Off The Shelf: Yeah, That's A Lot of Ennis, But What About Preacher?

True Faith
Art by Warren Pleece
Originally Serialized in Crisis # 29-34, 36-38
Published by Fleetway Publications

Crisis didn't last but three years, but Garth Ennis found his first comics work there, with a Northern Irish tale called Troubled Souls.  A few weeks down, the line, he unleashed the controversial religious satire True Faith, which Vertigo was nice enough to reprint themselves in 1997.  Warren Pleece, a British artist probably best known to US comics readers for his work during Paul Jenkin's Hellblazer run and a stint on Grant Morrison's acid-opus The Invisibles handled the art details.  Pleece, for whatever reason, is one of the few artists that Garth has never teamed up with on another comic.

If you want to start keeping track, this is the first time that Garth will have the artist draw something that a character loves, in this case a young man's dog, hanging off something after being brutally slaughtered.  Another first appearance is the generally free-floating disgust with religion only angry young men seem to feel the need to advertise, which is encapsulated...well, not really encapsulated, it basically covers the entire book and there's only a few pages where somebody doesn't mention that they really don't like religion, specifically Christianity, that much.  Artwise, Pleece's work is similar to what it would like if Eddie Campbell worked with markers--which is actually sort of a nice idea, and it should be, because it looks nice here.  The coloring is all a bit muddy and distilled, probably stemming from the original source of publication--if not, then it's just muddy and distilled coloring, and it's up to you if you like that sort of thing, or if you'd prefer your violent "Up Yours, Religion" stories to have more of a rainbow palette.  The close of the issue--a random, vicious murder--speaks less to an idea of revenge fantasy, and more of the story's primary character rejecting any attempt at comprehension or growth, thus serving to point up exactly what True Faith really is:  less a comic to be enjoyed and studied, and more one to be looked upon as an interesting artifact of a prodigious talent: Portrait of the Artist As A Pissed Off Kid Happy To Be Doing What He Loves.  In the characters case, that's ending a bully's tirade with a gun.  In Garth's, it's refusing to force a lesson down the readers throat.

Judge Dredd: Death Aid
Art by Carlos Ezquerra
Serialized In 2000AD # 711-715, 719-720, 1991    

Judge Dredd: Emerald Isle
Art by Steve Dillon
Serialized in 2000AD # 727-732, 1991

Judge Dredd: Return of the King
Art by Carlos Ezquerra
Serialized in 2000AD # 733-735, 1991

Judge Dredd: Twin Blocks
Art by Gary Erskine
Published in 2000AD # 741, 1991

Judge Dredd: The Rough Guide To Suicide
Art by Greg Staples
Published in 2000AD # 761, 1992

Judge Dredd: Babes In Arms
Art by Greg Staples
Serialized in 2000AD # 776-779, 1992

Judge Dredd: Almighty Dredd
Art by Ian Gibson
Serialized in 2000AD # 780-782, 1992

Judge Dredd: Innocents Abroad
Art by Greg Staples
Serialized in 2000AD # 804-807, 1992

Judge Dredd: The Magic Mellow Out
Art by Anthony Williams
Serialized in 2000AD #808-809, 1992

Judge Dredd: Christmas With Attitude
Art by Carlos Ezquerra
Published in 2000AD # 815, 1992

Judge Dredd: Blind Mate
Art by Greg Staples
Published in 2000AD # 825, 1992

According to Wikipedia, the early runs by Garth on Mr. 2000AD with a helmet weren't embraced by fans--having very little experience with the character outside of those old Batman crossovers, we came into this pretty clean.  For what it is, it's not that exciting, but that's probably due to the style of story required just as much as it is the youth of the writer--the stories are constructed out of what was originally six-page chapters published in 2000AD, and the seams show.  It's all far too repetitive in tone, and even the stronger aspects are muted by the knowledge that it can't sustain any real rhythm until the writer in question can get used to the format.  Here, Garth is just too young to have that kind of experience--what a brutal school this must have been.  Still, it's worth looking into, if not only for the low costs--these copies were found for less than a dollar, there's plenty more out there just as cheap--but because Emerald Isle contains one of Garth's funnier riffs on Ireland, which in the future has become a potato-dedicated amusement park where the local's primary form of employment is being hired to dress as leprechauns.  Punisher MAX fans will probably notice a similarity in plot between the "Widowmaker" storyline and the "Babes In Arms" serial here, just as the overall tone of Dredd's doom and gloom outlook may have helped shape Ennis' more current take on the Frank Castle character--both Dredd and Frank aren't much for conversation, although that might be because Dredd is surrounded by so many over-the top caricatures that a back-and-forth dialog is pointless--Frank's supporting cast is somewhat less ridiculous, if you exclude Barracuda and the elderly midget twins.   Besides those minor story pleasures, Carlos Ezquerra and Steve Dillon both turn in excellent work.  Comics writers working for hire pretty much have to do their time somewhere, and while the final product may look a bit slight when looked at 16 years later, these aren't comics to be embarrassed by.  They're just factory style product designed to entertain.  While some of them are irritating, like the dull Men's Health style joke "The Rough Guide To Suicide" or the always obnoxious comic-featuring-rainbow-hallucination-sequences "The Magic Mellow Out," the intent to write entertaining action work is clear, and the dialog is consistent and coherent throughout.  While this may not have been a Judge Dredd that Judge Dredd fans particularly liked, it is still a character that remains identifiably the same--no small feat, considering there's a lot of these Judge characters in the stories, and all of them dress the same.  Hopefully, when the upcoming American version of Judge Dredd is released, a project that Garth will also be writing, the longer format will give him an opportunity to use his current skills to do something a bit more involving.

Hellblazer: Dangerous Habits
Art by William Simpson, Mark Pennington, Tom Sutton, Malcolm Jones III, Mark McKenna, Kim DeMulder, Stan Woch & Tom Ziuko
Originally Serialized in Hellblazer # 41-46, Published by Vertigo/DC Comics, 1991

Here it is, one of those "seminal" types of stories--a dash of what was culled to help create that odd Keanu Reeves Constantine movie mixed with a healthy serving of what's become the definitive John Constantine type of story:  a chapter-based narrative constructed out of horror tropes, the working-man versus elitist mentality, and cursory shaggy-dog style comedy, all of which is seen through the eyes of  a character who behaves like he's seen it all, whether he has or not.  Again, it's an early work, but all of what handicapped Ennis on Judge Dredd--the low page count for chapters, the cumbersome nature of dealing with costumes and a massive fanbase are totally absent.  Whereas Jamie Delano had already spent forty issues mapping out the life and times of a minor Alan Moore creation, it's Garth who pushed Constantine to what he is now, by merits of publication survival alone: the flagship book of the Vertigo line.  These stories were originally published with the DC logo on the side, as what we now call Vertigo was still years away, but you wouldn't gather that from this story in the slightest.  A moody tale about a selfish man preparing to fight a losing battle with terminal lung cancer before tossing it all in for one last nasty gamble, there's so much...ugh here to deal with that it's hard to believe this was sharing shelf space with whatever the  fucking Infinity Incorporated were doing.  From a "comic book" standpoint, this is ugly stuff about ugly people who are, somehow, charismatic enough to move the reader through a story that's planned out to the last page--which, of course, features a quote from a Pogues song.  Whereas Garth's introduction to the collected version implies that he pretty much created a story to back up an idea--"kill the bastard"--the construction of the plot is so finely tuned that the entire thing reads like a dream.  It's totally believable that people can not like Hellblazer, it's even somewhat comprehensible that they can not be fans of the Ennis Hellblazer--but Dangerous Habits is one of those character-defining stories that breaks through all the bullshit--this, right here, is the sort of thing that an always-in-print trade program is created for.  While Hellblazer's long stretch of publication is mostly indebted to it not being a comic that requires the sort of continuity that makes so much of Vertigo's line unwelcoming, it's the stories like Habits that serve as the model for what can be done with the character--it doesn't require advance knowledge, and it doesn't demand you keep up after the last page.  Garth Ennis, more so then Jamie Delano or Mike Carey, knew from the start what he was doing--creating a comic that could be started or stopped at any time, while still being comprehensible.  

Hellblazer: Tainted Love
Art by Steve Dillon
Originally Serialized in Hellblazer # 68-71, Special # 1 & Vertigo Jam
Published by Vertigo/DC Comics, 1993

Hellblazer: Damnation's Flame
Art by Steve Dillon, Peter Snejbjerg & William Simpson
Originally Serialized in Hellblazer # 72-77
Published by Vertigo/DC Comics, 1994

These are compilations after the Vertigo shift, when John Constantine officially no longer had to pretend to occupy the same DC universe world that he didn't really occupy that often in the first place.  For the most part, they serve as inoffensive placeholder issues of the title, only differing from regular Hellblazer one-shots in that, for a good portion of the issues collected here, John is living as a homeless alcoholic and not shaving as he deals (passes the time might be more accurate than "deals") with the ending of his relationship with Kit, a Irish woman from Belfast that Garth had created so that John could have a relationship that didn't end in some kind of demonic possession or death.  Ennis must've liked the character a lot, as he even devotes an entire issue (as well  as a later one-shot), where John doesn't appear at all, to her.  It also gives him an opportunity to fuck around in Belfast, lending more examples of how little he's interested in telling stories about Ireland that don't involve A) the IRA, B) Anything Irish outside of Northern Ireland and C) people who do things there other than go to bars.  There's a dead bit of "fucking Catholicism" near the close of this collection that doesn't really serve to show much beyond the attitude on display in True Faith, but that's probably more to do with Garth preparing to leave the title and begin his opus maximus Preacher, which was only a few months away.  Still, the Dillon/Ennis era of Hellblazer locked in a lot of what is now considered standard Hellblazer tics--his terrible behavior towards woman, his unrepentant selfishness, and, in what probably differs it most from the Delano run, his ambivalence towards doing anything preventative when it comes to problematic situations.  Over and over in these Ennis stories, Constantine is a character who really only gets moving after the fact--and most of the time, only because he's bored or unable to drink in peace.

Damnation's Flame, the longest continued arc in both volumes, continues the trend of John not really doing a whole lot--he takes a trip to New York for the sole purpose of "taking a breath," having no ambition beyond checking into local bars and showcasing what would become even more blatant in Garth's later issues of Preacher and The Boys--that this is a writer who really loves New York.  While not as affectionately in your face as Preacher's "If you live anywhere else, you're fucking kidding yourself," the joy that Garth finds in depicting that "look at all the tall buildings" type of mindset that only immigrants can really spit out with a straight face is palpable.  The story itself isn't much beyond a closing of the door on Papa Midnite, something most Hellblazer readers probably would've hoped would prevent the appearance of the character in that abysmal Keanu Reeves movie.  (That's not all:  one also gets a chance to read about JFK wandering around America holding his brains inside of his hand and speaking solely in public relations soundbites, only to discover he's been replaced by the devil in the form of Abraham Lincoln.  It's similar to what Peter Milligan was doing with Shade The Changing Man at the time, like that series, it doesn't really reach any sort of natural ending, just slowly puttering to a close.  The image of JFK facing off to Lincoln is a striking one though, and it sticks with you.)

After Flame, it's back to the done-in-ones, and they happen to be some of the oddest Hellblazer stories ever published.  Two of them are straight up love affairs with people talking over alcohol, the sort of short studies in friendship and adulthood that would get them labeled auto-biographical stories if they were published by Drawn & Quarterly.  It can't be stressed enough--"Act of Union" and "Confessions of an Irish Rebel" are only Hellblazer comics because they feature John Constantine.  Nothing magical occurs here--it's drinking and talking, and the talking isn't the sort of pretentious, "Ain't love grand and snargle-snargle my daddy used to drink a lot" type stuff either.  Out of everything Garth wrote for the character, these two issues are the truest example of what he was trying to do with Constantine: turn the character from an empty vessel for horror stories into a living, breathing human being, fraught with actual feeling and emotion.  That's not to dismiss any of the great writers who have done entertaining, charismatic work with the character, but truthfully, Jamie Delano's take on the Constantine personality changed constantly to fit the story, Carey's work was far too clean an "epic" to fit, and Azzarello's, while brilliantly entertaining, didn't require the specific use of Constantine at all to work.  That's not to say that Hellblazer should focus solely on telling quiet bar conversation stories, but it is to say that, out of twenty years of publication, these are the two stories that stand out most as being the most "mature" of what Vertigo regularly publishes.  For that, they deserve attention, and yes, praise.  While it's unlikely that Vertigo made the wrong choice, as Hellblazer never would've made it past 200 issues if it tried to be the "smart & funny people talking comic," these issues point to a direction that, sadly, mainstream comics should learn to support.

The Punisher Kills The Marvel Universe
Art by Doug Braithwaite
Published by Marvel Comics, 1995

This short, recently reprinted comic has more in common with those old DC Elseworld's stories than any of the other versions of the Punisher that Ennis has been responsible for.  While the violence is certainly amped up, it's that sort of off-panel type of stuff that Marvel had published for years and, due to the lack of any internal dialog (unlike Garth's current string of Frank Castle stories, this comic contains zero "thought bubbles," delivering the entirety of it's language through conversation) it's also absent of any tonal weight or humor.  It's funny after a fashion, in that it's refreshing to see Cyclops shot in the face at point blank range while he attempts to stammer out a heartfelt apology for some collateral damage, but the brevity of it, the massive amount of action it requires (since Frank has to actually kill about a 1000 super-heroes) leaves no room for a sideline enterprises like pathos and humor.  It's not really a testament to skill, and it's not really that well done--if anything, it reads more like a story proposal published before it could go to a second round of expansion.  Still, if you've read enough Spider-Man comics to have had a moment where you wish somebody would shut the character up mid-whine, this is the only one you'll find where that happens by way of bullet-to-the-face. 

Loaded
Art by Greg Staples & Les Spink
Published by Gremlin/DC Comics (Free with Preacher # 12 & Invisibles # 19)

Someday, a website with extensive personal access to the bank accounts of comics creators should put up a story that details how much people like Garth Ennis, Ben Templesmith & Bill Sienkiewicz got paid to toss out these little video-game prologue comics.  If they really want to take it all the way, they should also figure out how much of an increase in sales video-game prologue comics produces.  Although this isn't as terrible as the versions that feel the need to be six-issue long mini-series, and it was just a freebie thrown in to a couple of comics it has zero tonal connection with, it's still such a terribly dull piece of shit that it's best enjoyed imagining that Garth Ennis wrote it while he was drunk.  Then you might be able to get a laugh out of it.  While nothing is more irritating then when shit-ass dumb bloggers start saying things like "I could write this," the truth is that, if you had Greg Staples and Les Spink providing the pictures, and you had a couple of issues of Judge Dredd to crib from, yes:  you could totally write this.  Unfortunately, because you're a fan-fiction writer, you'd probably be shoving Jay Garrick's penis inside the assholes available, instead of taking the route Garth took, which is to fill them with grenades.  Jesus, what kind of video game was this?

Bloody Mary
Art by Carlos Ezquerra
Published by Helix/Vertigo/DC Comics, 1996

Bloody Mary: Lady Liberty
Art by Carlos Ezquerra
Published by Helix/Vertigo/DC Comics, 1997

Originally published as two separate four issue mini-series by the now-dormant Helix imprint in 1996 and 1997, Bloody Mary is another team-up between Ennis and Ezquerra now collected in one volume by DC's Vertigo line.  Don't be fooled by the science fiction sounding aspects described on the back cover--this is an Ennis war comic, and many of his favorite tropes are found here:  there's a soldier who would be best off if the war never ended, a massive amount of graphic violence down with non-war related implements, a huge amount of affection for the special forces and the infantry soldier, and, because it's Ennis, nasty, vicious humor that has no hope of busting the guts of the mainstream reader.   In a way, it's similar to True Faith--a bit more extreme then it needs to be to get the point across, a bit too schizophrenic in its desire to find serious pathos immediately after sarcastic riffs on sexual proclivities, and far too long-winded when it comes time for the meandering, seemingly un-edited political statements.  One wonders what some of the characters in War Stories or the recent War is Hell mini-series would have to say about the multiple pages of dialog the main character spits out about the "power of hope" late in the book--as it is, it's an affectionate little piece of monologue, but it strains the credibility when it arrives after reading about a woman whose main purpose and goal in life is to kill as many human beings as possible.  (But hey!  Her mommy and daddy were murdered!)  Unlike Garth's work on Punisher, where it's fully acknowledged that Frank Castle is a sociopath as in love with violence as he is with revenge, proffering the Bloody Mary of the title as someone who finds time for heavy symbolic gesture while killing hundreds of people with an axe pushes this book so far into absurdity that there is no way back.  It's entertaining, in a vile sort of fashion, and Ezquerra's art could form a textbook on how one draws military combat in a readable fashion while hewing as close to "accuracy" as is possible, but Bloody Mary is one of those sorts of comics that ends up being most interesting when read as an experiment in form.  If one were the type to compare style choices over the course of a writers career, Bloody Mary is an excellent source text for all of Garth's future war comics.  Taken by itself, it's greatest moment is the really nasty Kurt Cobain suicide joke near the close of the story.   One doubts that was the goal.

Pride & Joy
Art by John Higgins
Published by Vertigo/DC Comics, 1997

Pride & Joy reads like the sort of middle of the road crime thriller that would probably have been directed by Dominic Sena--it's all broad strokes and overwrought conversation, this time set in the woods.  There should be a fucking moratorium set for setting things in the goddamn forests, preferably a retroactive one that prevents the production of a remake of the goddamn Friday the Sack of Shit 13th film from Michael Bay's Never Stop Believing You're Not Mentally Handicapped Film team.  Here in Pride & Joy, as always, it's the love of a good woman that has changed the life of an ex-criminal, and it's her death and an unspoken past that will bridge the gap in a father's relationship with his wispy wimp of a son.  (Is he gay?  Not explicitly.  But the leery, "what-exactly-is-your-deal-with-homosexuals Mr. Ennis" thing is there.)  There's very little here that hasn't been done before, not just in comics, but in the fiction of Christopher Pike, and it's been done better.  Not by R.L. Stine.  While there's nothing inherently wrong with turning out a straight up thriller, Ennis would've done well to ease up on the deafening grinding of emotional mechanics.  Or if he'd gone even further, and people wore name-tags that described their emotional state, like "Still Don't Trust You Dad" and "Terrified You Might Suck Cock Son."  It also would've helped if the main villain wasn't yet another human Terminator, who seems to have both the killing skill of Golgo 13 mixed with the invisibility talents of the fabled ninja, all the while looking like a zany English butler.  Side note: this comic was purchased from someone who called it "their favorite Ennis story ever" so reactions may differ.  Even further side note:  this same person cuts their own hair, badly, and also said that he chose not to have children because that would "cut into my comic money."  As far off into side notes as possible:  This person runs a comic shop.

Hellblazer: Son of Man
Art by John Higgins
Originally Serialized in Hellblazer # 129-133, 1998

The period between Garth Ennis original run on Hellblazer and Son of Man is an odd one for the title--excepting a Delano issue and a short arc by Eddie Campbell (yes, the respectable Eddie Campbell, he of the ejaculatory artsy squee), the 40-odd issues in between were by Paul Jenkins and future-Criminal & Marvel Zombies superstar Sean Phillips.  (As well as Garth's old True Faith pal, Warren Pleece.)  None of these Paul Jenkins issues have made their way to the Vertigo trade program that has republished the near-complete remainder of the series.  Why, and what sort of response these issues received is something beyond the knowledge of this reviewer--I'd imagine it's because the stories weren't that popular, but upon reading a few of them, they don't seem that far removed from any of the placeholder issues of Hellblazer that Delano turned out, and the tone itself seems relatively in line with the books current format.  Maybe Paul Jenkins fucked the other Paul's wife, who knows?  Either way, Son of Man is, ten years later, the only time Ennis has returned to the character and series since his original run.  For what it is--a malicious demonic possession comes home story with graphic torture and violence, it's entertaining enough.  While it's dependent upon one's mileage for reading cheap offenses like "I'm shagging a lesbian.  Do I win a prize?" and watching someone get their eyelids cut off with a fingernail trimmer by a guy saying "Clip clip," it's not altogether bad.  Actually, it's even better than that--it's a well-crafted malicious demonic possession comes home story.  With graphic torture and violence!  Hellblazer, as a series, could have gone another way for Ennis if he'd stayed on the title--as was mentioned earlier, the two short, non-horror stories, definitely indicate that he might have even thought of that himself.  Son of Man is a reversal of that, but it could be argued that the reason for it's safe return to form is that Ennis realized that, if he did have an ambition to tell a more mature story, a corporate owned property like Hellblazer might not be the right place to do it.  If so, doing a good thriller, but nothing more, was the right choice.  And at least when Ennis decided to focus so much on a small child, this small child was a blood-drinking rapist, instead of a skinny idiot that shits out his own intestines while trying to impress Nick Fury.

Judge Dredd: Helter Skelter
Art by Carlos Ezquerra & Henry Flint
Serialized in 2000AD #1250-1261, 2001

While Garth returned to the Judge Dredd stories having a far wider experience than he did when writing the other volumes mentioned in this collection of reactions, the work he did reportedly still didn't capture the love of the regular Dredd readers--according to online sources, which you aren't allowed to do on the John Byrne message board, apparently because most online sources think Byrne is sort of creepy, Judge Dredd fans complained that they wanted him to go away, again.  (Reading the online response of Dredd fans, I'm surprised that Britain itself didn't fucking implode when that Stallone movie came out.  But it had Armand Assante in it, and from what other online sources claim, the United Kingdom is a bastion of Mambo Kings quoting sociopaths.)  Having not read much of Dredd, it's difficult to see why these fans acted like a bunch of pissy wanks.  Helter Skelter, unlike Emerald Isle and Death Aid, is a relatively engaging story that works well against it's forced 8-page distribution, it maintains a cohesive plot and tone that's consistent throughout, and it reads as if it's one of those fan-pleasing stories wherein a lot of old characters (villains, the lot) return in a kind of Towering Inferno style enterprise to wreak havoc on Mega-City and get revenge on the main character.  For some reason, Ezquerra looks like he was trying to find a way to imitate the style of Steve Dillon, although that might be due to Ennis having written so many scripts for his Preacher/Hellblazer partner--the majority of the panels are those sorts of simple full-face drawings that make up so much of Dillon's work for the story of Jesse struggling with his masculinity.  Altogether, Skelter reads like something that's "what they want" first, with story second--oddly, that didn't grip the people who regularly pursue the Judge's adventures.  It's not as funny as Emerald Isle and Death Aid, but Ennis' progress as an author of action-based thriller writing is obvious, and Helter Skelter, regardless of what the proles might say, is the best Dredd work we've read so far.  Which, if the internet is right, means that the John Wagner Dredd must turn water into machine gun wine.

Adventures in the Rifle Brigade
Art by Carlos Ezquerra
Published by Vertigo/DC Comics, 2001-03

Now that time has passed, and Garth's war comics for the Vertigo imprint are mostly shelved alongside each other, one wonders how often someone picks up Rifle Brigade after being recommended in the Ennis-does-combat direction only to find that this is a compilation of a rather amusing running gag and a storyline focused on capturing Adolf Hitler's missing testicle.  This ain't War Stories--it's full comedy mode Ennis, and although the jokes aren't all top notch, the various ways in which a wispy little goof tries to get his commanding officer to please him sexually while faking his way through a full "One for the gipper" scenario are pretty classic.  It's an easy gag, and while it might be argued (if one cared) that it's mildly homophobic, that would require one to ignore that the commanding officer always seems on the verge of saying "Aw fuck it" and diving south to "give the old chap a bit of a suck...just like nanny used to do."  While your affections for Rifle Brigade may vary, it has to be said: if you're going to marathon read a shitload of Garth Ennis war comics, this is one that keeps the whole venture from going to far into "let's be serious about serious comic books" mindsets.  A bunch of soldiers on the warpath for the "hairy ball" of one of history's greatest monsters?  The constant pulsating potential for hardcore dude on dude sexual action?  You could do much worse.

Hulk Smash!
Art by John McCrea & Klaus Jansen
Published by Marvel Comics, 2001

One has to be curious as to whether or not Hulk Smash is what Marvel was expecting out of Ennis.  It is, after all, a Hulk story told in two issues where it seems that the writer didn't have any interest in having the Hulk in it at all:  he's nothing more than a utilitarian object that serves as the macguffin, the plot box, for another of the writer's studies of soldiers in conflict.   Sure, Hulk does more Smashing and Talking Bout Smashing in these scant pages then he was doing in his regular comic, which was under the stewardship of Bruce "No Really, I'm Trying To Get Myself Fired" Jones at the time.  But there's really nothing much here, it's such a carbon copy of every Hulk goes a-fighting story featuring the military that, in every section of the comic that doesn't focus explicitly on the soldiers, it reads the way any desert battle featuring Bruce Banner plays out in the memory of a reader...less wordy explanation:  remember that time Hulk fought the army in the desert?  Now write the script for that battle in less than four minutes--there, pencils down.  Give it to John McCrea.  There, you've got a comic book called Hulk Smash.  The flipside is that it seems Garth was trying to do something else here, some kind of serious version of that throwaway gag in the first Austin Powers movie where they point out that a dead henchmen has a wife at home, and she'll miss him--and that would be fine, but the characters are just painted far too broadly to stomach.  You've got the coward who finds his courage in the arms and leadership of a tough black superior who points out that, despite the odds against regular grunts in battle with the Hulk "...you had an obligation to your men.  You put on the uniform, you swear the oath, an' from that moment on your life means nothing'.  You agreed to become an officer in the United States Army: That means you accepted the burden of commandin' troops.  They get to be scared.  You get to lead." 

Sure, that's the sort of stuff that might work if it was delivered in a less "watch out for that burning flag, here come some doves, slow-motion now" kind of tone, but after that quote it's time for a three page monologue on the black officer's experience in Vietnam, which is where he learned all about courage and loyalty and so on, as well as talking like he lives inside the movie We Were Soldiers, until he looks down the ridge and says "Here comes the Hulk."   (A minor skirmish follows, where the wise and tough black officer dies while yelling "Keep fighting!  Keep fighting!")  It's all just a little too much, and it's that same thing that happens every time that Marvel, or DC, or any comic book, tries to match up some realism with some super-heroes, when it tries to meet on the bridge of "how would Joe Regular react to a 12 foot goliath, skin all green and pecs all a-buldging."  It's just too fucking stupid to believe, to enjoy--it's the nonsense when a nurse in Central City has to operate on Gorilla Grodd in a burned out Macy's on Christmas morning while Lex Luthor's outside grilling an infant on a funeral pyre or else Santa Claus will never come to the pediatric ward.  The idea that real human emotions, or ideals, are somehow going to behave similar to the way they do in the real world when confronted with the garish logic of the super-hero universe.  That a soldier will act like a soldier when a monster can throw a tank into a helicopter.  That normal boys in the service will follow a commanding officer into hand-to-hand combat with the Incredible Hulk.  It's asinine.  It's irritating.  And no matter who's on script detail, the shit just never works.

Enemy Ace: War In Heaven
Art by Chris Weston, Christian Alamy & Russ Heath
Published by DC Comics, 2001

Inside the category that is The Ennis War Comic is a sub-category called "air combat,"  which also often crosses over to "Ennis Revamping Old Comic Book Characters."  Enemy Ace serves as both--an old Joe Kubert character from the 60's, who happens to fly a plane.  (Other examples are Battler Britton & the current MAX series featuring the Phantom Eagle.)  Obviously, there's story tics that come up often--a character will always mention the engineering flaw that placed the fuel tanks underneath the seats of fighter planes, turning them into explosive death traps, you can count on the main character's closest friend to die somewhere near the final battle, there will be loudmouth asshole officers that no one likes, and, for some reason, there's usually a scene where somebody (good guy, bad guy, any guy, never a lady) ends up in the propeller blades and the gore is depicted as extreme as whatever the comic is "rated."  What makes Enemy Ace different--and it's pretty fucking different--is that it's main character and supporting cast are all German flyers in World War II.  Meaning Ennis, who has been criticized before for his depiction of the Axis powers in his war stuff, is writing the guys who fought for, and in some cases also were, Nazis.  It's heavy shit, brah--the conversation between the two leads about whether or not getting rid of Hitler will make all of Germany "clean again" is one of the more unrelenting moments of raw honesty in Ennis' entire catalog and it's also a sign that he clearly had a desire to be more than just "that guy with a fucked up sense of humor who wrote Preacher."  While Enemy Ace may look a lot like a standard study in those Men who are Great Killers, it's the strongest of any of his air combat stories, and one of his finest war comics to date.  (And while the obvious focus of these little missives is the writing, the art team of Weston, Alamy and Heath have turned in work that rivals Joe Kubert's work on the character--a feat in itself.)  Enemy Ace isn't a comic that gets mentioned a lot, and part of that might be due to Ennis' heroic workload--he seems to have at least one or two comics out a month, and rarely does he seem to have a comic that doesn't turn some kind of profit--either way, it ended up being the biggest out-of-nowhere moment of joy in this entire reading experience.  It's a great comic book, and it proudly earns a spot alongside the comics the man has ever written.

Fury
Art by Darick Robertson & Jimmy Palmiotti
Published by Marvel MAX, 2001-02

Whether the rumor is true or not that George Clooney was interested in appearing in a film based on the Nick Fury character until someone passed him a collected edition of this nasty piece of work, it certainly makes for a hell of a barroom anecdote.  (Apparently Clooney got all uppity because he found this comic more offensive then the script for The Peacemaker.)  Fury is one of those sorts of stories that is always going to be a tough sell to a large audience--ignoring the violence, which includes threats of male rape from a deformed seven foot tall Russian soldier and a horrifying sequence where a man is choked to death by his own intestines that have been cut from his belly, Fury is one of the most cynical of all of Garth's war stories.  Nick Fury is presented here as the a cigar smoking anachronistic relic of the Cold War, a man who pays for six prostitutes a night, ridicules his only friend for finding some type of marital joy, and draws those under his command into a personal vendetta with his old Russian counterpart, only to end up causing a massive amount of civilian casualty.  As the final pages of the story make clear, Ennis knew full well that the character presented in the series is far more responsible for the death and carnage surrounding him then a comic audience will probably find comfortable--and he's content to leave that as it's anti-climatic ending.  Still, Fury is an interesting look at the way Ennis explores his own feelings about war--the characters here are lost in a world consumed by the fictional depictions of what it is they do, some are unwilling to question the powers that have so exploited their willing sacrifice, while others seem the sort that should have been drowned in a pail of swamp mash at birth, much less placed in a jungle with a gun.  That's not to say that Fury is realistic--it's a cartoonish exercise in mayhem, and the violence is defiantly tilted towards the entertaining--but that it's an excursion into fantasies of patriotism.  This isn't war, and Garth knows it--but it's exactly what Nick Fury, and the real people who embrace his knee-jerk patriotism, wants war to be.  What makes it such a glaringly uncomfortable version of war is that it ends by pointing out that the characters here, the ones most in the "right," are not the ones who are charismatic soldiers, but the ones who have sidelined the soldiers.  The blood that's shed, the innocents who die--all of that, as one character points out to Nick early on, didn't have to happen.  All he had to do was listen to his boss--his sniveling, completely unlikeable boss, who is, in even more caustic fashion then any of the bloodshed, depicted as realistically as possible.

Just A Pilgrim: Garden of Eden
Art by Carlos Ezquerra
Published by Black Bull Entertainment, 2002

Garden of Eden was the second story featuring Garth's "Pilgrim" character, as this story ends with the characters death, one will assume it's the last.  (Also because it's hard to imagine that a publishing company that was run, in some part at least, by the same guy who produces that Wizard magazine has some kind of deal set up that Garth Ennis would willingly go back to at this point in his career.)  That being said, there's plenty more available to read about Pilgrim--the character isn't far removed from The Saint of Killers (from Preacher) and, in his obsessive isolation, not that far removed from the Punisher either.  Like the earlier Bloody Mary stories, this is another science fiction comic in setting only--Pilgrim's sun may have enlarged, turning the Earth into a desolate wasteland, but that doesn't mean there still isn't time to spread the gospel, shoot things with guns, and make a whole lot of normal people uncomfortable.  All in all, this is just another thriller--not as well-crafted as some of Garth's work, but one that's still tight enough (and cheap enough) that it's hard to get really irritated at it.  The most memorable thing about Garden of Eden would have to be the moment that serves as the books surprise climax--when the only remaining evidence of Christianity, the last Bible on Earth, is thrown out of the spaceship that will take the only surviving humans away from a dead planet.  For Garth, and for his Pilgrim character, Christianity's "lies, n' strife, n' poison" ends here.  Interestingly enough to this reader, this story, and that moment, is the last time Garth has said anything about Christianity in such a forceful, serious tone.  From 2002 onward, his work has only dealt with the religion in a blatantly humorous fashion that might be offensive, but lacks any of the anger and vitriol on display in Hellblazer, True Faith or Garden of Eden.  For that, it's led this reader to wonder if maybe, when Pilgrim chose to take that Bible to hell with him, Garth let some of his disgust and rage go with it.

The Pro
Art Amanda Conner & Jimmy Palmiotti
Published by Image Comics, 2002

The worst thing that could've happened to The Pro would probably have to be the publication of The Boys, which pretty much takes a whole lot of the stuff going on here and goes on to make a better comic--as a story, The Pro is fine, but it seemed a whole lot funnier and more pointed before Garth Ennis scared the shit out of DC Comics and went on to make a fuckload of money for Dynamite's tiny comics line.  For the most part, you will have read a lot of this sort of stuff before, and, since the main Pro story was a one-shot with ends with a relatively moronic "save the world" bit, you'll have enjoyed those other version more.  Why Garth felt the need to give this story a "hero prevails against all odds through self-sacrifice" is bewildering, and it's a weak ending to an otherwise scathing parody of the standard super-hero title.  There's all kinds of throwaway moments that still hold up: The portion of the comic where the sole black hero continuously spits out ridiculous ghetto slang is cruel, but when compared to the way Black Lightning and Luke Cage used to talk, and the way John Stewart still occasionally does, it's also a brilliant "fuck you" to shit writers, as is the moment when the title characters responds to a page of super-heroes attempting to describe their really important and mature exploits (all of which are closely paralleled by actual events in DC comics) by saying "That's all so fucking lame it makes my teeth hurt."  While other readers probably make the mistake of treating The Pro as a comic where Garth Ennis is espousing his own views on spandex characters, that's sort of missing the greater context of the comic:  it's about a prostitute given super-powers, so of course she's going to have zero tolerance for the argument that "to inspire hope can never be wrong."  Reading deeply into The Pro is a waste of time--it's pretty much a dick joke to hold the audience while the writer preps more political fare.  For dick jokes though, it's a pretty funny read.

The Authority: Kev
The Authoity: The Magnificient Kevin
A Man Called Kevin
Art by Glenn Fabry & Carlos Ezquerra
Published by Wildstorm/DC Comics, 2002, 2004, 2005-07

The three trades that make up, for lack of a less pretentious sounding term, the Kev Saga.  The first two trades collect three mini-series that all beg the question of why Wildstorm ever allowed Garth Ennis anywhere near their Authority characters in the first place--the overall sense of complete loathing for the characters is (while totally understandable) so obvious that whoever green-lit this series must have subconsciously loathed the stable of characters that, for a brief window of time, was funding their paychecks.  It's not hard to imagine why Garth might harbor such disregard for the Authority characters--most of them started out as cheap parody in the pages of Stormwatch as an answer to the age-old question of "What would it look like if Batman and Superman were, you know, together?"  (What's absurd about that question is that it was answered years ago by John Byrne in his Man of Steel mini-series from the 80's, and more recently beat to death by Jeph Loeb in the Batman/Superman series--if you couldn't read between the lines and see that all those comics were extended foreplay to nights of passion in the Fortress of Solitude, you're living in a state of delusion.)  When Warren Ellis went on to "invent" wide-screen comics with his bombastic super-heroes cum super-powers Authority series, he jacked up the violence, added a Dr. Fate stand-in, an Iron Woman, and, in what has to be the laziest parody since Ralph Dibny, a Hawkgirl.  (But she's a Buddhist.)  Ennis had already screwed around in the parody waters a bit, but with Hitman, Preacher & The Pro, he'd already realized what an empty form it was--making a super-hero pastiche appeals to super-hero fans, but no one else gets the jokes--and, as he does with The Boys, started to flirt with a satire on the concept of hero-worship as well as construct sequences where Batman fills Alfred's ear with semen.  The Kev stories operate in sort of a gray area--there's portions that are massively critical of the entire concept of "taking super-heroes seriously" that are sort of interesting, but overall they fail to fit with the tone of a book that, despite Kev's lack of powers and costume, follows the exploits of someone who behaves pretty much exactly like a super-hero when he isn't talking about his past in a bar.

For the most part, the first of these Kev stories is still operating in a silly place--the main character is taking a shit for the first action sequence and is then able to kill, as well as immediately resurrect, the entire squadron of gods that makes up the Authority in some of the laziest super-hero logic ever by "proving that humanity deserves another chance" to a talking machine, and the climax is where Garth has Kev get his shit kicked in for being a homophobic bigot.  There's a little more beyond that, just another one of Garth's "funny old army stories" where a couple of dudes sit around in a bar to talk about a tiger, and that's it.  Kev isn't really that involving of a character--sort of like that Cassidy character from Preacher mixed with a bit more acumen and a healthy dash of Hitman.   Besides that, there's a bit of creaky motions the comic takes when it decides to dive into Kev's back story are telegraphed with dialog like "Alright, I don't ever want to talk about it, but let me tell you a story..." as introduction.  

The Magnificient Kev, the second volume of stories, is more of the same--it's far more tolerable due to the lack of the majority of the Authority--Garth sends them packing at the hands of a demon with magical pies whose only threat/statement is "I'm a vagina."  Before they go, there's one of the greatest "I hate these sorts of comics" moments in Garth history, where the Hawkgirl stand-in sings about how "I'm just a token...I'm an asian chick" for the entirety of two and a half pages--like Garth's offensive rebuff to the idea of a token black character who speaks like an animated Flavor Flav in The Pro, it's a seriously uncomfortable moment of brilliance--everybody knows that the majority of comic writers are white, that the majority of comics buyers are white, and that there's nothing specifically "Asian" about the Swift character beyond her tacked on religion and vaguely non-Caucasian coloring;  it isn't that what Ennis is saying about this is anything surprising, it's that he's putting the statements directly into the mouth of the actual token character--Swift is talking, directly to us, and she's saying "Jesus, it's really pathetic that people (readers/writers/publishers) pretend that my existence is somehow progress worth bragging about."

From that moment, Magnificent returns to it's overall story, which is all about Kev getting put in the exact situation that one of his kinder friends had once mentioned, a moment where Kev is ordered to execute innocent children.  (In true Garth form, the children are miserable little assholes, even more homophobic and vile than Kev himself.  That's not to say that homophobes and asshole children should be executed, but it's somewhat surprising how attractive it makes potentially murdering them.)  Beyond that twist, which isn't integral enough to sway the story in a better direction, there's some cruel jokes at the expense of the handicapped--no worse than that Cameron Diaz/Ben Stiller movie--but still sort of junior league humor writing.  If anything, these first two volumes could have merited from some more of Hitler's missing testicle.

The final Kev arc is the strongest, no doubt in part due to the lack of any of the Authority characters--but it's also similar to Garth's work on Punisher before the MAX change-over, albeit with Kev standing in for Frank Castle.  A standard revenge story based in a selfish decision made during a military operation, on that's just a warmed up version of an existing story Ennis wrote for the Hitman character,  Man Named Kev is pretty much the perfect example of why none of the Kev stories are top drawer Ennis:  even at their best, which this one is by leaps and bounds, they seem unnecessary, repetitive work that's hamstrung by the limitations of the character.  Whereas Garth's work on Preacher, Punisher and the war comics all revel in exploring the boundaries of what the writer is doing with genre cliches, Man Called Kev is little more than a joyless delivery of those cliches: here's the man to man conversation about friendship, here's the immediate love connection, here's a shoot-em-up scene with a ninja, and all of it is so familiar that it fails to excite.  Conversely, like many of these lighter stories, it might be something that's greatly enjoyable to a reader who isn't dealing with a huge amount of Ennis at once--but even then, Kev isn't the type of story (like Enemy Ace, The Boys or Preacher) that inspires the desire to track down more work by the writer.  It isn't bad--but by comparison, it certainly isn't that good, either.

303
Art by Jacen Burrows
Published by Avatar Press, 2004

Ennis referred to 303 as "the strangest damn thing I've written in a long, long time."  He would know.  Depending on your tolerance for the one sentence description, this could be either "that comic with the most tasteless ending ever" if you're a certain type of person, or "that comic with the greatest ending of all time" if you have the opposite political views of the former individual.  A scattered, only mildly entertaining action thriller that jumps from place to place and plot to plot, 303 is a comic that seems to have come from a combination of multiple scripts, none of which have a complete thru-line beyond sticking to the one main character as he bloodies his way around the world.  Taken as a serialized story, it was probably a confusing comic when first released--besides location, there's only the briefest sense in who the Colonel is, and the entire story is one that's less about anything in particular beyond the greater sense that war is a fucked up thing, no less so when it's the one going on right now.  That being said, some of Garth's best work seems to show up when you can tell he's really pissed off about something--and 303 doesn't lack a sense of rage.  Whether it's the horrible image of an Afghani woman being splattered in the organs of her child by an American bomber (with the cartoonish words "Love Shack" painted on the side) or the shocking and almost unbelievable-they-printed-it ending, 303 is a mean fucking story about stuff that's on more people's minds then is probably comfortable imagining.  Still, it has the overall effect of being bludgeoned with a hammer--there's no respite or room to breathe here.  You're either willing to go into a story that's fractured, confused and resoundingly lacking in any simple entertainment, or you prefer to have your war stories depicted through the backward eyes of history.  End note: Whoever wrote the blurb describing this story as being "The Ultimate Soldier Meets His Destiny" should be fired.  Read it and see why.

Ghost Rider: The Road To Damnation
Art by Clayton Crain
Published by Marvel Comics, 2005-06

Garth tries as hard as anyone ever has, but you'll still be waiting for a Ghost Rider comic book where something beyond the character's appearance defines his existence by the close of this odd mini-series.  While, again, we're happy not to be privy to the vagaries of Marvel publishing, the comic itself seems to exist solely so that Clayton Crain can show off his odd digitally painted comic art.  What most people, this reader included, remember most about the initial publication of this Ghost Rider is how dark the thing was--dark in the sense that the pages required a bit more time to comprehend then any comic should ever demand.  There's aspects of the rough horror bit that Garth does well--the moment when an angel forces a little boy to blind himself will stick with you, for better or worse, and the comedic back and forth between a grotesquely overweight paraplegic and his girl Friday is a great homage to the droll screwball flicks it's clearly modeled on, but overall, it's hard to get a sense of why Ennis participated in this exercise beyond the paycheck.  For those who enjoy the Clayton Crain type of art, it's probably a classic.  But for the rest of us, it's just mediocre Ghost Rider comics, and that pretty much says it all.

Fury: Peacemaker
Art by Darick Robertson
Published by Marvel Comics, 2006

While it's the same character, and the same artist, featured in 2001's Fury story, this couldn't be more different.  Not being a MAX title, for one--although you'd be hard-pressed to come up with an explanation why some of the violence isn't just pretty graphic stuff, notably the moment when Nick loses his eye.  (Garth gives a funny throwaway line to help connect this to his '01 story by having a character mention that the damage to Fury's brain may cause him "to be a bit more short-tempered.")  Like some of the other titles here, and of course, the popular Punisher origin series by the same team, this is a straight up war comic with regular comic characters.  Here, Garth sets everything up for another foray into World War II, one of his pet subjects, and his excitement shows.  In what clearly would've been an exercise in repetition under most writers, Ennis just fires full steam ahead.  The story--a loose interpretation of any of the rumored German based Hitler assassination plots clashes smack into the story of a character who has already started to grasp that all the violence and killing has shaped him in a way it hasn't the men around him, and while he's clearly young enough to find that somewhat frightening, he's also starting to realize that he likes the change as well.  A lot of Garth's "men of iron" characters struggle openly with their own emotional state, searching for ways to tamp down what irks them most--any feeling that isn't rage.  Nick's struggle here, a struggle that is almost non-existent in Punisher comics (Garth didn't even depict what Frank Castle recently did in the moments when Barracuda's potential assault on an infant caused him fear.  Instead, the entire sequence was shown in aftermath, when Frank said "I don't remember what happened after that," and he pieces together the probable sequence of events by his broken limbs, his scarred knuckles, and, with that Ennis grotesque flourish, "meat in my teeth.")  But here in Peacemaker, Nick Fury is actually confused at times, lost, asking for help.  While he may ask for it in a tone of the haughty arrogance that eventually he uses to form his entire personality, the fact that he's asking, that he's not really sure what to do--that's not the sort of character that Ennis had used before in one of his for-hire comics.  While the action itself in this story is mostly relegated to a repetition of better sequences found in his other war scripts, his commitment to telling a story about Fury that hadn't been told before is one that serves to make this, while possibly less entertaining in it's audaciousness, no less of a worthwhile read. 

Battler Britton
Art by Colin Wilson
Published by Wildstorm/DC Comics, 2006

Like Dan Dare and Judge Dredd, the Battler Britton mini-series was another of Garth's forays into classic British characters.  Unlike Alan Moore, who never met a British fictional character he couldn't turn into a stained glory hole, Ennis again took a more reverent approach, telling another hell-on-wings air combat story about a team-up between the RAF and the American Air Force.  While there's been some complaint hedged at this story for being just that, more of the same, it's a bit unjust.  This is, after all, a character, and a setting, that the writer is openly a fan of.  While it may be irksome that the story is a bit less "realistic" or whatever that means when you're talking about comic books, it's a rollicking good read that's designed to be reverent first, innovation second.  It's funny when it needs to be, like when Britton lays out his American counterpart in a full-page splash, and the oil of Garth's experience shows when the reaction to dead pilots is etched across the faces of each survivor near the climactic battle--yes, he's done this before.  But he's learned how to do it really fucking well.  Besides all that, Battler has, for whatever reason, the best depiction of air combat in any of Ennis' work on the subject yet, a sequence that opens with a flawless depiction of a plane finally spotting a camouflaged troop regiment.  In three wide panels, Colin Wilson shows what the pilots see--nothing, nothing, and then, in a washed out picture with thin gray lines, an entire camp full of enemy troops.  The next panel focuses on the left flank of the pilots line, showing how close they had to come just to see it, before entering the bombing zone.  The remainder of the sequence, the standard planes burning and gunning, should be confusing--yet the way it's set up, with a back-and-forth dialog that bounces from radio orders and barked decisions is so flawlessly put together that it's easily comprehensible, even to those less versed in the genre.  While the speechifying aspects that close the story are a bit on the histrionic side--it's more of that "I always knew I could trust you" and "Some of these boys will never make it home," it's also a tone that fits more with a character who, unlike many of Garth's favored war heroes, plans to go home as soon as possible, and he isn't going to take this war with him.

Midnighter: Killing Machine
Art by Chris Sprouse, Karl Story & Glenn Fabry
Published by Wildstorm/DC Comics, 2007

Well, it doesn't get more mercenary then this, now does it?  For whatever reason--a favor to Chris Sprouse, boredom, or just the same mentality that convinced Forest Whitaker to do Battlefield Earth, this is Garth at what has to be his most questionable.  It's not that these comics, the first seven issues of a thankfully canceled series about the Authority's Bat-Parody, are that horrible.  For what they are, for the materials available, it's a mildly diverting trifle that isn't monumentally worse than anything else that rides the shelves.  But for a writer to waste his time producing something that's neither innovative, clever, or anything special, this is pretty lousy shit.  Everything that's done here has been done better, and it's been done better in both mediocre Ennis (More Kev) and funny Ennis (The Pro.)  The main plot, the always cringeworthy "what if you could kill Hitler" story drags on far beyond any sense only to end with the threat of killing a sleeping six-year-old, and the final story is one of those mind-numbing excursions into "our super-heroes have existed forever, here they are as historical Japanese ninja-types."  Normally, the prospect of killing children isn't going to be a dealbreaker, at least not around these parts, but it's such a trite, throwaway moment here that it doesn't speak to any great desire to be involved with the comic at all.  While there's no evidence that a good Midnighter series could be constructed by any writer, it might have been preferable to have given the job to someone who might have at least tried.  (Or wanted to do it in the first place.)  Then again, the only reason to try this series in the first place was the Ennis/Sprouse team-up, so maybe, for once in their hilarious publishing career, Wildstorm did something right.  (Besides Sleeper.)

Chronicles of Wormwood
Art by Jacen Burrows
Published by Avatar Press, 2007

Avatar's built up an interesting relationship with Garth Ennis and Warren Ellis over the last few years--they seem to specialize in providing pocket money by printing whatever the two feel like doing when they aren't tearing apart corporate properties.  Unfortunately, they also seem to specialize in giving Jacen Burrows a constant stream of work, and while Burrows is probably a really great person, his art is some of the most boring available.  Neither ugly, attractive, or anything that might strive to take it from the median ground of average, it only really works for this reader when it's A) on 303 for some reason, or B) drawing the talking rabbit that follows around his main character here.  (It should be noted, for those who might care to ask, that the main character named Wormwood featured in this story is in no way connected to the Wormwood character who appears in the Ben Templesmith comic of the same name.  That one is a zombie!)  While we mentioned early a totally unproven theory that Garth's Pilgrim: Garden of Eden story seemed to be the last time he'd gone after religion with his knives thoroughly sharpened on the anger side, Chronicles has a bit of a nasty streak to it as well.  But make no mistake--the type of attack presented here is one that's clearly designed to be funny, and yes, at times, it is.  Most of the jokes actually work best due to the collaboration with Jacen Burrows, surprisingly enough.  While it might have made for a more attractive read to see a Dillon or Ezquerra again, it's doubtful that either would've so affectionately depicted a man's nose turned into a penis in such realistic fashion.  (Besides that--the bunny.  Whichever of the two men involved decided to make the bunny--a foul mouthed little bastard--as cute as possible deserves some kind of award.)

Ghost Rider: Trail of Tears
Art by Clayton Crain
Published by Marvel Comics, 2007

All of the same criticisms against Clayton Crain leveled above can be brought around again--this is a comic that, regardless of what period of the day it's set at, requires a massive amount of ambient light to be even remotely comprehensible.  Why the guy has his "digital painting" studio set at "shade everything black and brown" is a question that only he could answer.  Besides that someone, either Crain or Ennis, made the horrible mistake of featuring a rogue posse made up of people who, with only a few exceptions, don't look that much different.  The choice makes the few fighting sequences that this Western comic has extraordinarily difficult to comprehend.  Garth doesn't help himself tremendously by choosing to tell a Ghost Rider story without the one thing that anybody reading a Ghost Rider story wants--which is to look at a flaming skeleton on a motorcycle.  Instead, the comic provides a hooded skeleton on a pony.  While the story itself does a decent bait-and-switch, waiting a surprising length of time to make clear exactly who the Ghost Rider is, it all adds up to a moment not that far removed from a million other cowboy tales, as a sweet old hooker and a town full of gingham loving farmers ends up caught between the Devil and Hell itself.  Seriously?  While Ennis almost saves the story by turning the final pages into a incisive criticism of violence and vengeance, it's presented in such a fashion that it's clear that isn't what this story was designed to do--if you're looking for to find an explanation for that, you have to turn a few pages back (before all that dumb talking!)  and look at how Clayton Crain drew that dude getting his arms ripped off.  OK.  Now do you get it?

-Tucker Stone, 2008

Comments

[Matthew J. Brady]

Also: Hitman.

I actually haven't read this whole thing yet, but I figured I'd get one comment in. I'll probably be back with more blah blah when I get through it. Looks like good stuff.

[Tucker Stone]

There's a considerable amount I've left out--Preacher is one that's probably received enough ink at this point. Punisher and War Stories are both future posts--they are both more interesting on their own merits. The Boys is one that would work best covered upon completion. (Unless you're Jog.)

Then there's the not-enough-time or too-much-work-to-find, like the original Pilgrim story, Hitman, the remaining Hellblazer stories, Judge Dredd and Strontium Dog stuff, The Demon, Goddess, Tangled Web, Thor: The Vikings and The Dicks. Some of these I read for this, but just didn't have enough of it to get a real sense of what was going on.

What would be most interesting would be the real hard to find stuff--Troubled Souls, They never Get Drunk But They Stay Sober, all those stories. There's some real gems out there in the world of the uncollected trades.

[Scott Bukatman]

don't pass on Hitman... one of the best things he's done. Great post.

[googum]

Boy, I thought I had read a lot of Ennis, but there's a good chunk that I've missed.

I kind of want to re-read Thor: Vikings, now: it crosses into the 'air combat subcategory,' features a surprising amount of carnage for a Marvel book, and guest-stars a increasingly irritated Dr. Strange. Pretty sure most of the Avengers get asskicked for good measure.

[Matthew J. Brady]

Damn. Nice overview. I've read a good portion of this stuff, but out of what I haven't, it seems that the one I most need to get my hands on is Enemy Ace. That sounds pretty damn good.

[Kenny]

I read all of this. My head hurts now. I've read about half the stories you mentioned. For some reason, I avoid Ennis like the plague on anything corporate owned, but now I'm thinking that Enemy Ace sounds *really* good. So does his Hitman work where the people are talking over some beers. Now I want to go read lots of Ennis....

BTW - I'm glad you didn't cover Preacher. Ennis is one of those guys where there's *so* much good stuff out there and it's a shame most of it is obscured by Preacher.

[Jog]

Ah, I liked this...

Some of Ennis' Dredd stuff was sort of interesting in the way True Faith was sort of interesting... he created a character called the Muzak Killer for a pair of early '90s storylines... Dredd barely shows up in either (save for the end, of course), with tons of space given over to this mad 20th century pop diehard slaughtering the shitty acts of the future... most of them seem to be parodies of then-current acts, although I'm no good at picking this stuff up...

Some Pogues references in there too... it's kind of trying to be both a rant at modern shit music and a parody of critical elitism... there's no voice of reason Trey Parkerish character to point out that the truth is somewhere in the middle of absurd extremes or other scalding insights... just everyone's nuts. It gets better as Dermot Power gets closer and closer to photorealism with his art... like, by that point there's not even really jokes or crazy gore, just as-realistic-as-possible images of Sinead O'Connor being shot in the head... very much the work of an angry young man with a sense of humor and an awareness of how much of a dick angry young men like himself can be...

[Matthew J. Brady]

I've been meaning to scan and post an image from Bloody Mary on my blog ever since I started it, but I never did get around to it. It's a panel where somebody yells something like, "Shoot him, Brady!" Apparently, that's hilarious to me, because my last name is also Brady, you see. Eh, maybe I'll actually do it someday, and share the glory with you all. It's like Ennis is personally acknowledging my existence!

[Johnny Bacardi]

As I recall, the Paul Jenkins issues of Hellblazer were generally well-regarded by the cognoscenti of the time; it took him a few issues to get his bearings but he finished well. It didn't hurt that most of his issues had Sean Phillips art; he was outstanding throughout the whole run.

Don't know why they're not collected- maybe it was the circumstances of Jenkins' leaving DC (wasn't it kind of acrimonious or something? I forget).

[Tucker Stone]

Matt: You do know the other Tucker Stone, right? I'm right there with you.

Johnny: I'd like to know more about Jenkins departure from the title myself, yet another reason why mainstream comics needs a Kenneth Anger.

[tam]

Boy, that's a lot of good perceptive reviewing there! It also reminds me how many crappy comics books Enis hs done over the years in between the brilliant ones.
A few thoughts...
I was reading 2000 AD at the time he was doing Dredd and enjoyed it as a kid because he addresed continuity and dealt with dangling plot threads. As a nerdy teenager that was great but I don't really give a shit about such things any more so they haven't aged well for me. If you want to see why some people were moaning about him, check out John Wagner's Dredd at its artistic peak and stories that haven't dated at all, check out volume 5 of the complete case files; lots of brilliant art and stories,like Blick Mania and The Apocalypse War which were like nothing coming out of the US at the time.

Incidentally, in that volume, you'll also find the story 'Return of the Dark Judges' which 'Thor : Vikings' is basically a (very nicely done) retelling of. Which reminds me, I'd like to see him try to do a heroic Nazi at some point. To read his WW2 stuff you could be forgiven for thinking there weren't any talented german soldiers who liked Hitler.

His take on Unknown Soldier was also very good although most of it has been recycled in other strips since.

The other thing that surprises me is how few people realise how much he borrows from the prose novelist Stephen Hunter, especially on his more thriller like strips, like Max Punisher and Pride and Joy, (which pinches most of the duller bits from Dirty White Boys). Fair enough I suppose, and far better than recycling other crappy comic books as most other comic book writers seem to but I reckon most comic book readers would enjoy Hunter's work; don't be put off by his movie adaption Shooter, he's much more interesting than most thriller writers...

You're very, very wrong about the Puncher kills the Marvel Universe though. It's probably the best superhero comic ever.

[tam]

Oh, and a couple of other random points. I liked his slight but fun Hitman crossovers with Lobo and JLA and have long wondered whether his story about Arseface was an inspiration for American Beauty...