At Wondercon, DC showed fans some of its latest animated short collection DC Showcase- Constantine: The House Of Mystery. While this latest collection follows the tradition of taking obscure characters and telling compelling stories in short form. This one features the most unique grouping of four stories featuring Blue Beetle, The Losers and Sgt. Rock, Kamandi, and John Constantine.
Before the Wondercon panel, we spoke with producers and writers of the four shorts.
The show-stealer of the collection was the seventies Superfriends animation style Blue Beetle/Question team-up. Writers Jennifer Keene and Jeremy Adams commented on their short being one of the first true Ted Kord-led stories outside of comics. While fans get the hero millionaire Ted Kord, the rhythm of the dialogue and jokes played well with the 70s toon visual style. Adams and Keene were hopeful that fans will appreciate this love letter to golden age style comics and animation in bringing together two Steve Ditko created characters that were never paired together in comics.
Paul Giacoppo, screenwriter of the Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth! short touched on how the story blended the classic Jack Kirby storytelling of the character’s early creation with touches for modern audiences. Giacoppo mentioned that when initially drafting the story he picked up on how the early comics revealed so much detail of Kamandi’s post-apocalypse world from the start. In the short, he opted to keep touches such as references to other DC characters to Kamandi vague until the right moment. His goal of the short is for audiences to feel the influences Kirby used to create the character such as Planet Of The Apes.
The most complete story short belongs to The Losers. Instead of the iteration movie audiences were shown some years ago, screenwriter Tim Sheridan brought the old war era group created by Robert Kanghier in comics joined by Joe Kubert’s Sgt. Rock. Sheridan commented on this short being the perfect place to tell stories with these characters because the audience has a familiarity with them and it allows the writer to focus on an emotional war story. While I won’t spoil the story, Sheridan was also asked if he had a way to get through the short’s definitive end. Sheridan responded, “there’s always a way.”
DC Showcase’s headliner features John Constantine continuing the story told across the throughline of New 52 era animated features. In his last appearance in Apokolips War, Constantine tried to fix the destroyed earth by having The Flash run back in time. This short serves as the epilogue of Constantine’s story with him having to pay the price for defying the natural order. Screenwriter Ernie Altbacker first had to answer the question of why this story needed to be told when the character’s last appearance gave an ambiguous but powerful ending. To Altbacker, Constantine’s true power comes in combination with his attitude towards what the dark arts can do. In a way, his true power and his true demons have yet to fully be explored. His tale in the House Of Mystery is a very twilight zone feeling exploration of those demons. While it’s not a spoiler, audiences will be in for a brutal level of violence in this short.
DC Showcase- Constantine: The House Of Mystery will be available with all four short tales on Blu-Ray and digital on-demand on May 3.
