A comical diversion at Twilight

I was surfing round this afternoon, looking up some information on Hellblazer when I found the Hellblazer Index website, which is a record of just about any appearance in comics by John Constantine (and his various relatives and avatars). There, I found reference to a Constantine appearance in an unpublished Alan Moore proposal called Twilight (or Twilight of the Superheroes - there seems to be a bit of a grey area over what its actual title would be).

I've heard of a few unpublished comic projects over the years, but this was a new one on me so I followed the various links and found Alan Moore's 'interminable ramble' about the project - what someone else might call a pitch, though I doubt anyone else writes pitches like Moore. It's quite a fascinating read, not least because Moore tells a pretty interesting story but also because DC turned it down (which seemingly ended their relationship with Moore) showing how much more conservative (in terms of story, at least) they were back when this was proposed in the late 80s. Now, of course, pretty much every character within the DC Universe has been remade, reimaged, redefined and given a walk through Elseworlds at least once and the whole legendary mythos has been given what Moore refers to as its 'capstone' in Kingdom Come but back then there'd only been The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen and the grand reset of Crisis on Infinite Earths and DC were obviously wary of taking on a universe-defining project of the size of Twilight.

In a way, it was a project ahead of its time. A lot of its themes, such as the personal relationships of the heroes and the idea of superheroes taking a role in the politics of Earth would be used in Kingdom Come and The Authority, but perhaps the lessons of Watchmen took some time to sink in before they could be used on a wider scale. There's a part of the pitch that's oddly prescient as Moore looks forward to a post-Cold War world, in a way that partly echoes the 90s we lived in:

What I want to show is a world which, having lived through the terrors of the Fifties through the early Nineties with overhanging terror of a nuclear Armageddon that seemed inevitable at the time, has found itself faced with the equally inconceivable and terrifying notion that there might not be an apocalypse. That mankind might actually have a future, and might thus be faced with the terrifying prospect of having to deal with it rather than allowing himself the indulgence of getting rid of that responsibility with a convenient mushroom cloud or nine hundred.

It's an interesting perspective from 1987.

Finally, and getting back to my original search for Hellblazer information, it's interesting to see how Moore envisioned using his creation John Constantine. This is before Jamie Delano got given the character for Hellblazer and Moore's Constantine takes a different path from Delano's in that he uses the character the way he originally was in Swamp Thing's 'American Gothic' series as the enigmatic Englishman who manipulates those more powerful than him while knowing much more than he lets on - an idea later returned to by Garth Ennis when he wrote Hellblazer, of course. The Constantine that did come about was a kind of magus figure, steeped in the world of magic, but Moore's Constantine is a man who walks in the world of heroes, manipulating Batman and Superman the way he did the Swamp Thing. Moore talks about him as a character involved in 'scams and wheeler-dealing' rather than as a magical character, and it's clear that his vision of Constantine's future development as a character was not the same as the one we got.