Nick Bryan

steve dillon

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.