10 Times Constantine Outsmarted Everyone

7. Bluffed Beroul - Hellblazer: All His Engines

John Constantine Doctor Fate
DC Comics

When your life has gone so haywire that you require Constantine to come save you, he already knows that you're not coming out of the experience without being scarred for life. So if it means saving you - he'll happily throw on even more trauma on top of what you're already going to have to deal with.

One such instance of this comes from Hellblazer: All His Engines, where John finds himself having to help his old buddy Chas save his daughter from the clutches of a demon. While John succeeds, he does so through having to help another demon named Beroul, who quickly chooses the recently saved kid as his payment.

John, of course, anticipated this, and summons an Aztec death god to counter him, actually managing to seriously hurt the monster enough that he flees into the little girl, convinced that even John Constantine wouldn't be so morally bankrupt to kill a little girl. Constantine calls his bluff by reminding Beroul whom he's dealing with. If a dead kid was enough to stop him in his tracks, he would've stopped at the Newcastle incident.

Beroul falls for it, and the kid is saved, but Cas tells him to piss off. After all, it's Constantine. You can never be sure if he was actually bluffing about killing the kid.

Contributor
Contributor

John Tibbetts is a novelist in theory, a Whatculture contributor in practice, and a nerd all around who loves talking about movies, TV, anime, and video games more than he loves breathing. Which might be a problem in the long term, but eh, who can think that far ahead?