Lady Constantine
Sep. 21st, 2006 11:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakToday is my mother's birthday, which makes for brief time online, but I'm still in an eighteenth century mood. I'm also in a frustrated comics reader mood, as ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
likeadeuce torments me with entries indicating that the new Astonishing X-Men is on sale and worth the wait. In the US. Which probably means I won't get it till the end of October. So, eighteenth century mood and comics mood unite and make for the recommendation of a miniseries I read back when it was issued, and now it's collected and available in one volume:
Lady Constantine
Which you could classify as either a Sandman or a Hellblazer spin-off. It's complicated due to the origins of the title character, Johanna Constantine, who belongs in the family tree of John Constantine of Hellblazer fame, but was created by Neil Gaiman for two Sandman stories. (Her debut was in "Men of Good Fortune", she really got fleshed out in Thermidor, and gets referenced in Brief Lives.) In Sandman, she's an adventuress with experience and sang froid, striking a bargain with the Lord of Dreams and helping to retrieve the head of his son Orpheus in the middle of the French Revolution. We never find out what he gave her in return, though.
Lady Constantine, written by Andy Diggle, gives us a look at Johanna in her younger days, and manages to get around the following conundrum quite neatly: in Hellblazer, the working class origins of John Constantine and the fact he's decidedly anti upper class are an important part of the atmosphere. And the miniseries was published under the Hellblazer label. Johanna, as written by Gaiman, is an aristocrat. The solution Diggle came up with was that Johanna's parents were aristocrats but disgraced and executed ones, and one of the motives which drive her through the story is to regain the money and status they lost, because being poor (and female) in the 18th century in England means something very different than in the 20th, and Diggle works with that, which makes the setting more than pretty costumes. It also makes her something other than just a female version of the Constantine character, with whom, of course, she shares many traits, the con artist routine, the moral ambiguity and the tendency to get the people around her who care for her in the proverbial line of fire. I already liked Johanna in Sandman - and appreciated that Gaiman doesn't pull the "heroines never really have to get into bed with the bad guys as opposed to heroes who do go to bed with bad girls" with her, Johanna in Thermidor did have sex with St. Just - and had been disappointed by her brief and not very interesting appearance in The Dreaming, so this one shot centred on her was something I had been looking forward to and been nervous about. It turned out to be just what I hoped for.
If you have never read either Sandman or Hellblazer, you'll still be able to follow the story; it works on its own right. If you do know either series, you'll get an additional kick out of several aspects, and will find the answer as to what Johanna was looking to get from Dream when she interrupted him and Hob Gadling in Men of Good Fortune both satisfying and moving. She's a great main character, and her arch nemesis in this story is a woman as well; giving away the identity - and how Diggle manages to work in a certain myth here - would be spoiling some the fun. I wish there were more stories about Johanna at any age (young, mature, old, don't care), but if that's not to be, I'm happy to have this one. If you like adventures with a supernatural element and ambigous main characters, and/or tough women, you'll be, too.
likeadeuce torments me with entries indicating that the new Astonishing X-Men is on sale and worth the wait. In the US. Which probably means I won't get it till the end of October. So, eighteenth century mood and comics mood unite and make for the recommendation of a miniseries I read back when it was issued, and now it's collected and available in one volume: Lady Constantine
Which you could classify as either a Sandman or a Hellblazer spin-off. It's complicated due to the origins of the title character, Johanna Constantine, who belongs in the family tree of John Constantine of Hellblazer fame, but was created by Neil Gaiman for two Sandman stories. (Her debut was in "Men of Good Fortune", she really got fleshed out in Thermidor, and gets referenced in Brief Lives.) In Sandman, she's an adventuress with experience and sang froid, striking a bargain with the Lord of Dreams and helping to retrieve the head of his son Orpheus in the middle of the French Revolution. We never find out what he gave her in return, though.
Lady Constantine, written by Andy Diggle, gives us a look at Johanna in her younger days, and manages to get around the following conundrum quite neatly: in Hellblazer, the working class origins of John Constantine and the fact he's decidedly anti upper class are an important part of the atmosphere. And the miniseries was published under the Hellblazer label. Johanna, as written by Gaiman, is an aristocrat. The solution Diggle came up with was that Johanna's parents were aristocrats but disgraced and executed ones, and one of the motives which drive her through the story is to regain the money and status they lost, because being poor (and female) in the 18th century in England means something very different than in the 20th, and Diggle works with that, which makes the setting more than pretty costumes. It also makes her something other than just a female version of the Constantine character, with whom, of course, she shares many traits, the con artist routine, the moral ambiguity and the tendency to get the people around her who care for her in the proverbial line of fire. I already liked Johanna in Sandman - and appreciated that Gaiman doesn't pull the "heroines never really have to get into bed with the bad guys as opposed to heroes who do go to bed with bad girls" with her, Johanna in Thermidor did have sex with St. Just - and had been disappointed by her brief and not very interesting appearance in The Dreaming, so this one shot centred on her was something I had been looking forward to and been nervous about. It turned out to be just what I hoped for.
If you have never read either Sandman or Hellblazer, you'll still be able to follow the story; it works on its own right. If you do know either series, you'll get an additional kick out of several aspects, and will find the answer as to what Johanna was looking to get from Dream when she interrupted him and Hob Gadling in Men of Good Fortune both satisfying and moving. She's a great main character, and her arch nemesis in this story is a woman as well; giving away the identity - and how Diggle manages to work in a certain myth here - would be spoiling some the fun. I wish there were more stories about Johanna at any age (young, mature, old, don't care), but if that's not to be, I'm happy to have this one. If you like adventures with a supernatural element and ambigous main characters, and/or tough women, you'll be, too.
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no subject
Date: 2006-09-21 11:35 am (UTC)Not quite so happy about the sexual politics - as we said when you did your main post on the subject, there's a tendency to assume that it doesn't matter if Bad Girl heroines have to have sex with possibly-sadistic scumbags, because they're ho's anyway... I have a nasty feeling Joanna might fit into that subclass.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-21 04:40 pm (UTC)The incident in her past would be what the story details, but the miniseries suggests she wants something more than not just dream about it anymore. It's certainly her equivalent to John Constantine's Newcastle incident, at the very least...
no subject
Date: 2006-09-21 09:36 pm (UTC)Incidentally, I know you don't follow Who fandom much, but Torchwood episode one is probably to be broadcast on 21st October and there is a make Jack Harkness shag anyone you want (http://sarkastic.livejournal.com/278504.html) crossover ficathon to celebrate.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-22 12:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-21 01:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-21 04:57 pm (UTC)a) kill each other
b) hit it off and hit the town together
c) nod vaguely and never bother to find out who the other was?
no subject
Date: 2006-09-21 05:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-21 02:07 pm (UTC)I was being very selfish with the "worth the wait" comment -- so sorry ;). This is me offering to send you the issue (I'm already planning to buy extra copies for reasons I shan't get into at the moment), though considering my luck with the mail, I have no idea if it would get there before you could get it yourself.
On the other hand, there might be scans up somewhere, or soon. I'll try to poke around and find out.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-22 09:07 am (UTC)