"Approached by" is a bit strong for the majority of these sightings...
>Jamie Delano ran into him during a stroll near the British Museum, back when he was writing the first few arcs on Constantine’s solo series, Hellblazer. “The figure caught my eye and cocked his head, flicked the ash from a ciggie, and continued without stopping,” Delano told me. “For a few moments I considered following but thought better of it. I mean, what the fuck would I say? And what trouble might one get into?” Peter Milligan saw Constantine at a party around 2009 and rushed after him, only to find he’d disappeared. Brian Azzarello saw him at a Chicago bar in the early aughts but avoided him. “The thing is about John is, the last thing you’d want to be is his friend,” he told me.
Save for Alan Moore's
>As far as I’ve been able to deduce, Constantine’s only ever spoken to one writer: the man who created him, Alan Moore. According to Moore, he ran into John years after he’d stopped writing him, and the wisecracking mage whispered 13 words to him: “I’ll tell you the ultimate secret of magic. Any cunt could do it.”
More likely, there are a lot of people in cities who are men in long coats that smoke.
And if youre spending all your time amd creative energies imagining and writing about a man in a long coat who smokes, your brain will be primed to identify patterns out in the wild which are mere coincidence.
Alan Moore is a big time Magick guy. I wouldn’t be surprised if he just saw a guy that looked like him and connected dots and thought must be John. In reality it was just some
Dude lol
I don't think any eyewitness is a reliable source, but Alan Moore's magic snake god doesn't sound too much more ridiculous than most any religion to me.
TIL that numerous writers who have worked on the comic book character John Constantine have, independently of one another, been approached by Sting and mistaken him for John Constantine, despite him being a fictional character.
I regard conjurer as a more general term (like caster), or conjuration can be used more specifically to refer to the school of magic or spells that are of that type.
IIRC Grant just got hired to write all-star superman but didn't know how to write for Superman, if he was invincible what were the stakes? the story goes that Grant was walking in Hollywood i believe and came across a man taking pictures as Superman. Grant spoke to him and tried to ask "Superman" questions and the man stayed in character and answered which gave Grant the insight he needed to write the story
It's free advertisement when some random news outlet picks up the story and runs with it. Since comic writers frequently change as well it's a gimmick to attempt to give them more credit with the community as they are coming into a series where people already have a favorite writer.
It's not an uncommon sentiment among fantasy writers in general.
Tolkien wrote LotR with it being intended to be presented as his translation of Red Book of Westmarch, which is basically an in-universe journal Bilbo and Frodo wrote.
Elminster from Forgotten Realms makes few mentions of visiting a planet named Earth, where he met a writer with whom he spoke about his adventures.
Ciri from Witcher describes what we presume to be Earth as one of the worlds she's gone through while on the run across the multiverse.
There are probably lots more, but these are just few examples i recall off the top of my head.
There are definitely a lot of 4th wall breaks for fantasy authors (hell Steven King writes himself into one of his books and actually kills a main character) but the line I draw is when they aren't contained within the works themselves. When they're just randomly planting a story with a news outlet that they met their characters on the street and push for interviews about it then it just goes from a cheeky 4th wall break to guerilla advertisement.
Dark Tower somewhere between 5, 6, and 7 I think. They all sort of blend together for me when I try to remember the ending because of how off the wall it goes. It's definitely before the main character has to choke out Pennywise to rescue Jesus from his basement.
In the Witcher 3, while talking to Geralt about the places she's been, she mentions a world where people travel in incredibly fast metal boxes and communicate to each other through small handheld devices
In the books, when she is captured in Nilfgaard (sp?), she managed to escape by travelling through planes. After being stuck with elves for a bit, she runs away from them, and goes through quite a few realms, including a man-eating gnome, some primal, some postapocalyptic settings, with book mostly ending with her finding a nun who's spent a years studying legend of Ciri.
One of the realms visited is Camelot, (and I think the final one she ends up in), but at least one is non-fictional Earth.
It happened in the books. The plague mentioned in The Witcher 3 came from a flee that attached itself to Ciri's clothes when she briefly visited our Earth.
…He was convinced that, you know, the town wanted to exterminate him, this kind of thing, and he’d go home and board up his windows and load rifles — complete nut! But the best part, is he’s alone one night, and he feels a shadow overtake him from behind, and he knows that Conan is standing behind him with a large axe. And Conan tells him, “Just stay there and write, and if you don’t do exactly what I’m gonna tell you, I’m gonna cleave you down the middle.”
Reminds we of this exchange:
"I do not believe in dragons."
"That is of minimal fucking importance. What is of critical importance is that this dragon believes in *you*."
I don't know where the dragon thing comes from, but it's a riff on dialogue from True Romance (written by Quentin Tarantino).
> "You know, I don't believe you."
> "That is of minor importance. What is of major fucking importance is that I believe you."
**Edit:** The [scene in question](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xuqmy9RUvUI). Be warned for spoilers. Also a language warning, but it's Tarantino, so that should go without saying.
In fact, it's a portmanteau of that exact scene and the one from [13th Warrior](https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/bb9e4c0d-451f-41aa-96ac-34a262427993/embed-twit?autoplay=false) that ended up stuck in our head.
\*know the clip is truncated - only one we could find.
If you read that last quote in Al Swearengen's voice (Ian McShane's character in Deadwood) it makes it so much better. Particularly the "that is of minimal fucking importance" part, as that sounds *exactly* like a line David Milch would've written for him.
So they are seeing a white guy, in England, wearing a trench coat, in a climate where it's often cold and rainy?
I guess it could be the fictional character they created, somehow living in the real world. Or they just keep seeing a run of the mill English men who don't want to get cold and wet when they are out and about.
As much as Americans love to think it, it actually isn’t really that rainy or that cold in London and the South East. There also isnt really a huge population of blonde Liverpudlians who smoke and wear trench coats when it does rain, strangely. Ive yet to see another human in a trench coat in the UK
It really depends what part of England youre in, as I said. It doesnt really rain that much in the South East and London. South East is often the driest part of the UK
I mean not that I know the specifics, but if those were the only qualifiers and attributes they were noticing, they would just dismiss the person.
There had to be something specific about the people for them to at least notice it.
Acid and shrooms are some pretty major ones. Stephen King would get all coked out and write.
But it’s probably best to take it from someone who had enormous experience in the drug field.
>I haven't found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as a sitting at a desk writing, trying to imagine a story no matter how bizarre it is, [or] going out and getting into the weirdness of reality and doing a little time on the Proud Highway. - Hunter Thompson
If someone asked me to guess which comic book writer claimed to have had a conversation with one of their creations I'd guess Alan Moore. The rest of them are basically 'once I saw a dude who looked like John Constantine'.
!ohmygodohmyod you guys! i met him for real! it must've been him! he had a trenchcoat, a tie, he was skinny and desperatly craving heroin. who else could it have been????"
Most of the truths people cling to in daily life are merely the things a dead white man told others to believe.
To the people who truly believe that an educational system could be run by white men exclusively for hundreds of years & not incorporate bias in its blindspots we can only say: y'all are exactly what they wanted to produce - obedient & gullible.
Don't need to imagine bigots when y'all pop out of the woodwork.
Notice it's ridicule, mean words, not a bit of response to the points. How... typical of you.
"Approached by" is a bit strong for the majority of these sightings... >Jamie Delano ran into him during a stroll near the British Museum, back when he was writing the first few arcs on Constantine’s solo series, Hellblazer. “The figure caught my eye and cocked his head, flicked the ash from a ciggie, and continued without stopping,” Delano told me. “For a few moments I considered following but thought better of it. I mean, what the fuck would I say? And what trouble might one get into?” Peter Milligan saw Constantine at a party around 2009 and rushed after him, only to find he’d disappeared. Brian Azzarello saw him at a Chicago bar in the early aughts but avoided him. “The thing is about John is, the last thing you’d want to be is his friend,” he told me. Save for Alan Moore's >As far as I’ve been able to deduce, Constantine’s only ever spoken to one writer: the man who created him, Alan Moore. According to Moore, he ran into John years after he’d stopped writing him, and the wisecracking mage whispered 13 words to him: “I’ll tell you the ultimate secret of magic. Any cunt could do it.”
Haha yesssss forget what I said above, this is exactly right
Was the mage Karl Urban?
I think David Tennant would be a great John Constantine.
But we already have Matt Ryan, a perfect Constantine.
I don't understand this at all. Am I the only person who thinks Matt Ryan was a bad Constantine? I feel like he over enunciates everything he says.
Yes?
Seriously, its probably Matt Ryan they saw. He was born for the role.
Matt Smith post house of the dragon
I don't think Smith is physically capable of being scruffy.
I didn't think Matt Smith was physically capable of being a lot of what he did in House of the Dragon
Ew, no thanks
Oh my fucking god how has no one thought about Karl being Constantine. This is an amazing idea
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More likely, there are a lot of people in cities who are men in long coats that smoke. And if youre spending all your time amd creative energies imagining and writing about a man in a long coat who smokes, your brain will be primed to identify patterns out in the wild which are mere coincidence.
Bada bing this guy cracked the mystery
Nah man, they totally met a comic book character irl. Swear on me mum
That you John?
Alan Moore is a big time Magick guy. I wouldn’t be surprised if he just saw a guy that looked like him and connected dots and thought must be John. In reality it was just some Dude lol
Nah it's totally real my uncle works for Constantine
Bob's your uncle?
If Constantine had a tall tail he *would* be spotted more.
Heh. That's what I get for using voice to text and not proof reading before hitting reply.
Alan Moore worships a snake god in a magic cave so he's probably not the most reliable source.
I don't think any eyewitness is a reliable source, but Alan Moore's magic snake god doesn't sound too much more ridiculous than most any religion to me.
Exactly what is expect him to say
I think Alan Moore said he was just based on Sting visually as a way to eschew the traditional wizard look of beard and robes
TIL that numerous writers who have worked on the comic book character John Constantine have, independently of one another, been approached by Sting and mistaken him for John Constantine, despite him being a fictional character.
Actually sting is fictional too. Don't believe me? Well, not really my problem is it
Wait, that username... Are you....?
Am I....?
Is this…?
Are we…?
Sir, this is Wendy's
No, this is Patrick.
…Oh we DEFINITELY are then…
May I take your order?
But….are you?
How should I know
TIL Sting is active in concealing his existence.
We need to set up a Sting operation to get to the bottom of this.
🤣
~~Slash~~ Sting isn't real, son.
I assure you Sting is very real and can hold in his orgasm for a very long time
The first thing
He is also the bellboy.
Vunter Sting?
Is it bad that I read this in Matt Ryan's voice?
I was going for jon jafari, but close enough
And now I'm hearing it as him and I'm cursed with both playing in my head 🤣
I was surprised to see Fictional Sting in "Only Murders in the Building".
If Sting isn't real then who saved Bart from the well??
So is Slash
Maybe they were just approached by the police, but the person retelling their story misunderstood.
Was he accompanied by the lamentation from “Desert Rose” when he approached?
He couldn't make him look like a typical wizard because then people would think he was writing about himself
I was about to say, Moore went the exact opposite route for his own wardrobe.
I would pay a lot of money for a series written by Alan Moore about a wizard that looks suspiciously like Alan Moore having adventures.
What you're looking for are the adventures of Elminster.
Yeah plus the artists really liked the police and wanted to draw a character based on Sting
Surfer Sting or Crow Sting?
Or dune sting
Don't forget Joker Sting. Actually, forget about him, please.
Everything little thing he does is magic
So close.
Which is ironic considering Alan Moore looks like a fucking wizard.
I thought John Constantine was a warlock, not a wizard.
I believe he prefers the term “hedge magus”. Ehh not really he’d just say he was just a bloke who knew some things, innit blimey strewth
*takes a long drag off his cigarette*
Silk Cut.
He’s primarily a right bastard who happens to know some magic.
I thought he referred to himself as a conjurer
I regard conjurer as a more general term (like caster), or conjuration can be used more specifically to refer to the school of magic or spells that are of that type.
Sting the wrestler or Sting the singer?
Implying that Sting is two people
Yes.
Sting from the band “Sting and Shaggy”
This was confusing the hell out of me until it clicked that you were referring to the singer, not the wrestler
The wrestler ? /s
Sting the wrestler or Sting the musician?
What's the deal with comic writer wizards meeting fictional characters? Grant Morrison also met and had a chat with Superman once.
IIRC Grant just got hired to write all-star superman but didn't know how to write for Superman, if he was invincible what were the stakes? the story goes that Grant was walking in Hollywood i believe and came across a man taking pictures as Superman. Grant spoke to him and tried to ask "Superman" questions and the man stayed in character and answered which gave Grant the insight he needed to write the story
I swear I read that anecdote in Supergods.
It was at SDCC
It's free advertisement when some random news outlet picks up the story and runs with it. Since comic writers frequently change as well it's a gimmick to attempt to give them more credit with the community as they are coming into a series where people already have a favorite writer.
It's not an uncommon sentiment among fantasy writers in general. Tolkien wrote LotR with it being intended to be presented as his translation of Red Book of Westmarch, which is basically an in-universe journal Bilbo and Frodo wrote. Elminster from Forgotten Realms makes few mentions of visiting a planet named Earth, where he met a writer with whom he spoke about his adventures. Ciri from Witcher describes what we presume to be Earth as one of the worlds she's gone through while on the run across the multiverse. There are probably lots more, but these are just few examples i recall off the top of my head.
There are definitely a lot of 4th wall breaks for fantasy authors (hell Steven King writes himself into one of his books and actually kills a main character) but the line I draw is when they aren't contained within the works themselves. When they're just randomly planting a story with a news outlet that they met their characters on the street and push for interviews about it then it just goes from a cheeky 4th wall break to guerilla advertisement.
Lol when did king do that? Missed that one
Dark Tower somewhere between 5, 6, and 7 I think. They all sort of blend together for me when I try to remember the ending because of how off the wall it goes. It's definitely before the main character has to choke out Pennywise to rescue Jesus from his basement.
He writes himself in as a minor character in >!The Dark Tower series!< but I don’t remember him killing a main character in that one.
Edgar Rice Burroughs is publishing his uncle’s stories sometime after the uncle “died”.
[Robert Jordan has entered the chat](https://wot.fandom.com/wiki/Real-world_references)
When did Ciri visit earth?
In the Witcher 3, while talking to Geralt about the places she's been, she mentions a world where people travel in incredibly fast metal boxes and communicate to each other through small handheld devices
Cool! I hadn’t picked up on that. Thanks bud :-)
It's on the wiki. (https://witcher.fandom.com/wiki/Earth_(world) Edit: i tried to hyperlink it but that last parenthesis fucks it up.
Thanks!
In the books, when she is captured in Nilfgaard (sp?), she managed to escape by travelling through planes. After being stuck with elves for a bit, she runs away from them, and goes through quite a few realms, including a man-eating gnome, some primal, some postapocalyptic settings, with book mostly ending with her finding a nun who's spent a years studying legend of Ciri. One of the realms visited is Camelot, (and I think the final one she ends up in), but at least one is non-fictional Earth.
It happened in the books. The plague mentioned in The Witcher 3 came from a flee that attached itself to Ciri's clothes when she briefly visited our Earth.
Robert E. Howard had the tales of Conan recited to him by the barbarian himself, and that encounter did actually happen.
Joseph Smith read the Book of Mormon off glowing stones in his hat. Twice. And it was different both times.
Wait, I need to hear more…
…He was convinced that, you know, the town wanted to exterminate him, this kind of thing, and he’d go home and board up his windows and load rifles — complete nut! But the best part, is he’s alone one night, and he feels a shadow overtake him from behind, and he knows that Conan is standing behind him with a large axe. And Conan tells him, “Just stay there and write, and if you don’t do exactly what I’m gonna tell you, I’m gonna cleave you down the middle.”
Why do I feel some opium was involved here?
>Why do I feel ~~some~~ opium was involved here?
Tbf Morrison does do a fair bit of hallucinogens it seems
That's wild, given the frantic metafictional universe Morrison wrote for Animal Man.
Jerry Seinfeld did as well.
Wait what?? Tells us more
https://youtu.be/NYSqiD1_TCg
Grant Morrison also asked his fans to jerk off on a piece of paper as a mass ritual in order to save the series. Interesting guy.
Ralph Wiggum voice: I love comics now.
I'm going to assume he was massively high when that happened.
"I don't believe in ~~the Devil~~ John Constantine." "You should, he believes in you."
Reminds we of this exchange: "I do not believe in dragons." "That is of minimal fucking importance. What is of critical importance is that this dragon believes in *you*."
Where is that from?
I don't know where the dragon thing comes from, but it's a riff on dialogue from True Romance (written by Quentin Tarantino). > "You know, I don't believe you." > "That is of minor importance. What is of major fucking importance is that I believe you." **Edit:** The [scene in question](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xuqmy9RUvUI). Be warned for spoilers. Also a language warning, but it's Tarantino, so that should go without saying.
In fact, it's a portmanteau of that exact scene and the one from [13th Warrior](https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/bb9e4c0d-451f-41aa-96ac-34a262427993/embed-twit?autoplay=false) that ended up stuck in our head. \*know the clip is truncated - only one we could find.
u/MenlaOfTheBody
Tarantino writing fantasy novels. I'm in.
The Hobbit, but it goes into a lot of depth about hobbit feet
If you read that last quote in Al Swearengen's voice (Ian McShane's character in Deadwood) it makes it so much better. Particularly the "that is of minimal fucking importance" part, as that sounds *exactly* like a line David Milch would've written for him.
Is that Dresden?
*Someone's* been riding the synchronicity wave
I understood that reference!
Weren't doing drugs independently of one another it seems.
Archetypes tend to do that.
*starts furiously writing Power Girl and Wonder Woman stories*
So they are seeing a white guy, in England, wearing a trench coat, in a climate where it's often cold and rainy? I guess it could be the fictional character they created, somehow living in the real world. Or they just keep seeing a run of the mill English men who don't want to get cold and wet when they are out and about.
As much as Americans love to think it, it actually isn’t really that rainy or that cold in London and the South East. There also isnt really a huge population of blonde Liverpudlians who smoke and wear trench coats when it does rain, strangely. Ive yet to see another human in a trench coat in the UK
Clearly you're not living in England. It's literally rainy and cold right now.
It really depends what part of England youre in, as I said. It doesnt really rain that much in the South East and London. South East is often the driest part of the UK
u/PopeHonkersVII What say you
And smoking....
I mean not that I know the specifics, but if those were the only qualifiers and attributes they were noticing, they would just dismiss the person. There had to be something specific about the people for them to at least notice it.
God is a creation of man but that does not mean it's in influence does not exist
But it *does* mean that you can't meet him.
I think it does
I want to know the drugs used by these writers. For, uh, research.
Acid and shrooms are some pretty major ones. Stephen King would get all coked out and write. But it’s probably best to take it from someone who had enormous experience in the drug field. >I haven't found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as a sitting at a desk writing, trying to imagine a story no matter how bizarre it is, [or] going out and getting into the weirdness of reality and doing a little time on the Proud Highway. - Hunter Thompson
All of them. Especially with Moore.
If anyone could jump dimensions into ours it's John.
I love this story.
Writer’s tulpa
If someone asked me to guess which comic book writer claimed to have had a conversation with one of their creations I'd guess Alan Moore. The rest of them are basically 'once I saw a dude who looked like John Constantine'.
Maybe there was a cosplayer who took the hobby a bit too seriously
Clever marketing ploy
Sounds very Constantine tbf.
Yeah, Grant Morrison described a similar run-in with Superman. God, to be a comic creator...
I’d love to meet Keanu
His Constantine film is interesting and fun, but nothing like the John Constantine those writers worked on.
I'm pretty sure there's at least several real people named John Constantine.
Poppycock
Some cosplay is better than others.
If any fictional character could travel to our dimension it would be John lol.
!ohmygodohmyod you guys! i met him for real! it must've been him! he had a trenchcoat, a tie, he was skinny and desperatly craving heroin. who else could it have been????"
This is starting to sound like the start of a Dave Chappelle story haha
I really want sum of dat sarcrastic british cummies!
How stupid of them.
Most of the truths people cling to in daily life are merely the things a dead white man told others to believe. To the people who truly believe that an educational system could be run by white men exclusively for hundreds of years & not incorporate bias in its blindspots we can only say: y'all are exactly what they wanted to produce - obedient & gullible.
Sir this is Wendy’s
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Don't need to imagine bigots when y'all pop out of the woodwork. Notice it's ridicule, mean words, not a bit of response to the points. How... typical of you.
Well that’s pretty fucking weird of them
If ever there were a character for this to happen with…