Across The Pond : STOP BEING MEAN TO ENNIS!!!

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I woke up the other morning wondering if I’d showered enough praise on Garth Ennis. I wonder this from time to time, since I’ve only mentioned his ‘Hitman’ series here and haven’t gushed about his many other good works. Plus he gets such a caning on the 2000AD Messageboard. But, first, as Bertie Wooster often says, I’d better explain what I’m talking about.

It’s an unusual thing to have on one’s mind, so perhaps writing about it will exorcise this unjustified need to praise Irish comic writers. In case anybody doesn’t know, Garth Ennis is a 34 year old Irish writer who did stories for Crisis (a failed ‘adult’ comic started by 2000 AD in the 90s), went on to work on Judge Dredd as well as a few of his own ideas for 2000 AD. He then wrote Hitman for DC Comics and, with Steve Dillon, created the brilliant Preacher for DC’s Vertigo label. He’s just done something called “303” after the rifle the British army used for about fifty years. That’s a bit sketchy because I assume most of my readers know who he is and there is a lot of material available on Ennis on Dogpile, Google and Wikipedia. Disgracefully the article on him on Wikipedia is much better than the article on Frank Hardy. This is because I’m the only person working on the Frank Hardy article and don’t have a clue how to do WIkipedia articles. But I digress yet again.

I liked Ennis before I knew who he was. When I first discovered 2000 AD, I didn’t care who the writers were. I was just interested in the characters and the stories. The two stories that stuck with me were “The Pit” (by John Wagner) and “Goodnight Kiss” (by Ennis). Both of them had a lot of Western influence in them (the spirit of Clint Eastwood hangs over a lot of Dredd stories). In Goodnight Kiss, Dredd goes out on patrol with another Judge in the Cursed Earth, for no particular reason (except to keep an eye on it). Dredd is being hunted by an assassin, Jonii Kiss who has persuaded a group of mutant lawmen called The Marshalls to help him catch and kill Dredd. Kiss is in it for the money, the Marshalls are after revenge, since Dredd’s city poisoned the water of one of their tribes. I didn’t know it at the time, but the Marshalls were lawmen who had been inspired by an old Lone Ranger comic. They roam the Cursed Earth enforcing their law and are not as lame as they sound here. In ‘Goodnight Kiss’ they’re just a creepy bunch of tough guys looking for revenge on Dredd.

Jonii Kiss kills the other Judge and the Marshalls crucify Dredd. After some vivid hallucinations he escapes and …well I won’t spoil it but the existence of almost ten more years of Dredd stories should give you a hint as to who wins. Two moments stayed with me. After the other Judge dies, Dredd has to disarm her gun so that it’s safe for general use (ie he can use it without having his hand blown off). There’s about a page of him going through the procedure under instructions from the computer on her motorbike, which ends with the bike telling Dredd that he’s finished and asking where the other Judge is. Dredd doesn’t answer. It’s a real strengh-in-stillness moment. Other Judges cark it with monotonous regularity in Dredd, and the character who died was nobody special but she had one of the most moving deaths the series has known. The other moment is when Kiss’s cowardly sidekick Roscoe is drunk and terrorizing a small town. He has killed the school teacher and is forcing a class of mutie kids to read from the bible (here as is often the case, the Cursed Earth is like the American mid-nineteenth century frontier, or at least like a comic writer’s version of it). The terrified kid stops reading because Dredd has entered the room. Dredd thumps Roscoe and then says to the kid “don’t let me stop you”. The kid, even more terrified now, keeps reading from, as luck would have it, a particularly creepy part of Revelations. The whole incident is told by one of the kids as an old man years later. The whole thing is pure western corn and works perfectly.

I first became aware of Ennis as a name when the Judge Dredd Megazine began reprinting Preacher. This was unpopular with a lot of the readers, if the letters page was anything to go by, with a lot of complaints about swearing, but I was hooked. When they stopped running it, I bought all the books. It’s got everything – vampires, God, cowboys, devils, conspiracies, pseuds, Ireland, America, Steve Dillon. A large part of the success of Preacher has to be down to the humour of Dillon’s drawing, he can say a lot with a face. Nobody does doubt, shock, bemusement or stupidity in faces like Dillon. Preacher is very popular with non-comics buffs that I know, mainly for the humour (although one woman had a crush on Jesse and kept hoping for his girlfriend Tulip to be wiped out).

I only found out this week that there’s a largish plot discrepancy. Something that is hugely important at the beginning of the story just about disappears by the end. I hadn’t noticed. To the people who take it seriously, this must make me seem like a bit of a lazy reader. I prefer to see it as a tribute to the strength of the story. At the beginning of the story, it’s pivotal, by the end it’s like the ‘letters of transit’ in Casablanca, a MacGuffin (in case you didn’t know, a MacGuffin is something which seems important but which is only really there to move the plot along. In Casablanca it was letters of transit ‘signed by General de Gaulle himself’, which were supposedly a good way to get out of Nazi controlled territory. Why the Nazis would respect documents signed by one of their enemies was never explained, but it worked in the movie).

After this my career as an Ennis fan really took off. I bought all the collections of his Dredd material I could get my hands on (including Goodnight Kiss which was still brilliant). I bought two enormous Punisher books. I remembered the Punisher as a fairly lame supporting character in the Spiderman stories I loved when I was a teenager. To a superhero-fixated kid, the Punisher was pretty ordinary; all he did was wear a skull t-shirt and shoot a lot of people. When Ennis and Dillon tell his stories he’s…well, all he does is wear a skull t-shirt and shoot people, but it’s exciting and funny. As I said before, I also bought a lot of Hitman, which is a hoot and must be even more of one for people who, unlike me, are interested in what happens in the DC Universe (Batman, Superman etc). Oh for it to be collected. Garth Ennis is God!

To judge from his comments in interviews, I’m more of an Ennis fan than Ennis himself. He has said that he was too reverential towards Dredd, having been a fan since childhood and that his stories suffered from this. For me his Dredd stories range from brilliant through fun and hit bottom on adequate, which is pretty much how I feel about John Wagner. The only Ennis Dredd story I dislike is Helter Skelter, which reads as if he wrote it in the bath. He bagged his short-lived series The Corps, about a bunch of tough Judges fighting monsters in space. I liked it myself. It has a very Ennis moment, in which one of the Corps worries that another soldier has gone psycho. The commanding officer explains that if he throws a frag-grenade in a room full of enemies, he doesn’t expect anyone to be alive afterwards and that it’s the same with her unit.

Garth Ennis has a great ear for language. I suspect a lot of it comes from cowboy movies and novels. One of his less successful efforts, a Chopper story for The Judge Dredd Megazine is notable for having the best Australian slang ever used in 2000 AD. I should say the least painful Australian slang, since he doesn’t get it completely right. Ennis and I agree on Time Flies, a prime example of 2000 AD trying too hard to be funny. It was painful to read. Just loads of tedious surrealistic jokes. Satire is provided by 80’s group Bros being crap. It’s so bad, I can’t believe it appeared more than once. Bros’ posters were funnier. I notice nobody has collected these stories in hardback.

So Garth Ennis is not completely God. The Punisher stories get too silly too fast. The loser vigilantes who are inspired by the Punisher are funny – each appears with a special logo once they’ve decided on their name…Ennis always does well poking fun at the ‘men in tights’ comics. There’s a beautiful moment when two criminals are chatting about an assassin called ‘The Russian’ saying “they say he beat up the Hulk. Made him cry and everything”. It’s a preposterous claim, as are most things to do with ludicrously strong characters like the Hulk. Making it a passing comment is brilliant. But Ennis can’t leave it alone. A character comes back from the dead. With breasts although male. The breasts get bigger. At this stage I’m muttering ‘enough already’ at my beautiful expensive Punisher book.

Another reason he’s not Lord God Almighty and I don’t walk round in an ‘I love Garth Ennis’ t-shirt is that he pulls his punches a bit. Preacher is great but wouldn’t you know the rough, tough, macho ‘not politically correct’ hero respects women, has read Germaine Greer and seems to want points for going down on his girlfriend (unlike all those insensitive oafs out there). The vampire cares not for conventional morality, being a Pogues loving, hard drinking boyo but only kills, you know, nasty people. And so it goes. Conventional heroics are fine with me, especially in comics but they grate a little in stories that advertise how unconventional they are. I try not to think about Ennis’ “I’m a wild hard drinking Irish boyo who likes the Pogues and drinks meths” introduction to the Preacher books. Hitman, which I love, pulls its’ punches a bit too. The twist in the story is supposed to be that the hero is a contract killer, but he almost immediately goes back on this and we see that he only kills – surprise, surprise – bad people.

So there you have it. Ennis in “not quite God” shock. I’m still hooked. I still want to buy every Punisher story he does, 303, and the early stuff like Troubled Souls. I also want to buy his Dredd epic, Judgement Day which everyone on the messageboard and Ennis himself cans. Must be genius.

There, that’s almost three pages of Ennis praise. I can return to my Frank Hardy page with a clean conscience.

Frank Hardy , (1917 – 1994) was a left-wing novelist who deserves a better Wikipedia page than Garth Ennis.