John Constantine

Constantine is an odd character -- a powerful magus from an English working class background, and with the appropriate sympathies for Labour and lager. He specializes in summoning demons, and he has an unfortunate history of getting his old friends killed by said demons. He wavers between the hero and the antihero in more or less every issue.

Most of the time, both Heaven and Hell are rather extremely pissed off at Constantine, and most of the time neither one can do bugger all about it.

So the story goes, Moore created Constantine for two artists he worked with on Saga of the Swamp Thing. They were fans of the Police and wanted to draw someone who looked like Sting as part of the comic. The machiavellian magus with a working class background proved too cool to throw away and the character eventually landed his own series.

His genesis is given a wink by the later revelation that during his youth Constantine had been the leader of Mucous Membrane, a New Wave band.