was discovered and captured during the French Revolution, revolutionary leader Maximilian Robespierre revealed some of the information he had collected about her personal history. After hiding Orpheus’ head in a stack of severed heads at this point, she was able to escape from prison with the aid of Dream. Then, after singing a song that rendered Robespierre insane and enabled him and Lady Constantine to flee.
All of this happened in The Sandman issue #29, which Gaiman and illustrator Stan Woch worked on together. Gaiman pitched numerous concepts to his editors at DC before settling on this one, because he had long known he wanted to depict a tale in which Lady Constantine participated in the French Revolution. Robespierre revealed some of Lady Constantine’s past in the ensuing narrative, which increased her aura of mystery. Although she was the daughter of George and Harrier Constantine, some people believed Johanna’s original father to be Sir Frances Dashwood, because of her mother’s affair with him. Dashwood was the creator of the actual Hellfire Clubs.
The transgender French spy Chevallier D’eon served as her mentor, as she received training in espionage, linguistics, and languages. Lady Constantine regularly engaged in occult activities and caused disturbance in remote locations like Louisiana and Egypt. The Hellblazer’s most ancient magical progenitor, the pagan ruler Kon-Stan-Tyn, may not even be linked to John Constantine, even though Frances Dashwood is not the sole magical ancestor of John Constantine. As a result, Johanna would be his ancestor, as she most closely resembles him—not Kon-Stan-Tyn.
When Lady Constantine finally passes away at the age of 99, some of the most heartbreaking scenes in the series—such as Dream and Orpheus’s bittersweet reunion—took place at her grave.
But her tale was expanded in Andy Diggle and Doran Sudzuka’s comic Hellblazer Special: Lady Constantine, which has only four issues and takes place a few years before she met Dream and Hob Gadling. The British Crown employed her to find Pandora’s Box on a sunken ship in the Arctic Ocean. Swamp Thing from the 18th century was among the friends she enlisted as Pandora. An army of homunculi attempted to stop her and seize the box for themselves. She succeeded in her task, but at a high cost, since her comrades suffered greatly—another trait, she has in common with her most famous offspring.
So let us look at the 4-part series in detail.
Hellblazer Special: Lady Constantine
In Issue 1, we see the narrative is set in 1785. Through the Arctic Sea, Captain Talbard and his men navigate their galleon. Instead of finding whales or the valuable fat that may be extracted from them, they instead come across what appears to be an abandoned ship. The captain takes a small group of his crew onboard the ship out of curiosity. The captain is about to capitalise on his discovery of a weird, metal box dangling from chains in the ship’s partially submerged cargo hold, when a terrifying grey thing emerges from the sea and orders the gathering men to escape.
Then we see Johanna Constantine, who discovers that her inability to control the Parliament of Flames is impeding her capacity to continue perfecting the technique of turning metal into gold in London. Johanna is rudely interrupted by an angry innkeeper as she now shares a small, barren room with her younger sister, Mouse, who is dressed as a guy to avoid the terrible fate that can strike a young girl on London’s streets. The innkeeper was about to give Johanna his belt after being unimpressed by Constantine’s attempts to settle her bill with a phoney gold ring, when a courier with instructions to transport her to Westminster arrived.
After moving to Westminster, Constantine is greeted by Mister Tweed and Mister Bramble, two officers of her majesty’s secret service. The two assign Johanna the task of rescuing the metal box that Captain Talbard and his crew discovered, knowing she has a reputation for discreetly handling strange state issues. The price Constantine demands for accepting this position is high: a hereditary title, an estate, and a lifetime stipend of 5,000 pounds. The two agree to this cost if the package is returned untouched.
Next, we see a beast like the one that attacked Talbard’s crew being tortured by Lady Blackwood in the dungeons of Blackwood Manor. Doesn’t take long for it to become clear that the animals are actually brothers and that Lady Blackwood’s torture is motivated by her desire to find out where the captive beast’s brother is (who she believes betrayed her and stole “the box”). The whereabouts of one creature may be determined by reading its entrails, according to Blackwood, who confesses that she made both of them. The chained creature cries for mercy as it realises what is about to happen.
Johanna visits the eerie Oldland Croft in Hither Green in quest of assistance, aware that she lacks the abilities necessary to recover the strange box for the British secret agency. Here, she converses with an apparition by the name of Jack; if he decides to assist her, she will reveal to him the identities of those guilty for his death.
Rafe McCallister, a roguish sea captain, is having a leisurely shave at a dockside tavern when Johanna unexpectedly shows up and leans close to his neck while directing the razor being used to remove his facial hair. Clearly, longtime friends, the two chat briefly before Constantine persuades Rafe to let her borrow his vessel, The Jezebel, for her mission.
Johanna delivers Mouse a twig of elderberry from an enchanted wood aboard Rafe’s ship. She instructs her to carry it with her at all times, saying that it will protect her from danger.
Later, when the Jezebel was well out to sea, Constantine and Rafe took advantage of the solitude to have an intimate relationship. McCallister’s mood is soured when he discovers a flintlock handgun beneath Johanna’s pillow, and he decides that he needs to go take a pee. Shortly after, Rafe returns to Constantine’s cabin and hears Johanna being threatened. A brief glance at a nearby figurehead would have shown that it has an eerie similarity to a specific swamp-dwelling beast. McCallister storms into the cottage but finds Johanna alone.
When they reach Spitzbergen, a little Arctic hamlet that holds the box Johanna is looking for, Constantine and Mouse check into a cozy room in the Mariner’s Inn. They are greeted by a dapper man going by the name of Dorian Blackwood. He cautions her against continuing her hunt for the lost box. When Constantine stands her ground, the guy transforms and is identified as the monster who attacked Talbard’s crew. The growling monster pulls a handgun out of its coat’s folds and points it at Johanna.
Johanna Constantine appears to do some evil magic as she confronts the wrong end of the flintlock pistol, causing the offending firearm to sprout roots that soon spread to entangle the creature. After being disarmed and slightly chastened by Johanna’s magical prowess, the creature assumes its human form. He immediately assumes that Constantine has been sent by his creator, Lady Blackwood, to reclaim the magic box he stole from her.
The monster informs Johanna about the box’s past, in an effort to convince her that she should not think about giving the box back to Blackwood. While unaware of the box’s creation date, the beast is confident that the box conceals a vast evil that, should it ever be opened, will destroy the planet. Previously, Lady Blackwood served as the box’s protector; cursed with immortality, she kept vigil over it throughout the history of man. After falling into the hands of certain crusader knights, the box was ultimately taken by Seljuk raiders.
Using her own mysterious abilities, Lady Blackwood developed a race of beings who would never grow weary in their quest for the box. Dorian Blackwood, the oldest of these creatures, who is now before Constantine and is retracting his story, discovered the box in the private collection of a dead Norwegian royal. One of the creature’s brothers stopped by before he could give Blackwood the box and informed him that she had gone insane and intended to open the box. Finding no other option, the monster took the box. He sailed far into the arctic, scuttling his ship and dumping it securely at the bottom of the sea. Lady Blackwood is prepared to sacrifice the entire globe in her desperate desire for oblivion.
Dorian jumps into a frenzy when he discovers that Constantine isn’t working for Blackwood and charges at her. Quick on her feet, Johanna shoots at the thing; the power of the contact blows the creature out the window of the chamber and out of sight. Johanna persuades Mouse that she must break into a whaler anchored at the harbour and steal its logbook to get the coordinates of the wreck where the box is hidden, after concluding that the beast must have landed there.
Mouse gets onboard the Bryggen, the whaler ship, during the night. She moves into the darkness in search of the log book that the sleeping captain is holding, but as she gets closer, she is shocked to realise that the captain’s throat has been cut open. Before Dorian emerges from the shadows and tries to strike her down, she makes a last-ditch effort to grab the book and just about succeeds in freeing it. The crew is roused from their sleep and engage the beast that killed their captain, while Mouse leaves the boat.
Johanna tries her best to comfort her still-upset younger sister as they return to the open seas on Rafe’s galleon. Rafe quickly places his ship above the sought-after sunken wreck using the log book Mouse found. Johanna throws a little pebble into the water after wrapping a vine around it. The vine expands and digs deep into the wreck’s hull, when the boulder reaches the water floor, before wrapping itself tightly around the box and pulling it to the surface. With a large group of shocked seamen surrounding her as she stands on the ship’s deck, Constantine vocally directs the enormous vines to drop the box in front of her.
When the vines are freed from their weight, they alter and shift once more, this time creating a giant, imposing monster that resembles a human. The entity, referred to by Johanna as Jack-In-The-Green, discloses that he assisted Constantine in finding the box. As compensation, he now demands the identities of those who killed him in a previous existence. He finally agrees to help escort the box to safety after Constantine and Jack have a private conversation and exchange bitter words.
After leaving her home and embarking on the seas, Lady Blackwood discovers that Whitehall has sent Johann to reclaim the box. Blackwood recounts that Johanna was disinherited when still a little child and that Lord and Lady Constantine were killed for treason. Blackwood is more determined than ever to get the box back after dismissing Constantine as little more than a menial street wizard.
Johanna realises that Lady Blackwood has arrived to take the weapon she intends to use to destroy the world, when an uncharacteristically strong wind whips up. A sizable cruiser emerges on the horizon. Constantine issues Rafe the order to go for the adjacent port of Spitzbergen, feeling restrained by the extremely unfavourable circumstances and having little prospect of outrunning or outfighting the incoming warship. Blackwood’s galleon is getting closer as Johanna attempts to call Jack, but in vain.
Issue 3 opens with the Blackwood’s ship approaching, as Johana and Rafe attempt to conceal the box in a crypt beneath an old church on the Island.
Johanna and Mouse enter the church, lock themselves inside with the box, and order Rafe to stall Blackwood for as long as possible.
Johanna turns around to find Jack, who informs her that he tried to sink Blackwood’s ship, but he just couldn’t reach for some odd reason. Johanna tells him that Blackwood has put a spirit ward in her ship, so things needed to be done the hard way.
She tells Jack to take her to the spirit world to find out what really is inside the box. Jack hands her a fruit to eat, and after consuming it, she collapses in front of Mouse.
Meanwhile, we see Blackwood and his army of undead reaching the Island. After a short skirmish, he meets Rafe and extends his hands to enter into an alliance.
We see Johanna getting inside the box via the spirit world with the help of Jack the Green. Over there, she meets many angry demons who want to eat the planet.
While Dorian was fighting with his own group members, He requests his mother, who was inside the ship, to stop this madness. Lady Blackwood kills him and Jack the Green while revealing his actual name (Alf Oldland), then she turns towards Rafe as he tries to escape.
Johanna returns to the real world and informs Mouse about the angry demons and how she wants to free them. She is also able to learn about Lady Blackwood’s actual first name. It is Pandora!
Issue 4 begins with the Box now open, and thousands of angry demons, who all look different, standing outside the box. The demons try to escape from the church in order to devour the planet, but the door was sealed by one of Johanna’s charms. The monster who tried to open the door got angry and tried to eat Johanna. Apparently, Johanna had made a deal with them while she was inside the box. So, she shouted to the demon that she couldn’t eat her because they had made a deal. Furthermore, the particular demon was Echidna, the mother of monsters bound by the rules of engagement.
The deal was, If Johanna let them out of the box, they wouldn’t be able to eat her or Mouse and would have to answer her three questions truthfully. However, once the questions are responded to, Constantine will open the door, allowing the demons to do whatever they want to after getting out.
The first question Johanna asks is, how was the box created?
Echidna responds that Mulciber built this prison enclosed within a box and imprisoned all the demons within, since her rapacious offsprings defied Lucifer and reproduced and multiplied, posing a threat to escape the very bounds of hell.
According to her, the box was never intended to distill and crystallize into the physical world. Still, some way, it ended up in the world of the mortals in ancient times.
There, a competing prince gave it to the powerful empress Pandora, but prohibited her from opening it while knowing fully well that she would.
The prince considered overthrowing her realm, but he had no idea the horrible consequences she would bring about. All the devils that emerged, nourished, reproduced, and turned the world upside down.
A group of mortal sorcerers had to be assembled in order to use a single binding phrase to summon the demons back within the box.
The punishment for Pandora was terrible; she was cursed with immortality and could only perish at the hands of those demons. The sorcerers connected her destiny to that of the box, demanding payment from her to make sure no one opened it until the end of time.
Through the millennia, Pandora carried her shame with her and guarded the box at all times.
After ten thousand years, she has gone pretty insane and wants nothing more than to be released from existence.
For her second question, Johanna says that attaining wealth and power has been her lifelong dream. So how can she get that?
There, Echidna tells her that once every hundred years, the Devil and the Wandering Jew get together in a pub to drink and tell stories. She can get anything she wants from the Devil. However, Echidna didn’t inform her about the exact tavern or the time.
Constantine, being very sharp, for her third question, she asked the demon, what is the single word of binding which will entrap the demons in the box once again.
Echidna wrote down the word on the floor but immediately picked up Johanna and shut her mouth so she could not speak the binding word.
Immediately, Lady Blackwood enters the church without using the door. She sees the Demons and asks Echidna to kill her and grant her peace. But the Demons, already very angry with her, don’t allow that and just start to attack her by scratching and biting on her body.
As a call for help, she releases Johanna from the Demon’s grasp. Johanna shouts out the binding word, driving all the demons and Pandora to get trapped inside the box. While Pandora was being dragged inside, she held onto Mouse. Alas, Mouse also got trapped along with everyone inside the box.
Next, we see Johanna in London, delivering the box to Mister Tweed and Mister Bramble, who hands over a deed of ennoblement signed by King George himself, guaranteeing in addition to the title, she will also receive five thousand pounds every year. She also gets the Blackwood Manor.
The 4-part mini-series ends with Johanna traveling to the inn to meet the Devil in order to get back Mouse, who apparently is not her sister but her daughter!
Clearly, after this incident, she meets up with Dream in the tavern.
Johanna Constantine in Netflix’s Sandman
There are several difficulties in adapting a comic book like The Sandman for the screen. Since the first issue was published, author Neil Gaiman has had thirty years to revise and update his narrative. Still, minor changes, like a character’s look, risk upsetting devoted readers.
Though several Sandman characters, like Lucienne and Lucifer, have had their genders switched in the Netflix live-action series, which recently finished its first season, creating Johanna Constantine in the same way, may have been the most contentious decision.
The character, who is based on the warlock John Constantine from the Hellblazer series from DC Comics, is portrayed by Jenna Coleman of Doctor Who. In the comics, Johana was introduced considerably later in the story than John. In other words, it appeared as though Netflix had just transformed John into Johanna.
While both John and Johanna Constantine appear in the Sandman comics, only Johanna is seen in the Netflix series. As previously mentioned, Johanna is also considered John’s ancestor from the 18th century. Coleman was cast in Netflix’s Sandman as both Johanna and her contemporary clone, representing a new approach.
Despite appearing in two episodes of The Sandman’s first season, Coleman’s Constantine has also proven popular with viewers. Her main-starring episode also had a plethora of allusions to Hellblazer characters like Ric the Vic, the demon Agileth, and the chilling nightmare sequence from Hellblazer #11. Even Johanna’s ex-girlfriend Rachel makes references to John’s ex-wives in the comics, including Oliver, Sarah, and Kit Ryan.
It’s been fun to observe and get to know this new character. “She isn’t a female version of John. She is a different Constantine.” Fans appear to concur with what Neil Gaiman stated on Twitter.
In the episode where she is first introduced, Dream is on the quest for his bag of sand, which has passed through the Constantine family’s hands. He locates Johanna, who claims her ex-girlfriend retained the bag of sand. Unfortunately, it was killing her since its strength was never meant for her. After obtaining the sand, Dream assisted Johanna’s girlfriend in dying peacefully before the two split ways.
In the show, Jenna Coleman portrays the character in two separate iterations. She also plays the ancestor from the eighteenth century. After the Sandbag plot, she is shown again in Sandman Presents: Love Street, where a young John is seen in the home of Morpheus while Dream was still being held hostage.
Though Netflix has yet to renew the fresh new series for a second season, speculation of a Johanna Constantine spin-off is a promising sign.
Will John Constantine make a cameo in the series in the upcoming future?
Gaiman acknowledged that the rights issues made giving John Constantine a one-episode cameo more challenging. Still, he insisted that the choice to base Johanna Constantine on Lady Constantine from the 18th century and cast the same actor in both roles was made early in the development cycle of the show and was not necessarily influenced by the rights issues.
Giving John Constantine a cameo in The Sandman would be utterly superfluous, as well as being legally complex. Adaptations are allowed to modify aspects of the characters when appropriate, particularly given Gaiman’s participation in the choice to create Johanna Constantine.
What Makes Johanna Constantine So Powerful?
Johanna is an apt occultist like John and shares similar powers with him like Divination, Curses, the Ability to conjure Demons, Illusion Casting, Mind Control, etc.
Of course, she is an expert in Witchcraft. Johanna Constantine possessed the skill to control magical energy for a restricted range of effects. Her powers were not explored as much as John’s, because of the small time she has spent compared to her popular ancestor. While Johanna is familiar with a variety of rituals and can create protective rings against demons and other supernatural creatures, she prefers to depend on her reputation and theatrics than genuine magic, which is significantly less reliable than acting on people’s expectations.
In this, she is similar to her descendant, who, despite possessing some magical ability, wants to keep people wondering about how powerful he actually is, so that dangerous magicians dismiss him as a scam artist dabbling in trivial hedge wizardry.
While Johanna appears to be less competent at using magic than John, based on the few stories she’s been in, she is significantly more trained than him in most other areas. Johanna was said to be a protégé of Chevalier d’Éon, a real-life French diplomat and spy who once spent 33 years acting as a woman at the court of Empress Elizabeth of Russia. Johanna became a master in disguise and a specialist in espionage under d’Éon’s tuition, allegedly serving the Royal family for many years as a secret spy comparable to James Bond, even after reclaiming her title.
She could also transmute matter into different forms. She had the ability to produce and absorb matter and energy, shape it, and recreate it into anything they choose. Johanna Constantine knew the physics necessary to achieve such an effect, but she struggled to execute it all the time.
The most interesting skill she possessed is that of haruspicy. Johanna Constantine could deduce facts from slaughtered animals’ entrails.
Here’s a small piece of Trivia: Roderick Burgess bought Lady Johanna’s estate, Fawny Rig, in the early 1900s. So the estate in which Dream was held captive for over a century was actually John Constantine’s mansion.
Marvelous Verdict
Out of all the actors who played a Constantine on screen, Jenna Coleman is the greatest thus far, and oddly, the most real, since she possesses the humour, beauty, and sleazy, doomed quality.
We don’t know much about Johanna’s past beyond that Morpheus has had numerous encounters with the Constantine family in the past.
However, John’s ancestry is more well-documented and may be traced back to the Laughing Magician family. His forefathers were known for their deception, which allowed them to mislead both God and the Devil.
It’s unclear if this will be reflected in the show just yet. As previously said, we’ve just scratched the surface with Johanna and we hope to see much more of her.
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