Excalibur's Pete Wisdom Was Not Based on John Constantine

In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, find out whether Pete Wisdom was really based on John Constantine

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and seventy-eighth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends.This time around, all of the legends will involve British superheroes.

NOTE: If my Twitter page hits 5,000 followers, I'll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow my Twitter page, Brian_Cronin!

COMIC LEGEND:

Pete Wisdom was based on John Constantine

STATUS:

I'm Going With False

As I often discuss in various columns, comic book companies often try to copy from each other, or at least the success of one character would often influence other comic book characters. You know, if a comic book company has success with, say, romance comic books, then every other company will come out with romance comic books (seriously, by the end of the 1950s, it felt like every single comic book company in the country was putting out at least two romance comic books apiece). However, as a result, people are perhaps a bit TOO eager to say "Character X is copying Character Y!" without any real evidence. So let's see what we think about the claim that Pete Wisdom was based on John Constantine.

WHO WAS PETE WISDOM?

After Alan Davis left Excalibur, the series about superheroes in England first went to a British writer, Richard Ashford, but his tenure was brief and soon, American writer Scott Lobdell was writing yet ANOTHER X-title (Lobdell was not only writing one of the flagship X-books, Uncanny X-Men, but he also stepped in to help out other books when needed, so that dude was doing a LOT). Eventually, though, Lobdell couldn't keep writing the book, so a new British writer, Warren Ellis, was brough in to script over a few Lobdell plots and then take over the series solo.

In his first solo issue (with art by Ken Lashley and Tom Wegrzyn), Ellis quickly made his mark on the book by introducing the British intelligence agent, Pete Wisdom. He had a memorable introduction, being seen in a dream...

where we see that this new character has a very dark past...

Later in that issue, Excalibur is met by agents from a mysterious British intelligence agency (which debuted in that issue), Black Air, and Wisdom is one of the agents...

He is assigned to the team as a liaison, of sorts, but it is unclear at the time that Wisdom actually is a mutant himself (he has the ability to produce blades of energy that he would refer to as "hot knives"...

Wisdom would become a key part of the series during Ellis' run on the book. However, people would also often claim that Wisdom was Ellis' sort of Marvel substitute for John Constantine, the famous DC anti-hero of the series, Hellblazer...

So, was that the case?

WAS PETE WISDOM BASED ON JOHN CONSTANTINE?

In 2000, when speaking about his return to the character of Pete Widsom in the pages of X-Force, Ellis spoke about Wisdom's origins:

When I began EXCALIBUR, there was a place for Pete Wisdom: a character from an entirely different kind of fiction, a confused cop-show leftover finding himself stuck in a modern generic superhero team story. The disgusting lovechild of THE SWEENEY's Jack Regan and James Bond (or maybe Harry Palmer), Pete Wisdom was there as a way for me to find a way into the book. I could use him as a tool to explain and subvert the tropes of the form. He was the engine of character development in the book: everyone changed and grew in relation to him. He contrasted everyone nicely. Once he and Kitty Pryde came together, they pretty much wrote their own dialogue. The plot of PRYDE AND WISDOM was, in retrospect, almost worthless --but I'll reread it just to see the pair of them talking.But leave nothing alive.When I was approached to do the Counter-X consultation, I went back and reread a lot of what had happened between then and the time I left the X-Office. I'd never read an issue of EXCAL past my last issue. (I wrote a short "goodbye book" piece for the last issue of EXCAL, but no-one at Marvel ever bothered sending me a copy of the published book.) I have no problems leaving behind characters I created under work-for-hire, because I'm very aware of what work-for-hire means and have made that mental adjustment. You have to cut your emotional ties to work you've created but which something else owns. And, Christ, I hope I have better ideas than Pete Wisdom sometime before I die.Hm, I said. Interesting. Kill the Pete/Kitty thing literally as soon as I'm out the door, change Pete's personality to make the plot work, slap an eyepatch on him. Interesting approach, guys.Should've killed the bastard when I had the chance.

Jack Regan was the lead character of the popular 1970s British police drama, The Sweeney. Here he is in action...

Basically, though, Ellis' reference is that he wanted to take a character very much of the "real world" like Regan (or the spy character Harry Palmer from Len Deighton's spy novels, also a famously "real" approach to spies, made famous by Michael Caine playing Palmer in The Ipcress File) to contrast them with these superheroes, and that's EXACTLY how those old Excalibur issues read.

A British character in a trench coat smoking cigarettes is far from a distinctive John Constantine trait, ya know?

Generally speaking, when a comic book creator says, "I based this character on this other character" (and the comparison makes sense), I find it hard to doubt them, as it is far different from saying, "I didn't base this character on ANYone." There's nothing to be gained by lying here. And Ellis' description of the influences of Wisdom honestly make more sense to me THAN the Constantine ones. This isn't, "I believe everything Warren Ellis says no matter what," and more, "What he says here makes sense, so I'm willing to believe it."

Ellis, by the way, also threw in a female character clearly based on Constantine in the aforementioned Pryde and Wisdom miniseries, so he was obviously aware of the critique. Maybe I'll do a Meta-Message on that character in the future.