Saturday, February 19, 2005 The Constant Sting of Constantine For some, the fact that Gordon Sumner, a.k.a. Sting, never got a chance to play the British comic book superhero that he inspired is a slap in the face of synchronicity. Back in 1985, when British comic book writer Alan Moore first introduced a character by the name of John Constantine, Sting was a full bore multimedia superhero. He had conquered arenas with The Police, begun a solo career and was starring in films such as Dune, Plenty and Brimstone and Treacle. So perhaps it’s no surprise that when Moore first turned to writers Steve Bissette and John Totleben around that time and asked them for a wish list of things they would like to add to Swamp Thing, both of them mentioned the idea of a character that looked like the runaway pop star. Thus, the supernatural detective John Constantine was born, although as Moore pointed out in a 1993 issue of Wizard Magazine, DC Comics went to great lengths thereafter to remove all traces of the character’s Gordon Sumner ties: ‘I think DC is terrified that Sting will sue them, although Sting has seen the character and commented in Rolling Stone that he thought it was great,’ Moore opined at the time. ‘He was very flattered to have a comic character who looked like him, but DC gets nervous about these things. They started to eradicate all traces of references in the introduction of the early Swamp Thing books to John Constantine's resemblance to Sting . But I can state categorically that the character only existed because Steve and John wanted to do a character that looked like Sting.’ Part of the reason the setting for this weekend’s Warner Brothers film was changed from London to Los Angeles is that it was felt Keanu Reeves – who took over the Americanized end of things from an originally attached Nicolas Cage – could not convincingly play a Brit. And so, the closest we’re left with is this actual Sting sighting by Moore, which gave him chills: ‘One day, I was in Westminster in London - this was after we had introduced the character -- and I was sitting in a sandwich bar,’ Moore explains in the same Wizard Magazine interview. ‘All of a sudden, up the stairs came John Constantine. He was wearing the trenchcoat, a short cut - he looked - no, he didn't even look exactly like Sting. He looked exactly like John Constantine.’ ‘He looked at me, stared me straight in the eyes, smiled, nodded almost conspiratorially, and then just walked off around the corner to the other part of the snack bar,’ adds Moore. ‘I sat there and thought, should I go around that corner and see if he is really there, or should I just eat my sandwich and leave? I opted for the latter; I thought it was the safest. I'm not making any claims to anything. I'm just saying that it happened. Strange little story.’ As Constantine begins racking up its record February box office numbers, you can bet more than a few blokes in pubs around the United Kingdom are bemoaning this weekend what could have been. But the way Hollywood works theses days, it’s still not too late for an animated TV series about a crime fighting English teacher from Newcastle who moonlights as a jazz musician. (Richard Horgan) ~Anne