Warning: Spoilers for Batman / Dylan Dog #2 ahead!
For as much as John Constantine likes to pretend he’s always in control, a lot more gets past him then he’d like people to realize. Case in point: when Constantine teams up with Dylan Dog, the nightmare investigator easily pierces through Constantine’s cynicism with a single, perfectly applied meme.
When Dylan Dog needs to check if the soul of a notorious serial killer has found a way out of hell in Batman / Dylan Dog #2 by Roberto Recchioni, Gigi Cavenago, and Werther Dell’Edera, he finds himself keeping company with John Constantine as the two travel through London’s Piccadilly Circus. Constantine bemoans the district’s fate with his typical cynicism, pointing out how what was once a punk haven is now soulless, corporate and homogenized.
But Dylan isn’t one of his typical marks, calling Constantine out with a perfectly placed “okay, boomer!“ before chastising him for being enamored with the past and unable to see the dreamers of the present.
This one-liner is the perfect way to put Constantine in his place for multiple reasons. Firstly, Constantine has always been a cynical character. His marquee series, 1988’s Hellblazer, is rife with critiques of then-contemporary English Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Her conservative politics were very much at odds with Constantine’s punk predilections, and as such, early Hellblazer issues are packed with instances of Thatcherism driving England to hell (in some cases, quite literally), quashing the free spirit of the people for soulless, corporate gains.
Secondly, while everyone retains a quasi-ageless quality in comics, Constantine is definitely out of touch with the current generation. As a man in his late-twenties/middle-thirties during the 1980s, Constantine would conceivably now be in his fifties — even with DC’s generously loose timeline. The character being so closely tied with the politics and cultural movements of the 1980s does him no favors here either, as it firmly marks him as a product and character of that era and places him loosely at the tail end of the baby boomer generation — a “boomer” in the literal sense.
The dismissive “okay, boomer” meme is practically tailor-made to pierce through Constantine’s defenses: it rejects the notion that the present generation is useless and that things were better in the past. Its forward-looking nature counters Constantine’s nearly omnipresent barrier of cynicism; it calls out the belief that previous generations were better while emphasizing Constantine’s generation in particular. Constantine has bewildered angels and bartered with demons, but the two-word “okay, boomer” insult simply ignores all his defenses.
Batman / Dylan Dog #2 is available now from DC Comics.