I’m working on a piece about Alan Moore for TCJ and it’s driving me crazy. I finally backed away from the keyboard this evening and turned on the tv. A sitcom was going. I saw a bunch of spindly guys in a pretty realistic-looking comic book store (longboxes). Up at the counter a cute chick was asking what to get her 13-year-old nephew.
“How about Hellblazer?” the counter guy said. “It’s about a morally ambiguous confidence man who has cancer and traffics with the undead and the supernatural.” Or pretty much. He rattled the words off to get the pseudo-offhand effect sitcom characters strive for when voicing the elaborate and outrageous.
The woman, very perky, said something like “Sure, that’s bound to make me his favorite aunt.”
1) Pretty amazing odds: I’m done with Alan Moore for the day, and there’s one of his characters being described on CBS.
2) The joke seems more like it’s for the writers than the audience. “Confidence man” and “cancer” don’t resonate as absurd, over-the-top comic book qualities that you, as a civilian, will be floored with when you venture into a comic book store. The audience wouldn’t be thinking, “Yeah, typical crazy comic-book shit.” Whereas people who actually know about John Constantine would find it kind of amusing to think of him as gift material for a 13-year-old when his salient qualities were highlighted that way.
I looked the show up in the listings and it’s called The Big Bang Theory.
update But he isn’t really a confidence man, is he? More of a ghostbuster dressed like a private detective, or at least that’s my memory. It’s been a while.
I always forget that Constantine was an Alan Moore character originally.
The Big Bang Theory does a lot of comic-related jokes. In season 1 the 4 main guys all dressed up as Flash for a Halloween party. One guy made a joke about the four of them walking together in a line and looking like Flash running really fast.
I love that.
The show, however, is awful
He is a confidence man too, though
"update But he isn't really a confidence man, is he? More of a ghostbuster dressed like a private detective, or at least that's my memory. It's been a while."
He's a con artist (not necessarily a confidence man).
He'll generally be up against some supernatural force beyond his power to fight, but will manipulate or trick someone in order to win. A bunch of innocent people will get killed in the process, including his friends, and he'll light a cigarette, walk off into the sunset, and repeat in the next story.
Does he go around conning people out of money? Just being a slippery character doesn't qualify someone as a con artist or a confidence man, in my book.