The Comicon Advent Calendar – Day 15: Constantine And Santa Walk Into A Bar…
by Richard Bruton
It’s time for the next door to open on the Comicon Advent Calendar, our seasonal gift to you. Today, it’s Paul Jenkins and Paul Pope with Tell Me, a Constantine story from Vertigo Winter’s Edge Volume 1, from the end of 1997.
It’s Christmas in Manhattan, John is typically downbeat. You hardly imagine he’d be anything else really. More a Humbug than a Ho Ho Ho man.
Running out of a girlfriend’s weirdly happy family Christmas sees John in a bar, chatting to a Santa with a tale to tell…
He tells of a couple of music journos, she’s a news getter, he’s a reviewer. They meet. They fall in love. He gets ill. She stays by his side. He dies. She mourns.
It’s her first year without him, her first Christmas without him.
That’s the tale the Santa tells. Declining a drink, he leaves calling John by name, a name Constantine didn’t share…
And yes, you knew how this was going. You knew the whole Christmas ghost story thing was going on, but it’s such a warmly told little tale, a mere 12 pages long, that it doesn’t matter that you see the end coming, John left alone, just a crappy pink bunny she put by her lover’s bedside on the barstool.
And who walks in as Constantine’s on his way out…
Oh yes. Of course.
It’s a lovely, melancholic Christmas tale from Jenkins, with Pope putting in a brilliantly restrained shift on the art.