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Name : Papa Midnite First Appearance : Hellblazer #1, Hunger Last Appearance : Papa Midnite #1 Who is he ? 
While John Constantine and Papa Midnite have had cause to work together on occasion, relations between
the pair have never been better than strained and their last confrontation ended in bloodshed...Born in Trenchtown, Jamaica and raised there by a father who regaled him with dark tales of black magic, Papa Linton Midnite grew up to become a strong player in the world of Voodoo, with a bustling criminal empire and an unquenchable lust for power and influence. Midnite's success was built, quite literally, on the bones of his dead sister Cedella. |
Eager to gain favour with the Lords Of Hell, Midnite murdered Cedella and damned her immortal soul to hell,
where he pimped it out to a host of the nastier beings that reside there. Midnite used the juicier snippets
of pillow talk she heard to further his own agenda in the worlds of both the occult and the mundane.
As he sent his sister's soul screaming into the lowest depths of hell, Midnite declared himself to be the
Houngan Voodoo King. ( Hellblazer #74 )Wasting no time in reaping the rewards that having a spy in the very inner circles of hell afforded him, Midnite set about establishing a sprawling criminal empire – the heart of which he based in New York, where he built a massive tower block complete with plush penthouse apartment and dodgy nightclub (where select patrons could wager on the outcome of brutal zombie fights!). It was an ill-judged act of theft that first brought Constantine and Midnite into conflict with each other. Still very much novices at the magic game, John and his mate Brendan Finn hatched a plan to steal the occult rifle known as the “Ace Of Winchesters” from a fence by the name of Zeerke after he doubled the asking price he originally quoted them – from half a million to an even mill. While the heist proved successful, the pair didn't realise that Zeerke was selling the rifle for Midnite. Zeerke later caught up with a friend of John's and inflicted a terrible wound on him for the part Constantine played in the robbery. Obviously Midnite wasn't happy with the loss of such a valuable piece and so he vowed bloody Vengeance on all concerned. ( Hellblazer #76 ) |
It was against this backdrop that Constantine and Midnite had their first face to face meeting. With the
hunger demon Mnemoth lose in New York City, the pair were forced to put aside their differences and work
together. While John was eager to stop the mounting death toll left in the creature's wake, Midnite was
more keen to stop it harming his business interests in the city. Using the ingrained power of an old
electric chair from Sing-Sing in which over three hundred prisoners had been executed, a syringe full of
heroin and a little voodoo magic, Constantine and Midnite were able to seal Memoth in the body of John's
hapless friend Gary Lester.
Their business concluded, John and Midnite went their separate ways but the Voodoo King still had revenge on his mind... ( Hellblazer #2 ) Coming out of a rough period which saw him breaking up with his long term girlfriend, earning the ire of his best mate and becoming a homeless drunk on the streets of London, John Constantine flew to New York City in order to get his head back together. Alerted to Constantine's presence in his city by Zeerke, Midnite was able to trap John in a chunk of hell he'd sequestered with his magic. Forced to trudge through a nightmarish vision of America, Constantine was only able to escape after striking a deal with Cedella. She agreed to lead John to freedom on the condition that he released her from Midnite's power. Driven mad by the freed spirit of his sister, Papa Midnite made his way to the top of the Empire State Building where he jumped to his apparent death. ( Hellblazer #75 ) Midnite turned up alive and well recently, sporting a trimmer waistline and a somewhat improved taste in fashion. Haunted by a ghost from his past, Papa Midnite is forced to confront the part he played in a doomed revolution. ( Papa Midnite #1 ) 
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