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Alan Moore
Basically, when I take over something as a writer, I always try to work as closely as I can with the
artists on the book, so I immediately did my best to strike up a friendship with Steve Bissette and John
Totleben. I asked them what they would like to do in Swamp Thing. They both sent me reams of
material. Things that they had always wanted to do in Swamp Thing, but never thought they would get
away with. I incorporated this into my scheme of things, and tried to pin it all together.
One of those early notes was they both wanted to do a character that looked like Sting. 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. 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. Having been given that challenge, how could I fit Sting into Swamp Thing ? I have
an idea that most of the my stics in comics are generally older people, very austere, very proper, very
middle class in a lot of ways. They are not at all functional on the street. It struck me that it might be
interesting for once to do an almost blue-collar warlock. Somebody who was streetwise, working class,
and from a different background than the standard run of comic book mystics. Constantine started to
grow out of that.
One interesting anecdote that I should point out is that one day, I was in Westminster
in London -- this was after we had introduced the character -- and I was sitting in a sandwich bar. 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. 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.
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