After a rather long winter break, Constantine is back on air. If you recall, the show ended on cliffhanger, with Constantine shot and left for dead.

By the end of the episode, I wonder what the direction this show will take. What I would like is for the finale episode to explain Newcastle and perhaps introduce the Newcastle demon as the big baddie in Season 2.

However, the way the show is going, I felt perhaps the Zed’s cult family may be a constant reoccurring threat. Manny the Angel story feels like it’s going nowhere.

If you’ve seen the episode, click below to read the recap and how the television show compares to the original Vertigo Hellblazer comic books.

Warning: Contains spoilers.

John Con Noir Webisode 1: Trash (16 Jan 2015)

Along with the regular show, DC Comics is also uploading quick webisodes of John Con Noir.
Unlike some webisodes that expands the universe, this John Constantine animation seems to poke fun at itself. You can watch the episode on YouTube.
In the first episode of John Con Noir, Constantine is on a search to look for the television show creators (Daniel Cerone and David S. Goyer). It’s just fun Claymation, and I noticed that they show Constantine smoking! It’s also worth noting that Matt Ryan also voice the animation.

Constantine Episode 9: The Saint of Last Resorts – Part 2 (16 Jan 2015)

Constantine was able to get out of his predicament by inviting a demon called Pazuzu into his body to heal himself. We’ve seen sort of thing in the comic books. The first time we’re introduced to this was in issue #8 when Nergal the demon gave Constantine some of his blood to quickly heal Constantine’s entire broken body. The demon blood would later resurfaced in later storyline… But since the story ended with his exorcism, this might be the last we see of Pazuzu (or is it?)
Manny the Angel mentioned that what Constantine did was invite “the First of the Fallen“, which is not true (at least in the comic book, that the demon did not go by the Pazuzu name). In the Hellblazer comic book, there are three demons that ruled hell: The First of the Fallen (aka Satan), the Second and the Third. In Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics, he wrote that the triumvirate was Lucifer, Beelzebub, and Azazel. To be clear, all six demons are separate creatures, although you could easily mistaken them to be one and the same. If we were to stick to the Hellblazer universe, the First of the Fallen will come back to haunt Constantine time and time again.
Although there were a lot going on in this episode, from the Snake “Tempter” to Zed’s cult family to the Mexican gang… they were all resolved by the end of the episode! The way they handled it, it just did not feel very satisfying. I wonder if it is because they realized they had a shortened season (13 episodes), that they had to squash developing storylines before the last episode.
This Mexican prison that Constantine was sent to seemed pretty low security to me. In the comics, when Brian Azzarello took over the series with Hellblazer #146, his first story arc was to send John Constantine to a maximum Federal Prison. The “Hard Times” storyline was one of the better Constantine story, but unfortunately, the television didn’t go that direction.