Nick Bryan

garth ennis

Best of 2015 – TOP TEN COMICS

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Day two in the Nick Lists His 2015 Favourites house, and we’ve made the logical jump from books to comics. Once again, I’ve read enough of these to produce a nice structured top ten list – just spent half an hour agonising over it in Notepad.

While putting this list together, I glanced at my 2013 comics post and its 2014 follow-up and was saddened how much of the stuff I said I “must read next” hasn’t yet been looked at. I gotta stop buying new stuff in Comixology sales and jumping straight into it.

But in terms of what I actually did read in 2015, here’s the list. The divisions between items in this list are kinda arbitrary in some cases – for example, first item is a crossover spread across multiple comics series…

10) X-Men: Age of Apocalypse by many, many people

Once again, I’ve relied on Marvel’s Unlimited app to supply me with their comics, and my big old-stuff reading project this year ended up being this 90s mega-X-crossover. Has serious shoulderpads/pouchs/tits/arse/grimdark issues, as with many comics of this period, but it’s still one of the highlights of its type. I wrote a longer blog about AoA here if you’re so inclined.

9) Avengers/New Avengers/Secret Wars by Jonathan Hickman and various artists

Sticking in the Marvel megacrossover subgenre for one more entry, this is Jonathan Hickman’s ludicrously ambitious multi-year epic, split across two Avengers titles and culminating in the still-ongoing Secret Wars mini. It’s a bit rambly and dry, not what everyone wants from Marvel action stories, but the scale and twists are great when they work. Especially from the Infinity arc onwards, I thought this did cool stuff.

8) Spectre by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake

Moving house in summer, I had no internet access at home, so was forced to stop reading Marvel. For whatever reason, I settled on this five-year series from the late 90s about DC’s WRATH OF GOD character – writer Ostrander uses him to tackle serious questions of theology and crime/punishment, and Mandrake brings twisted horror images to back him up. It’s aged badly in places, but still, an impressive example of creators using a franchise character to do thoughtful, stylish stuff.

7) X-Force by Si Spurrier, Rock-He Kim and others

Si Spurrier popped up in the 2013 and 2014 top-tens as a writer of note, and here he is again, this time taking on the X-Men black ops team concept. And I don’t just mean that as a flowery way of saying he worked on the book, he really does take on the concept. Sometimes aggressively. Starts slow but ends up one of this year’s most interesting Marvel books, for me.

6) Batgirl of Burnside by Brendan Fletcher, Cameron Stewart and Babs Tarr

Already a cult hit without any help from me, this reimagining of Batgirl from troubled veteran vigilante to young, dynamic burst of energy is just fun. Is this how the kids really talk? I have no idea, but it’s incredibly likable, the art is beyond charming and, crucially, the lead character is always trying but allowed to screw up.

5) The Wicked And The Divine by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie

A big hit from last year and still delivering great stuff with second arc Fandemonium. Big fan of Gillen/McKelvie’s willingness to experiment and go in brave directions with their characters. It’s a nice reminder that you can be populist without taking the easy route – if anything, it just makes you more popular. Not yet caught up on the latest arc, but excited to check that out, as well as their Phonogram continuation.

4) The Sandman by Neil Gaiman and others

Kinda veering off the current-comics track now. I’ve been slowly catching up on a few classic books over the last couple of years, and in 2015, I took the plunge and re-read Sandman for the first time as self-aware adult. I… quite liked it, yeah. Interesting to see Gaiman working in a slightly more raw style, before he really developed a signature approach. The slow dreamy pacing is well realised (although when a story/arc isn’t working for you, it drags), and the art is lovely. Probably a good thing to have properly read.

3) Cindy & Biscuit by Dan White

As you may have spotted from the rest of this list, I don’t often venture beyond the Marvel/DC/Image Big Three bubble, so full-on indie books are a rarity. But I listen to the SILENCE! podcast and picked this book up at Thought Bubble as it’s by one of the presenters. And yeah, it’s a great girl-and-her-dog-versus-monsters story. Charming with a dark smile (not grim-and-gritty, just… not too saccharine), this works for me. Available from the creator’s website if it takes your fancy.

2) The Invisibles by Grant Morrison and various artists

Another one from the classic-catch-up-project, this is Grant Morrison’s weird scifi project, in which an anarchist cell try to defend us from the weird monsters that lurk behind the Establishment. I haven’t read the last two volumes, so it may fall apart, but from the place I’m currently at, this is hugely fun, fast-paced, brainbending stuff that really could only work in comics. I couldn’t always tell you exactly what’s going on, but I remain entertained.

1) Hitman by Garth Ennis and John McCrea

And at the top, another comic from a couple of decades ago. Hitman is a DC comic from the late-90s/early-00s in which a superpowered paid killer tries to make his way in their shared universe. It’s Garth Ennis at his most OTT comedy-drama with perfectly matched art by McCrea and it’s one of my favourite things I’ve ever read. A longer blog about it here if you want.

Potentially controversial to say I prefer Hitman (a superhero-violence-semi-comedy) to Sandman and Invisibles (two titans of the Serious Adult Comics field), but… the others are probably better technical works, but I’ve always been a huge Garth Ennis fan and I think it might be one of his best. Certainly the best thing by him I’ve read in a while.

And that, folks, was the comics of 2015. For next year, I might try and actually read some current comics again. Putting together this list, I can’t help but notice I’ve fallen massively behind in all the Image books I was following, for example.

Hitman by Garth Ennis/John McCrea – A comic about men, violence, superheroes and undead seals

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I’m a big Garth Ennis fan – his Preacher series was important to me in my teens, his Punisher Max run one of the best things I read in my twenties and I’ve never read a comic by him that isn’t full of strong storytelling. Even when he might not be working on a classic concept, the man knows his way around a comic book page.

I’ve recently been filling some gaps in my cultural intake, including a few major Ennis works that I never got round to. First up, almost exactly a year ago, was his Hellblazer run with Steve Dillon and others.

Today, I’m moving on to Hitman, a five year series with artist John McCrea about Tommy Monaghan, a super-powered gun-for-hire running around the DC Comics superhero universe. It wasn’t easily available for a while, but DC have put it back into print in seven collected books, not to mention slapped the whole thing up on Comixology.

So, I read the entire sixty-issue series (plus the extra bits and bobs reprinted in the collections) over the course of about a month. Normally it’d take me longer to read a run of this length, but as I said earlier, Ennis is just that good, and so is McCrea. The stories slip down.

HIT

Zombie sealife – no, it wasn’t a joke

When writing the above intro, I almost didn’t mention the super-powers aspect of Hitman because it often barely seems to matter. The focus is always on the character of Tommy Monaghan and his friends, a crew of fellow hitmen who all hang around in the bar, take jobs and then go back to said bar to bitch about them. They rip the piss out of each other but always have each other’s backs when it comes down to it. It’s sweet, in an incredibly violent kinda way.

And because this is set in the DC universe, where every fantasy or sci-fi genre convention has been introduced somehow, Ennis can throw almost anything at Monaghan and friends, and they just nod wearily and do darkly comic ultraviolence to it. Demons and vampires? Dinosaurs? Zombie sealife? Batman? They’re all in here somewhere, having their arseholes filled with grenades. Well, not Batman, he just gets puked on.

But as I say, these clearly aren’t the parts that really interest Ennis. The stories where Monaghan and crew mutilate genre standards are usually the fun comic relief storylines between the main ones, which deal with the mob, the military and the real-life consequences of living a life full of ridiculous violence. Especially towards the end, as the constant waves of death start to finally penetrate the main cast, it gets downright sad.

And his super-powers, well, Ennis doesn’t seem that bothered. Monaghan can do x-ray vision and telepathy, but their only purpose is to maybe explain why the hero is a little better at surviving gunfights than most. It was the same in Preacher, to be honest – Jesse Custer could compel anyone to do anything via the Word Of God, but tended to just punch them instead.

If you enjoy a charismatic likable-but-doomed anti-hero story, then Hitman is definitely worth a shot. He and his friends are a great ensemble, the jokes are funny, the gunfights and action are beautifully executed by McCrea. Some mainstream artists struggle to make complex fights clear without the shortcut of bright costumes or obvious energy blasts, but McCrea renders the environments clearly and communicates every important move. It really is like a good action movie.

In fact, McCrea nails it when the superheroes show up and when Tommy and friends are hanging around drinking in the bar and when Tommy gets zapped into the future and when the dinosaurs show up and every other thing he’s called to draw. The consistency and clarity is a joy to behold.

Ennis says in the text piece that ends the series that he feels like he could’ve done more Hitman, and I loved the book, so obviously part of me thinks that’s a shame. On the other hand, I can also respect the clear beginning, middle and end here. And if the ending isn’t the one Ennis was planning, he does a damn good job still making it feel entirely inevitable and necessary.

MAN

The award-winning Superman issue

That was some heartfelt verbal masturbation I just wrote. A real embarrassing outpouring of positivity. Tommy and the guys would hate it. In the name of not seeming like a fanboy, I’ll talk a bit about some weaknesses.

Yes, if you’ve read many Garth Ennis comics in the past, you’ll notice some recurrence of pet themes. There’s male friendship, the consequences of violence, flashback stories about soldiers, a quick trip to Ireland and the need to poke fun at superhero comics (although also an excellent Superman issue where Ennis plays them entirely straight).

And yes, he has tackled these things a lot, but as someone who has read a lot of his work: this is one of his best renditions. These elements always feel in service of the story.

Like many 90s-and-earlier comics, it occasionally hits some bum notes when re-read with 2015 cultural sensibilities, but (perhaps due to the PG-13-level content rating), it rarely goes hardcore awful for laughs like Preacher sometimes did.

There aren’t many women in the supporting cast beyond Monaghan’s one love interest – as I say, Ennis clearly wanted to ruminate on male comradeship here. Although to give the book some credit in this paragraph, the all-male crew of hitmen are not too uniformly white.

In short, yes, I loved this series, it was right up my grimly comic, urban-fantastic, Ennis-liking alley. Hitman was kinda ahead of its time – a talented writer/artist team telling their own stories against the backdrop of an established superhero universe, just a few years before the balance in mainstream comics shifted from following franchises/characters to individual creators. If it existed nowadays, it could well be a cult hit. Now that it’s finally back available, worth giving it a shot.

Hellblazer by Garth Ennis – Classic Constantine Contemplations

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Inspired by the launch of that Constantine TV show, Comixology recently held a generous sale on Hellblazer, the original for-mature-readers John Constantine series. I took this opportunity to finally read in order the entire Garth Ennis-written run on that title, the work that broke Ennis into American comics and first teamed him with Steve Dillon, with whom he’d later create Preacher.

For the uninitiated – Hellblazer is a horror comic about John Constantine, trenchcoated modern-day wizard antihero, confronting supernatural/magical unpleasatness in a modern setting. He was created during Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing stories, before spinning off into own series after fans enjoyed his manipulative schemes and wry British comments.

Hellblazer distinguished itself from other urban fantasy via particular emphasis on straight-up awful horrific moments and a tendency to reference real modern-day British issues rather than just the affairs of its own fictional universe, all of which made it a massive cult hit.

Long time ago, when we were young…

Now – I’ve only read Ennis’ run in segmented chunks before, mostly due to DC/Vertigo’s until-recently-quite-shitty approach to reprinting Hellblazer. The original issues came way before every single comic book got a collected edition as a matter of course, but thanks to Ennis/Dillon’s later success, there was a half-arsed attempt to collect this early collaboration. Sadly, these had no helpful volume numbering and an annoying habit of skipping non-Dillon issues.

I, meanwhile, was a teenager in a suburban-Essex library where neither Google nor Wikipedia had emerged yet. Not a chance in hell(blazer). But DC have, at last, started collecting early Hellblazer in easy-to-follow numbered volumes. On the down side, they’ve cancelled the monthly comic and relaunched it as the no-longer-so-horrific all-ages Constantine series, but… y’know, it’s something.

Stories within stories

John Constantine is sad, he is so very sad

Not getting into big spoilers, the ongoing storylines of Garth Ennis’ Hellblazer hinge on two points:

  1. In the first (very well-regarded and good) storyline Dangerous Habits, John discovers he’s dying of lung cancer from his years of smoking. Escaping that certain death requires such a big, risky deal, he ends up dealing with the repurcussions for the rest of the run, right up to the climax.
  2. Constantine finds himself in an unusually healthy and normal relationship with Kit, a dead friend’s ex, to whom he makes a lot of promises about not fucking it up by getting in deep with magic. These prove difficult to keep, especially with the aftermath of that first point hanging over him.

As is the joy of monthly comics, there are a lot of diversions into horror vignettes along the way. Still, the Ennis run broadly reads as one big novel covering those two interweaving stories. Scattered references to past Hellblazer storylines, but you can basically read it as a complete unit in itself. It’s fine. God knows I only knew the bare-bones basics when I started, and I’ve still not read that much other Hellblazer now.

The Litany

I first kinda-sorta read chunks of this run in my late teens, and re-reading it now, a lot of it came lumbering out of my past recollections. I didn’t realise to what extent I’d half-absorbed it, nor how much I’d failed to understand some of the broader themes – especially the many references to political and social issues of the time.

I’ll be the first to admit, I’m still not shit-hot on the tensions of 80s-90s Britain, but the ideas about race and class in these Hellblazer issues shot straight over never-left-suburbia teenage Nick’s head. Good to see all this time reading liberal Twitter has changed something in me.

It’s interesting reading this as an early Garth Ennis work, spotting some of the tools he’d later become extremely known for – pontifications on self-destruction and the effects of extreme actions; the enduring nature of male friendship; crowbarring a war story into an unrelated plot; creating strong and likable relationships, then putting them under extreme pressure.

It also features a predilection towards demons delivering rather long, ponderous and flowery monologues, a tendency Ennis thankfully dialled down in later works – Preacher, in particular, featured a lot of heavenly beings, but less of their unvarnished soliloquies.

Also, it’s so easy to think of Hellblazer as a forerunner to other tortured urban fantasy antiheroes, you forget how much more genuine horror there was, how many times Constantine was faced with magic not just as a vague swirly force, but a really on-the-nose, awful esclation of something wrong with the real world. There’s not as much extrapolating through metaphor, far less excuse to think, actually, this isn’t really happening. Because a lot of it clearly is, and that’s when this book really works. The visceral stuff.

Ennis was, I gather, pretty young when he wrote this, and he’s definitely youthfully angry about some stuff. Another character type Ennis always writes well, and often applies to the many forces that displease him: idiots bringing about their own doom.

I’m a sucker for Dillon’s art after growing up on Preacher, and he’s great for this kind of stuff, creating a grounded real world around Constantine – a plausibility that only makes it more brutal when fucking horrible magic hits home. William Simpson, the other main artist involved, is excellent too – his work carries a washed-out, ghostly feel, bringing out the End-Of-The-Line-Mate sense permeating Dangerous Habits.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t all a grim journey into the heart of darkness – yes, things inevitably get bad before the big showdown, but before that, in order to make us care about JC and chums, there’s a lot of real human warmth in there. Yet another Ennis trick – writing dialogue that actually feels like human conversation rather than… well, like dialogue. Look, here’s John talking to a rabbit.

Whereas today, on the other hand…

The weirdest part about reading this book again, to be honest, is realising how much it’s influenced me. Much like when I revisited Quantum & Woody a while back, this is a series that got to me young, even if always as a supplement to Preacher, and a lot of the lingering regret and tone of world-weariness does come up in my work. I look at John Hobson (of Hobson & Choi fame) after this re-read and think, actually, there’s a bit of the Ennis Constantine in there. Only without the magic, obviously.

I’m also following the Constantine TV show, and I think one reason old-school Constantine fans aren’t all taking to it is a lack of the two points I mentioned that distinguish Hellblazer from standard urban fantasy: genuine horror and real world relevance. But on its own merits, it’s a reasonably entertaining pulpy supernatural antihero show, helped along by Matt Ryan being quite good as John himself (even if other characters can be a bit flat).

That, in summation, is every thought I had after re-reading the Garth Ennis Hellblazer run. Hope you enjoyed the piece. Do check out the comics in question if they sound appealing – they genuinely are quite good. The Ennis stuff is Hellblazer #41-83 plus a few specials, or volume 5-8 of the recent collected editions (only the last six issues of book 5 are by Ennis).

And if the comparisons with Constantine make you want to buy the first book in my Hobson & Choi series, I won’t discourage you from doing that either.Now, I might even try reading some other Hellblazer some time.