The Essentials: Which Comics are Must-Reads? - Page 3

Man, The Boys is awful. All of Ennis's worst writing traits and wafer thin characters.

I don't want to give any spoilers because it finished so recently, but I agree.  The series was disappointing after a swift start.  The ending was what I expected from the first issue five years ago, but I found it lacked pretty much any emotional impact.
 

 I gave it four trades and none of the characters except Butcher and Hughie(And even with them, not much.) were given any depth. I just read the ending on Wikipedia, and, uh, wow. Hughie and Butcher weren't exactly Jesse and Cassidy or any of the cast of Hitman.

Last Ennis thing I read was Streets Of Glory; I've definitley gone off his cheap nilhism and Cool Uncle take on shock value. Preacher has quite a lot of faults, but I think its essential sentimentalism is a plus.

I had a bad feeling when Ennis said The Boys would "out-Preacher Preacher." 
 

Another Ennis story worth reading is his take on Dan Dare, the classic British adventure hero.

 

You mentioned Dan Dare so now I have an excuse to post a picture of THE MEKON:

 

 

Carry on.

 

Streets of Glory is great. So is his modern war comic 303.

As is his current run on The Shadow.

As is his current run on The Shadow.

I haven't read that yet.  Have you read David Liss's Mystery Men from Marvel? His historical thrillers are terrific.

His run of The Shadow is solid. Not the usual Ennis stuff at all. He seems to have left most of his fetishes at home for that one. I'll likely get volume 2 when it comes out. The Alex Ross covers are good too and the best work he's done in years. 

 

 

 

 

For my money the best stuff Ennis ever did was his Hellblazer run, which appears to be coming back into print next year by the way. Good news since the oop trades have been going for ridiculous prices the last few years. 

 

Well, it's tough to define Ennis simply by gratuitous sex and violence anymore.  When he's dealing with subject matter he respects, such as war or classic comic characters, he often puts his mature hat on and we get classics like Battlefields or his other military comics.

Oh wow, those are gorgeous, especially the Japanese flag one.

One Piece, Pokemon, Inuyasha are what I love :)

 

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Magento extensions | Magento gift card

It's what all the cool thirteen year olds are reading.

 

My avatar seconds this sentiment.

 

Another great example of how Ennis is best when restrained is his and McCrea's run on Demon.

Ennis' initial run on Crossed works up to a horrendous image in, I believe, issue 2 (if you've read it, you know what I mean) and then levels off to be relatively restrained; nothing else is as bad, and it haunts the whole rest of the run. The subsequent Crossed series under other writers have just been nihilistic geek shows.

At times Mark Millar seems to want to out-Ennis Ennis, and it seldom works.

I'd love to read a good book someday about the British invasion of American comics. Lot of vivid personalities there to work with, with the possible exception of Neil Gaiman, who seems too nice a guy to be interesting personally on the level of, say, Moore or Morrison or Warren Ellis. Actually, such a book might as well be the history of Vertigo and the American woman who kept flying overseas to score new talent for DC/Vertigo.

I read a trade of Hitman a while back. Didn't care for it. Cameron's description of The Boys up above was how I felt about it basically. Felt like all of Ennis's worst tendencies in one volume. I have been thinking about getting into his war comics though. 

 

So the 6th issue of The Shadow was Ennis's last. It's old news but I just heard about it today. Guess I won't be getting volume 2 after all.

 

Speaking of The Shadow though, apparently Alex Ross and Chris Roberson have created a sort of pulp Justice League! The team includes The Shadow, The Phantom, The Green Hornet and Kato, Zorro, and any other pulp heroes that Dynamite has a license for at the moment. Not too keen on Ross doing the interiors as well as the covers but he's only doing the first issue so I guess it's okay. Also checked and every character doesn't look like a washed up old wrestler so there's that as well.

 

I've wanted Alan Moore to write a 30's LoEG with exactly this roster since I was 13 so I'm pretty excited about this. It won't be nearly as good as that would have been but at least it finally exists. They were sold out of the first issue but I'll drop in again on Monday and check it out. 

 

 

 

 

God, I've been waiting for something like this for so long. I'm surprised someone hasn't written it yet. 

Edited by Odo19 - 12/2/12 at 1:32am

It may have been an early trade of Hitman.  It's light fare off-and-on early on, but after the episode with the SAS soldiers he keeps it pretty straight and narrow.

 

I'll have to check out the League of Radio Heroes, it sounds cool.
 

 

Yeah, that pretty much sums up the problem with The Boys in a nutshell, an attempt to push buttons without the compelling characters or narrative to back it up. I'm about as big an Ennis fan as you'll find, and he can obviously make a violent, raunchy story work (Kev, Midnighter, the Marvel Knights Punisher, Adventures in the Rifle Brigade etc.), but this and to a slightly lesser extent Chronicles of Wormwood were pretty big whiffs in my book.

John Ostrander's runs on "Suicide squad" and "The Spectre"; one is the best "dirty dozen meets the DC universe" series ever written, and features far too many great moments in both characterization and plot; the other one has to be the sole instance i can think of on a superhero comic book treating the subject of religion, faith and spirituality without becoming preachy or cyical about it.

John Ostrander is seriously underappreciated. He also wrote a now-obscure Batman miniseries in the early '90s called Gotham Nights, with artist Mary Mitchell. It was a series that focused on the everyday people of Gotham and the effect Batman had on their lives. Great stuff for people who like Batman stories that don't actually feature a lot of Batman in them. The two of them did a sequel series as well, Gotham Nights 2, that was a bit of a step down but still worth finding.
 

Ostrander also collaborated with the legendary Del Close on one of DC's weirdest pre-Vertigo titles, Wasteland. I'm proud to own a complete run (not a big feat as it only ran 18 issues) and I recommend you all haunt eBay to pick it up. Ostrander was interviewed here about it, with quite a few images from the series that may lure you into a search for the back issues. I really wish DC would collect the whole shebang in a trade. I was in high school when these came out, the absolute dead perfect time to read it.

It's been like a decade since I seriously read any comics, but getting back to Ennis for a sec: wasn't his Unknown Soldier series absolutely superb, or am I just remembering it as better than it actually was?

 

Forget Eastwood as The Saint of Killers, I always thought they should make a movie out of that one and have Clint be the Unknown Soldier.

 

 

It was superb, void of Ennis' usual tropes, and was followed a few years later by an excellent (short-lived) Unknown Soldier series by Joshua Dysart.