The Sandman: This returning  fan‑favorite isn’t from the comics — here’s why the show made her up

In The Sandman, she flirts with ghosts, banishes demons mid-hangover, and walks through death like she’s done it before. Johanna Constantine quickly became one of the breakout stars of The Sandman's TV adaptation, and now she’s coming back for Season 2. But comic book fans were quick to notice something odd.

While there is a Johanna Constantine in the original comics, she is not the same character the show puts front and center. The Johanna we see on screen is a modern creation, invented for the series to fill the space that once belonged to someone else entirely.

Yes, The Sandman comics had another Constantine. But it wasn’t her. It was him, John Constantine, the trenchcoated warlock better known from Hellblazer and countless DC properties. So where did Johanna come from, and why did the The Sandman adaptation reinvent her? The answer is part licensing logic, part narrative clarity, and a lot of Neil Gaiman doing what he does best, rewriting myth with intention. And with Johanna’s return confirmed, now is the perfect time to trace the origins of this fan-favorite and explore what her new arc might bring.

Who is Johanna in the comics?

Johanna Constantine is not an invention out of nowhere. In The Sandman comics, she first appears as Lady Johanna Constantine, a cunning 18th-century adventurer hired by Dream himself during a mission in Revolutionary France. She’s clever, ruthless, and very clearly a Constantine, all the sharp edges without the modern chain-smoking aesthetic.

But she’s not a recurring player. Lady Johanna shows up in a few arcs and is referenced as an ancestor of John Constantine, the modern-day occultist who occasionally crosses paths with Morpheus in the comics. While John is part of the wider DC universe and had his own sprawling lore, including solo comics, movies, and TV appearances, Lady Johanna was more of a historical footnote. A fascinating side character who came and went with the 1700s.

The TV series, however, made a bold pivot. It didn’t just resurrect the 18th-century version. It reimagined her entirely, crafting a present-day Johanna Constantine played by Jenna Coleman. This wasn’t just a nod to continuity. It was a deliberate substitution.

The man behind the name: John Constantine

Before there was Johanna, there was John. Chain-smoking, trenchcoated, and morally tangled, John Constantine emerged from the swamps of Alan Moore’s imagination in 1985, debuting in Swamp Thing #37 before becoming the star of his own long-running comic, Hellblazer. Unlike most heroes in tights, John aged in real time. He failed often, loved badly, and bore the scars of every deal gone wrong.

He was never clean-cut. A self-described con man who practiced magic by instinct and manipulation, John drifted through the dark corners of the DC universe, tangling with demons, angels, and gods. His magic was messy, improvised, and fueled by guilt. His victories came at a cost, and usually, someone else paid it.

On screen, he’s had a strange life. Keanu Reeves played him in the 2005 Constantine film, reimagined as an American cynic with terminal lung cancer and a cross tattooed into his arms. The character returned in more faithful form through Matt Ryan, who portrayed him in the NBC series and across multiple Arrowverse shows and animated features. Across every version, though, one thing remained: Constantine was the kind of man who knew what hell looked like because he had been the one to open the door.

The real Johanna from the comics

The show’s Johanna may be a reinvention, but the name has roots. In the original The Sandman comics, Johanna Constantine is an 18th-century occultist and adventurer who first appears in The Sandman #13. She is sharp, guarded, and unafraid to manipulate power in a world that barely lets women hold it. She takes on jobs for kings, crosses paths with Dream, and navigates a society where every deal feels like a trap.

But she was never a major presence. Lady Johanna appears in only a handful of issues, functioning as a historical note in the Constantine lineage. She is clever, morally flexible, and recognizably part of the same bloodline as John, but her story is limited to brief flashes of intrigue and political mysticism. She dies as she lived, calculating the odds and making sure she’s the last one standing, until she isn’t.

Neil Gaiman created her not as a substitute but as a shadow. A reflection of Constantine’s essence refracted through history. When the showrunners resurrected her name and gave it to someone living in the present day, they weren’t just recycling. They were reclaiming a version of Constantine that belonged entirely to The Sandman’s mythos.

Why the show replaced John with Johanna

The decision to feature Johanna instead of John Constantine wasn’t just a creative whim. It was a strategic move shaped by legal boundaries, tonal focus, and a clear vision of what The Sandman was meant to be.

First, there were rights issues. While Neil Gaiman had originally included John Constantine in the early comics, the character’s screen rights are tangled in the broader DC universe. With The Sandman positioned as a distinct Netflix adaptation, separate from the Arrowverse, the DCEU, and other Warner Bros. projects, bringing in John would have opened the door to complicated licensing and unwanted narrative baggage. Johanna offered a cleaner slate.

Second, there was the tonal mismatch. John Constantine, as seen in his solo series and film appearances, often leans into noir, urban grit, and a very male-coded cynicism. That energy clashes with The Sandman’s dreamlike, mythopoetic atmosphere. Johanna, while still a disaster-prone occultist, brings a different edge. Her pain is quieter, her sarcasm more elegant, her morality blurred in ways that feel closer to Dream himself. She fits.

And finally, there was legacy. By anchoring the present-day Constantine in Johanna, the show bridges two timelines from the comics, Lady Johanna of the past and John of the present, into a single lineage that belongs fully to The Sandman's world. It’s not just gender-swapping. It’s timeline-consolidating.

What her return means for The Sandman Season 2

Johanna Constantine’s return isn’t just fan service. It signals that The Sandman is continuing to build out its version of the occult, not just as background lore but as an emotional and metaphysical mirror to Dream himself. Season 1 gave Johanna a contained arc, she faced her past, lost a lover, outwitted demons, but it also left her wide open. She didn’t close the door on magic. She opened one, and Dream walked through it.

With Season 2 expected to adapt Season of Mists, one of the most iconic arcs in the comic series, there’s fertile ground for Johanna to return with purpose. The storyline revolves around Dream reclaiming Hell after Lucifer steps down, triggering a cosmic power scramble.

In the original comics, John Constantine doesn’t play a role in that arc. But the show has already established Johanna as someone who understands how hell works, who knows how to bargain, how to lie, and how to survive in spaces ruled by pain and memory.

That makes her a natural candidate to get pulled into bigger games. Whether she’s there to help Dream navigate infernal politics or to chase her own ghosts, Johanna’s presence adds a human tension the Endless cannot carry alone. She bleeds. She bargains. She remembers what it costs.

And if the show leans further into the idea that Johanna is more than just a Constantine, that she might be echo, lineage, and reinvention all at once, then her arc could become one of the most emotionally grounded in the whole season. A modern ghost story with the voice of old magic.

The Constantine that belongs to the world of Sandman

Johanna Constantine was never meant to replace John. She was built to belong. The show didn’t just gender-flip a well-known character, it extracted something older and stranger from the mythology and gave it new breath. By making her a fixture of The Sandman rather than a borrowed guest from the DC catalog, the series carved out space for a Constantine who reflects its core themes, grief, memory, consequence, and the fragile dance between power and purpose.

What makes her compelling is not how many demons she defeats, but how she carries what they leave behind. She is haunted, not just by spirits, but by choices she never wanted to make and by love she couldn’t save. That is not an accident. That is the very soul of The Sandman.

Now, as the series moves deeper into the mythology of the Endless, Johanna Constantine stands as a bridge. Between timelines. Between genres. Between the known and the unknowable. She may have started as a workaround. Now she is part of the canon that matters most, the one written in dreams.