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X-O
Apr 28, 2002

Long Live The King!

Tasteful Dickpic posted:

The Wesley Gibson wiki page is amazingly terribly written.

Well that's the case it was probably written by Millar himself.

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Push El Burrito
May 9, 2006

Soiled Meat

I'M NOT AFRAID

Cabbit
Jul 19, 2001

Is that everything you have?


I've watched a fair bit of gay porn and that's not dissimilar to the face one might have while being hosed in the rear end.

zoux
Apr 28, 2006

He's the fuckor not the fuckee.

Ferrule
Feb 23, 2007

Yo!
Preacher loving rules what the hell are you all taking about?

Wheat Loaf
Feb 13, 2012

by FactsAreUseless

Archyduke posted:

I guess it's hard not to read these scenes today in light of his first arc of Crossed (which I believe is the last Ennis I read): he seems to think that the world is a hard and cruel place, but that's a good thing, and that people too sensitive or not "masculine" enough are destined to be humiliated and punished by it, and that's hysterically funny because everyone around them secretly hates them anyway. I mean, look-- The Boys prominently featured a dog that raped people and this was all generally framed as an instrument of karmic and comedic justice. That's just not a world-view I can play along with. Maybe I'm just bitter because I know I'd last two pages in a Garth Ennis comic before a grizzled man in a black trenchchoat knee-capped me for vague reasons.

He is from Northern Ireland.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



Ferrule posted:

Preacher loving rules what the hell are you all taking about?
Preacher rules but certainly has some low points, and also it seems like Garth Ennis keeps doing Preacher.

achillesforever6
Apr 23, 2012

psst you wanna do a communism?

Nessus posted:

Preacher rules but certainly has some low points, and also it seems like Garth Ennis keeps doing Preacher.
Which is why I'm glad the TV series has been doing different things other than trying to adapt it perfectly

Wanderer
Nov 5, 2006

our every move is the new tradition

Nessus posted:

Preacher rules but certainly has some low points, and also it seems like Garth Ennis keeps doing Preacher.

Every so often, yeah, he tries to mine that particular vein again. He did a romantic comedy book at Dynamite, A Train Called Love, last year, and it's a truly weird read.

Archyduke posted:

I guess it's hard not to read these scenes today in light of his first arc of Crossed (which I believe is the last Ennis I read): he seems to think that the world is a hard and cruel place, but that's a good thing, and that people too sensitive or not "masculine" enough are destined to be humiliated and punished by it, and that's hysterically funny because everyone around them secretly hates them anyway. I mean, look-- The Boys prominently featured a dog that raped people and this was all generally framed as an instrument of karmic and comedic justice. That's just not a world-view I can play along with. Maybe I'm just bitter because I know I'd last two pages in a Garth Ennis comic before a grizzled man in a black trenchchoat knee-capped me for vague reasons.

I didn't get that out of the first arc at all. It's a shorter version of an arc he's done before: a character begins in a situation where the answer seems to be to "toughen up," to lose his emotions and become jaded, but in the end, decides that it's bullshit and that doing so would make him inhuman. That's the point of the last couple of issues, more or less, that survival isn't worth much if you lose what makes you human along the way. A lot of people who read the first series of Crossed put way too much narrative weight on and read too much into the nerd who gets himself killed in issue #2 (and the nerd himself is eventually vindicated in a roundabout way, because Stan's big moment in the final issue is the realization that yeah, we should have been fighting back).

Basically, to paraphrase someone else, Ennis finds a lot of stories in characters from a certain background--military-trained, veterans, cynical due to experience--but he's consistently made it clear that those characters also have to overcome that to progress and mature. It's more or less spelled out in Butcher's deathbed speech in The Boys: all that stuff may look fun, but in the end, it's self-defeating. Frank Castle has forsaken any semblance of happiness to become what he is, and will never be any better than this ("the long, cold dark that I've made of my life"); Butcher betrays his wife's memory and wishes; even Jesse Custer has to consciously ditch his previous vision of masculinity, which is something he had to stitch together on his own from John Wayne movies and what little his father could teach him, in order to get his happy ending with Tulip. His protagonists often start a story in a place like you've described, but if they find a happy ending at all, it's because they have the courage to leave that place.

And yeah, there's a lot of facile humor along the way, which often makes a critical reading harder than it has to be. The Boys is at once a hamfisted superhero satire; an extremely black comedy; an alternate-history drama about the legacy of the Cold War; an allegorical discussion of the oversized role that copyrighted characters play in modern pop culture; and a bizarre series of detective stories. It's also a story that features a bulldog that's been trained to gently caress things on command. It's vast; it contains multitudes; some of those multitudes probably shouldn't be there, but that's Ennis for you.

Duke Igthorn
Oct 11, 2012

by FactsAreUseless

And, please keep in mind, that he's loving you in the rear end because you're a stupid baby pussy that's reading comic books instead of going out and being a badass super cool son of a super assassin in a world of ex superheroes like he did.

zoux
Apr 28, 2006

Duke Igthorn posted:

And, please keep in mind, that he's loving you in the rear end because you're a stupid baby pussy that's reading comic books instead of going out and being a badass super cool son of a super assassin in a world of ex superheroes like he did.

Not me, because I, in fact, did that.

Opopanax
Aug 8, 2007

I HEX YE!!!


I think a lot of wheather or not you like Ennis comes from how much you take his stuff at face value. If your reading something like Punisher or Fury Max or The Boys and thinking you're supposed to identify with the big tough manly guy and that they're a good and true hero, then yeah you're not going to enjoy it much unless you're a 13 year old boy.
The whole point of most of his work is how hosed up and broken those guys are. It's the same as Watchmen and Rorschach

Opopanax fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Apr 5, 2017

Lurdiak
Feb 26, 2006

I believe in a universe that doesn't care, and people that do.


Ferrule posted:

Preacher loving rules what the hell are you all taking about?

Remember in Preacher where the bad guy gets raped in the rear end.

Retro Futurist posted:

I think a lot of wheather or not you like Ennis comes from how much you take his stuff at face value. If your reading something like Punisher or Fury Max or The Boys and thinking you're supposed to identify with the big tough manly guy and that they're a good and true hero, then yeah you're not going to enjoy it much unless you're a 13 year old boy.
The whole point of most of his work is how hosed up and broken those guys are. It's the same as Watchmen and Rorschach

I find that harder to believe the more Ennis writes, because that's all he writes, and those characters always win and are established to be morally superior to others within their own world. Like I won't say that Ennis genuinely wishes The Punisher was real or anything, but it's hard to look at his work and say "Punisher is broken" when everyone Punisher fights is like 3x more hosed up than he is and the normal people that disagree with him get humiliated and brutalized.

Lurdiak fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Apr 5, 2017

site
Apr 6, 2007

Trans pride, Worldwide
Bitch
I think you might be looking at things wrong if you're saying that punisher is not broken because his enemies are even more broken

Avulsion
Feb 12, 2006
I never knew what hit me

Lurdiak posted:

Remember in Preacher where the bad guy gets raped in the rear end.


I find that harder to believe the more Ennis writes, because that's all he writes, and those characters always win and are established to be morally superior to others within their own world. Like I won't say that Ennis genuinely wishes The Punisher was real or anything, but it's hard to look at his work and say "Punisher is broken" when everyone Punisher fights is like 3x more hosed up than he is and the normal people that disagree with him get humiliated and brutalized.

Frank Castle is a paragon of mental health.

Avulsion posted:

Punisher MAX was a great book not because of the excessive violence, but because of how well it conveyed the concept that Frank Castle is not a Hero. He's a monster every bit as bad as the people he kills, sometimes worse. Killing bad guys doesn't make him one of the good guys.


























Ennis writes horrible hosed up stuff that is sometimes really really good.

Lurdiak
Feb 26, 2006

I believe in a universe that doesn't care, and people that do.


I'm not saying he isn't written as a disturbed individual, I'm just saying that the way the stories play out in Ennis' run, that isn't the main takeaway. Said takeaway is usually that the world needs someone like Frank Castle, and that what makes him broken is what allows him to triumph over people who are worse than him.

Keeshhound
Jan 14, 2010

Mad Duck Swagger
Case in point, Frank being ~*~even crazier~*~ just winds up solving petty crime, too.

Doc Hawkins
Jun 15, 2010

Dashing? But I'm not even moving!


Doom has also been the protagonist of a few comics.

I think the appropriate term is "anti-hero"? The drama concerns itself with the struggles of someone with unadmirable and unsympathetic morals. They have impressive traits (usually but not always determination and self-control), and they have something to teach us (assuming the work they're in is any good), but they're clearly awful, and their world is rarely improved by their victories.

That there seems to be a lot of them in Ennis' work makes me imagine that he's a pretty cynical guy.

E: Lurdiak, do you mean his run on Punisher: MAX or the Welcome Back, Frank stuff?

site
Apr 6, 2007

Trans pride, Worldwide
Bitch
Well if we're only taking about the knights run yeah it was a comedy but 616 Frank has never really seemed that comfortable delving into the psychology of Frank, i don't think it's necessarily fair to lay the blame on Ennis for that

But if we're including MAX literally the entire point of the whole series is investigating how hosed up he is

Hellbunny
Dec 24, 2008

I'm not bad, I'm just misunderstood.

Lurdiak posted:

I find that harder to believe the more Ennis writes, because that's all he writes, and those characters always win and are established to be morally superior to others within their own world. Like I won't say that Ennis genuinely wishes The Punisher was real or anything, but it's hard to look at his work and say "Punisher is broken" when everyone Punisher fights is like 3x more hosed up than he is and the normal people that disagree with him get humiliated and brutalized.
That's because it's rather nuanced. It would be easy to just straight up write Frank as a complete monster (and Jason Aaron's great run on Punisher Max had a version of that) but that's not what Ennis wants. Ennis writes him as a straight up war-hero with a ton of good qualities. He likes kids. He defends women and loses his poo poo when they are mistreated. He tries to help or at least stay out of the way of the cops etc etc. The "broken" part is that this dude has somehow gotten the crazy idea in his head that the best way to help people is to endlessly murder criminals. That clearly confuses a lot of people.
Like these panels:

Avulsion posted:

panels of Frank killing a lot of people.

are usually posted to show that Frank is some unhinged monster, but then the very resolution to the story is him realizing how dumb it was and moving on. Hell, he even bangs O'Brien and it doesn't seem to be a big deal for him which is pretty strange if he's supposed to be hung up on his dead wife and kids.

Besides, you could just read Punisher Max: the end if you wanna see Ennis genuinely make Frank horrifying.

Scaramouche
Mar 26, 2001

SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

Lurdiak posted:

I find that harder to believe the more Ennis writes, because that's all he writes, and those characters always win and are established to be morally superior to others within their own world. Like I won't say that Ennis genuinely wishes The Punisher was real or anything, but it's hard to look at his work and say "Punisher is broken" when everyone Punisher fights is like 3x more hosed up than he is and the normal people that disagree with him get humiliated and brutalized.

Can you honestly say that about Fury: My War Gone By?

(I agree with you about every single other thing he has written)

Somberbrero
Feb 14, 2009

ꜱʜʀɪᴍᴘ?
I reread Preacher after viewing the TV series. It's not something I can recommend to anyone. For ever cool moment you think you remember, there are a dozen cringeworthy bits.

Choco1980
Feb 22, 2013

I fell in love with a Video Nasty

zoux posted:

Not me, because I, in fact, did that.

*does the secret handshake* Man, we are in the raddest club on the planet!!

Wanderer
Nov 5, 2006

our every move is the new tradition

Lurdiak posted:

I find that harder to believe the more Ennis writes, because that's all he writes, and those characters always win and are established to be morally superior to others within their own world. Like I won't say that Ennis genuinely wishes The Punisher was real or anything, but it's hard to look at his work and say "Punisher is broken" when everyone Punisher fights is like 3x more hosed up than he is and the normal people that disagree with him get humiliated and brutalized.

That's not actually true. Off the top of my head, that general description--a protagonist who's depicted as morally just, who's a trained military operative and/or veteran, in a particularly dark setting--fits Frank Castle, Billy Butcher, and arguably Mellinger in Red Team.

Castle is repeatedly shown as not being moral in the least; he's certainly effective, but the characters who come into his orbit are typically used to show off how hollow his life actually is. He starts Punisher MAX by shooting his only real friend in the face; "Kitchen Irish" is primarily a story about the cycle of revenge and how it solves precisely nothing, which is all but spelled out on the last pages; Jen Cooke in "The Slavers" is repeatedly shown and stated to be doing more actual good than Castle could ever do, via her social work; "Widowmaker" is a story about a woman who's basically Frank's mirror, and how broken she is. Frank is occasionally funny in a very bleak, dry way; and the book in general runs into the old war-movie problem, where you can't really do an anti-war story that shows an actual war scene because war scenes tend to look cool despite themselves, but there's no way to read the run and come away with it with the idea that Frank is anything to aspire to.

Butcher isn't the protagonist of The Boys; Hughie is. Arcs that focus on Butcher, in whole or in part, show his moral decay and cheerful amorality, which is explained and understandable but never justified, and which eventually brings him to the collision point that ends the series. Butcher is an amiable monster from the word "go" in The Boys, and the book sets up a conflict between him and Hughie--cynicism vs. idealism, with Hughie very much shown to be in the right--almost from the first issue.

If you expand the remit to Jesse Custer, one of the continuing threads throughout Preacher, which reaches its conclusion in the last issue, is that Jesse spends most of his relationship with Tulip tripping over his own dick. He's put an idea of what a man should be together from movies, old TV, and what little he remembers of his father. It's only when he's able to admit that to himself that he's able to reconcile with Tulip and walk into the sunset.

Ennis does himself a rampant disservice by dressing most of his manuscripts up with a lot of shock comedy, but in a lot of his work--by no means all, but a lot--there's quite a bit to unpack.

Hellbunny posted:

That's because it's rather nuanced. It would be easy to just straight up write Frank as a complete monster (and Jason Aaron's great run on Punisher Max had a version of that) but that's not what Ennis wants. Ennis writes him as a straight up war-hero with a ton of good qualities. He likes kids. He defends women and loses his poo poo when they are mistreated. He tries to help or at least stay out of the way of the cops etc etc. The "broken" part is that this dude has somehow gotten the crazy idea in his head that the best way to help people is to endlessly murder criminals. That clearly confuses a lot of people.

That's why Frank keeps running into situations and characters who make it clear that he's a monster, and that the only vague saving grace he has is that he's laser-focused on other monsters. It's pretty much the entire point of "Long, Cold Dark," for example.

NorgLyle
Sep 20, 2002

Do you think I posted to this forum because I value your companionship?

Wanderer posted:

That's why Frank keeps running into situations and characters who make it clear that he's a monster, and that the only vague saving grace he has is that he's laser-focused on other monsters. It's pretty much the entire point of "Long, Cold Dark," for example.
So basically what you're saying is we need an OH GARTH ENIS NO meme.

(For people too lazy to click and read the protagonist from the discussed novels has a monologue that reads, in part, "He knew that at heart, he was a rapist. And that meant he hated rapists more than any "normal" human being. They purely pissed him off. He'd spent his entire sexually adult life fighting the urge to not use his inconsiderable strength to possess and take instead of woo and cajole. He'd fought his demons to a standstill again and again when it would have been so easy to give in.")

Name Change
Oct 9, 2005


Doc Hawkins posted:

Doom has also been the protagonist of a few comics.

I think the appropriate term is "anti-hero"? The drama concerns itself with the struggles of someone with unadmirable and unsympathetic morals. They have impressive traits (usually but not always determination and self-control), and they have something to teach us (assuming the work they're in is any good), but they're clearly awful, and their world is rarely improved by their victories.

That there seems to be a lot of them in Ennis' work makes me imagine that he's a pretty cynical guy.

E: Lurdiak, do you mean his run on Punisher: MAX or the Welcome Back, Frank stuff?

The Fantastic Four do suck though, go Dr. Doom

Wanderer
Nov 5, 2006

our every move is the new tradition

NorgLyle posted:

So basically what you're saying is we need an OH GARTH ENIS NO meme.

Not really, unless you want to start it in reaction to the sheer number of times he ends up using sodomy as a punchline.

It's more that a lot of people online seem to think Ennis writes certain characters in an attempt to make you root for or empathize with them, when the aim in the text is often anything but. It's like how people took a surprisingly long time to get around to the reading of Preacher where, yeah, Jesse is a tremendous rear end in a top hat and Tulip probably shouldn't have gotten back with him in the end.

Android Blues
Nov 22, 2008

My problem is not that these characters are eventually morally justified (they aren't), but that the narrative and framing seems to consistently think they're cool. Butcher beating up the Homelander with a crowbar or getting his dog to rape civil servants is played as an anarchic, funny, slick thing. Even if the narrative doesn't vindicate them in the end, it certainly frames them as possessing many admirable qualities. Often the qualities it seems to think are admirable are the ones that are most instinctively repugnant to the audience.

There appears to be a conflict in many of these characters, one directed at the audience, that is meant to pull readers between, "he's slick, cool, and highly skilled," and, "but at the end of the day, he's a bad person". The problem is that Ennis' perception of what is cool or funny is so deeply messed up that the first part of that conflict usually just resolves as, "he's disgusting and upsetting, and the narrative frame thinks that's really cool".

This creates a weird dissonance where it feels as though the book expects you to like that these characters do repulsive things. It sets that up as the quality that makes them worth rooting for, usually on the basis that they're dispensing necessary justice or teaching a weak, decadent society a lesson. Ultimately, you're meant to condemn them on the basis of morality, but not until you've had your fun watching them bully, torture and murder people.

Ennis is weird and nuanced, and he does write complex stories. It's just that those stories are often insufferable on a tone level from beat to beat, and that insufferability isn't superficial. There's a narrative dissonance right at the heart of it.

Wanderer
Nov 5, 2006

our every move is the new tradition

Android Blues posted:

My problem is not that these characters are eventually morally justified (they aren't), but that the narrative and framing seems to consistently think they're cool.

That's just it, though. The narrative might give them moments of excellence from time to time, but they then consistently proceed to undercut those moments with their flaws. Butcher beats the Homelander, but the last page of the issue in which he does it is him facing the sky and acknowledging that Rebecca, the person he's ostensibly avenging, would have hated it. Jesse can kick any rear end in the world, but he's weirdly naive in a couple of key areas and his inability to trust Tulip almost drives them apart; there's a thread in Preacher's main cast (except for Tulip) about the dangers of buying too heavily into your own personal narrative, which also plays into The Boys with the Hughie/Starlight pairing. Frank Castle may look cool while he's shooting dudes and there's a certain cold satisfaction in watching him gently caress up people who are worse than himself, but the book is built heavily around the costs of such a life and the cycle of revenge. Frank is loving miserable.

Even in his current book, the sequel to Red Team, the two protagonists have a couple of badass moments between them and they're interesting characters to spend some time with, but the book also never shies away from reminding you that they're both multiple murderers, vigilantes, and as of a couple of issues ago, an adulterous couple. The best thing you can say about Mellinger and Trudy is that they're self-aware.

There's a James Ellroy quote that ends one of the volumes of The Boys that fits a lot of Ennis's work like a glove: "It's time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to secretly define their time." You're not meant to like these characters. They aren't good people and they often aren't doing good things; they might be necessary or important or amusing or interesting, but they aren't supposed to be laudable and every time you might think they are, there's usually something in the narrative that's there specifically to remind you otherwise. There's craft here that a lot of readers don't realize is there, because they're mistaking the narrative's intentions or they got distracted by the gross-out.

SiKboy
Oct 28, 2007

Oh no!😱

Wanderer posted:

Ennis Stuff

I had a whole thing typed up, but basically it boiled down to "I mostly agree with Wanderer on this one", but much more rambling than that, so I deleted it. Essentially a lot of what Wanderer are saying is metatextual, but as far as I remember (and I havent read it again since it was originally published) it is literally text in The Boys, its not an interpretation of the text, its literally on the page, said by Butcher. I think his intentions with these characters is spelled out there, although we can obviously argue about execution, with so many people disagreeing on interpretation then its fair to say that some of what he was aiming for didnt land. With a lot of Ennis characters I feel you are supposed to empathise with them, you are supposed to hope their story ends well for them, but you arent always supposed to AGREE with them. A lot of his villains are monsterous, but have their good points or understandable motivations. A lot of his protagonists also do monsterous things beause when you fight monsters etc etc.

And on a basic level I cant agree with someone saying that Preacher is a bad series. If someone was to say "There are elements of Preacher that have aged badly", then I'm all on board with that. Parts of Preacher have aged INCREDIBLY badly (and in all fairness there are parts that were cringy at the time, its far from a perfect series), but in all fairness there are precious few comics from the goddamn 90s that have aged well. But essentially "Garth Ennis isnt Mark Millar" is the long and short of what I'm getting at I think.

Android Blues
Nov 22, 2008

Wanderer posted:

That's just it, though. The narrative might give them moments of excellence from time to time, but they then consistently proceed to undercut those moments with their flaws. Butcher beats the Homelander, but the last page of the issue in which he does it is him facing the sky and acknowledging that Rebecca, the person he's ostensibly avenging, would have hated it. Jesse can kick any rear end in the world, but he's weirdly naive in a couple of key areas and his inability to trust Tulip almost drives them apart; there's a thread in Preacher's main cast (except for Tulip) about the dangers of buying too heavily into your own personal narrative, which also plays into The Boys with the Hughie/Starlight pairing. Frank Castle may look cool while he's shooting dudes and there's a certain cold satisfaction in watching him gently caress up people who are worse than himself, but the book is built heavily around the costs of such a life and the cycle of revenge. Frank is loving miserable.

Even in his current book, the sequel to Red Team, the two protagonists have a couple of badass moments between them and they're interesting characters to spend some time with, but the book also never shies away from reminding you that they're both multiple murderers, vigilantes, and as of a couple of issues ago, an adulterous couple. The best thing you can say about Mellinger and Trudy is that they're self-aware.

There's a James Ellroy quote that ends one of the volumes of The Boys that fits a lot of Ennis's work like a glove: "It's time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to secretly define their time." You're not meant to like these characters. They aren't good people and they often aren't doing good things; they might be necessary or important or amusing or interesting, but they aren't supposed to be laudable and every time you might think they are, there's usually something in the narrative that's there specifically to remind you otherwise. There's craft here that a lot of readers don't realize is there, because they're mistaking the narrative's intentions or they got distracted by the gross-out.

I don't think you really tackled my point head on. I fully acknowledge that the ultimate thing "going on" with Ennis' anti-heroes is that they're morally irredeemable. What I'm saying is that the stories are nevertheless interested in making them look cool. Often, this is done by having them do upsetting, repulsive things which the book doesn't seem to realise are upsetting and repulsive. See: Butcher's dog rape running bit, which is never played as anything other than a good larf and probably exactly what his victims deserve for being conniving/un-masculine/morally deviant.

That's what makes people uncomfortable about Ennis' work. It isn't the fact that there's black comedy, it's the specific way in which the black comedy frames his strongman protagonists as vindicated when they engage in punishing and humiliating others, or how his narratives like to focus in on characters who are the anti-thesis of the strongman archetype and serially torture and humiliate them. Someone raised Detective Soap from Punisher as an example earlier, and it's a good one.

Lurdiak
Feb 26, 2006

I believe in a universe that doesn't care, and people that do.


Scaramouche posted:

Can you honestly say that about Fury: My War Gone By?

(I agree with you about every single other thing he has written)

If anything My War Gone By is the story of Nick Fury not being macho enough like Frank Castle.

Unlucky7
Jul 11, 2006

Fallen Rib
Badass Panels: Pretty much just arguing about Garth Ennis

Can someone please post a page of Thor punching Galactus in the dick or something?

Toshimo
Aug 23, 2012

He's outta line...

But he's right!

Unlucky7 posted:

Badass Panels: Pretty much just arguing about Garth Ennis

Can someone please post a page of Thor punching Galactus in the dick or something?

It was Hercules.

quite stretched out
Feb 17, 2011

the chillest
surely thor has done it at some point too though?

How Wonderful!
Jul 18, 2006


I only have excellent ideas
I think a lot of these readings are sound-- I mean, if I totally hated The Boys I wouldn't have finished reading it-- and frankly I'd be hard-pressed to disagree that Ennis is very good at carefully undercutting the same myths he enjoys scaffolding a lot of his narratives around (and yeah, most of these are myths of masculinity).

But I stick by my feeling that he way he "does" humor detracts from a lot of what works in his dramatic work. I think Butcher and Hughie's arcs, on paper, are pretty sophisticated and moving. But I also am 100% sure that as much as we're eventually meant to pity Bucher and see Hughie as the aspirational character of the whole story, Ennis also writes his jokes with the expectation that we're happy and amusd to see a rape-dog punk the guys we don't like. I honestly can't think of a writer who can swing from absolute empathy to none at all on a dime like that.

Sure, we're not necessarily supposed to "like" Butcher or Frank Castle-- I mean we wouldn't take them home to meet our moms-- but that James Ellroy quote is a telling one. We are led to believe that we live in a world where these hard, bad men are necessary, and that the sacrifices of themselves that they make are ugly but valid. I don't want to embrace them. I don't care about the price they paid to secretly define their time, and if I were them I'd ask for my money back.

At the same time-- I've read an awful lot of Ennis and nobody forced me to. So no matter how morally repulsed I am by a lot of his work-- and no matter how strongly I feel that a good 70% of his jokes are tasteless and/or not very funny (I did like most of All-Star Section 8-- there is an element of virtuosity in his craft and an underlying vein of-- I don't know, melancholy? very deeply subsumed tenderness?-- that keeps drawing me back. Although I wish he'd nurture some interest in vulnerability that isn't quarried up laboriously from under eight inches of trenchcoat.

Anyway, I really enjoyed reading the past page or so of this thread. I think Wanderer's advocacy of Ennis has shed a lot of interesting light on his ouevre that hadn't occured to me at all.

Android Blues
Nov 22, 2008

Archyduke posted:

I think a lot of these readings are sound-- I mean, if I totally hated The Boys I wouldn't have finished reading it-- and frankly I'd be hard-pressed to disagree that Ennis is very good at carefully undercutting the same myths he enjoys scaffolding a lot of his narratives around (and yeah, most of these are myths of masculinity).

But I stick by my feeling that he way he "does" humor detracts from a lot of what works in his dramatic work. I think Butcher and Hughie's arcs, on paper, are pretty sophisticated and moving. But I also am 100% sure that as much as we're eventually meant to pity Bucher and see Hughie as the aspirational character of the whole story, Ennis also writes his jokes with the expectation that we're happy and amused to see a rape-dog punk the guys we don't like. I honestly can't think of a writer who can swing from absolute empathy to none at all on a dime like that.

Sure, we're not necessarily supposed to "like" Butcher or Frank Castle-- I mean we wouldn't take them home to meet our moms-- but that James Ellroy quote is a telling one. We are led to believe that we live in a world where these hard, bad men are necessary, and that the sacrifices of themselves that they make are ugly but valid. I don't want to embrace them. I don't care about the price they paid to secretly define their time, and if I were them I'd ask for my money back.

At the same time-- I've read an awful lot of Ennis and nobody forced me to. So no matter how morally repulsed I am by a lot of his work-- and no matter how strongly I feel that a good 70% of his jokes are tasteless and/or not very funny (I did like most of All-Star Section 8-- there is an element of virtuosity in his craft and an underlying vein of-- I don't know, melancholy? very deeply subsumed tenderness?-- that keeps drawing me back. Although I wish he'd nurture some interest in vulnerability that isn't quarried up laboriously from under eight inches of trenchcoat.

Anyway, I really enjoyed reading the past page or so of this thread. I think Wanderer's advocacy of Ennis has shed a lot of interesting light on his ouevre that hadn't occured to me at all.

I more or less agree with all of this - the stuff about Butcher and Hughie especially is exactly my view.

Ennis is definitely a skilled writer and there is a rich seam of sentimentality in much of his work. It's just that in nearly everything he writes, there's a bevy of deeply uncomfortable and nasty jokes, scenes, and ideas that don't strike me as an element of craft. Nor are they just puerile sideshows - they actively detract from themes that the books otherwise aim for. To go back to The Boys again, one of the major ways Ennis casts his superheroes as villains is by making them sexual deviants who engage in group sex and date rape. When Butcher has his dog rape his victims though, it's not "serious" in the same way - he gets a pass from the narrative because it's just for a giggle.

I think it's difficult to deflect from that with, "well, these are just jokes". If anything, I think what the reader is meant to find funny in a piece of fiction can be more revelatory of its perspective than many other parts of it. In the light of the dog rape stuff, the rape plotlines running through the rest of the book come off as less a cry for justice and more part and parcel of a puerile obsession with sexual violence.

Anyway, I'll quit it with the Ennis talk now, understood that this is a panels thread.

ConfusedUs
Feb 24, 2004

Bees?
You want fucking bees?
Here you go!
ROLL INITIATIVE!!





Unlucky7 posted:

Badass Panels: Pretty much just arguing about Garth Ennis

Can someone please post a page of Thor punching Galactus in the dick or something?

Badass Panels: Pretty much just Thor: God of Thunder



Exact issue unknown, found it by googling. My gut says its Thor: GoT 20 or 21 or thereabouts.

I wouldn't mind seeing that whole sequence if anyone's got it.

quite stretched out
Feb 17, 2011

the chillest
there's quite a few pages for the full sequence so i'm just going to link the imgur album i found

http://imgur.com/a/vhchN

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Ygolonac
Nov 26, 2007

pre:
*************
CLUTCH  NIXON
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The Hero We Need

Unlucky7 posted:

Badass Panels: Pretty much just arguing about Garth Ennis

Can someone please post a page of Thor punching Galactus in the dick or something?

How about Star Lord dickshotting Thanos with a Cosmic Cube?

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