The Four Color Media Monitor

El Pais interviewed the overrated Ennis at the Aviles comics convention, and he continues his disdain for superhero themes about as could be expected:

“What would happen if superheroes existed in the real world?” That was the question asked of Garth Ennis, 55, at the recent 30th edition of the Avilés International Comic Book Festival. His answer was simple: “A nightmare.”

And only a nightmare, right? Nothing wonderful at all, huh? I think it's a shame he's still making a virtual career out of this, with the worst being whenever pop culture writers act as apologists for his obsessive, negative vision.

Like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, and Warren Ellis, Ennis was one of the most illustrious writers to move from Britain to work in U.S. comics after making his name in a wildly popular weekly magazine of dark, fantastic stories: 2000 A.D., home to legendary characters like Judge Dredd. Ennis himself recalled in one of his talks in Avilés that, at the height of the publication, “250,000 copies were sold each week” — that is, a million a month.

What's the use of citing Gaiman alongside these other British scribes, after the sexual assault scandal that's since brought down his career? Is there nobody else better than that available for citation? That said, look how they note, sans irony or question, that 2000 AD was dark. That's a good thing? I'm sure decades ago, it did sell about as much as they say though, but today, it wouldn't be surprising if the sums dropped considerably.

But it was with the television adaptation of The Boys, his savage satire of the superhero genre for streaming giant Amazon Prime Video, that the popularity of his work reached an extraordinary peak. In its fourth season, The Boys drew 55 million viewers worldwide in just 39 days, according to figures released by Amazon Prime Video; the fifth and final season is expected in 2026. Why did Ennis, in a genre he isn’t particularly fond of, create his own major superhero saga — a comic spanning over 1,700 pages across 72 issues? The reason was to answer another question: what would happen if beings with near-divine powers walked among us?

Regrettably, it was little more than an excuse to wallow in smut and cheap sensationalism, and worst of all, to depict "superheroes" as extraordinarily vile figures. Do we really need that? It's a shame if it's getting any kind of audience anywhere in the world, because the tone it follows has only brought down the world ever further. And if Ennis really doesn't like the superhero genre, he'd at least have the audacity to explore a different genre. Instead, he takes an obsessive route, which is unhealthy.

"The Boys answers in a different way," he says. “My superheroes have the ego of a young pop star — but they also act as active members of society, perhaps saving the world or preventing disasters. That puts them somewhere between a pop star and a politician. Finally, they would be owned by major corporations — probably the most destructive force in human history. If superheroes could be real, Amazon and the others would have their own.”

Regrettably, saving worlds and preventing disasters isn't what the comics emphasize, as the following indicates:

Ennis takes the most terrifying implications of this hypothesis to its extreme in chapter 21 of The Boys, which he co-created with illustrator Darick Robertson. Inspired by the 9/11 attacks, the episode follows one of the planes hijacked by terrorists, which, in the world of The Boys, the superhero squad attempts to save. The carnage that unfolds — culminating in Homelander, The Boys’s version of Superman, abandoning the plane as it plummets onto a New York bridge — is unforgettable. The shocking and horrifying sequence stems from a rarely explored premise in the superhero genre: what if the person meant to be the savior is utterly useless and incompetent?

“They have no idea. They’re amateurs. They don’t have a plan. How does a plane work? Its aerodynamics? What happens if the tail falls off? [Homelander makes the insane decision to rip the tail off the plane, mid-flight, to try to save the day]. What happens, no matter how strong you are, if you don’t have any leverage? The thing is, these guys aren’t trained in combat. When the people on the plane rush at Homelander, the way he tries to get them off is like the squeals of a panicked child: ‘Get away from me, get away from me!’ But of course, with super strength, every time he pushes someone, he decapitates them. So it’s a massacre.”

I don't understand what's so great about seeing heroes of any kind fail, especially in a story that's allegedly inspired by 9-11. Worst of all, it makes the "heroes" look worse than the Islamic terrorists of al Qaeda themselves. At worst, it does something similar to Spider-Man's 9-11 issue by J. Michael Straczynski: it trivializes a serious incident for the sake of tearing down heroism and making it look bad. Have we gotten so far past 9-11 that nobody today understands what's wrong with Ennis' story, that it desecrates the memory of the victims?

One of the most distinctive traits of Ennis’s work is precisely that: raw, shocking, and visceral violence. His scripts insist that torn guts, broken bones protruding through shredded flesh, and copious blood be depicted in all their brutal detail. Unlike a movie or video game, the comic freezes a moment in time in each panel, which means that in works like his post-apocalyptic dystopia Crossed, scenes of extreme violence don’t just happen — they are fixed on the page, displayed in their full horrific glory. Unforgettable.

“Sometimes, I do it for satire. But in works like Crossed or The Boys, it’s for honesty," says Ennis. “I try to be as honest as possible about the effects of violence. I think it’s something that needs to be weighed very carefully. In most superhero comics, violence has no consequences. People kick each other, punch each other, explode each other… And nothing happens. Death doesn’t mean anything in those comics, because every time someone gets killed, you know they’re coming back."

“I prefer to show, sometimes, that the truth is that the consequences of those acts are terrible,” he continues. “That extremely horrendous things would happen. That’s why, generally, in my stories, when someone dies, they stay dead. And I think I’d like to encourage other writers to do this: to explore the consequences of violence.”

And just what kind of "honesty" is that supposed to mean? He's perpetuating the notion nobody can figure out in any way that superhero comics like Superman's were meant to be surreal in some way or other in the past, and weren't built upon repellent scenes like what Ennis puts in his shoddy tales. And what's so wrong with resurrection in science-fantasy? It's part and parcel of the whole concept, and to think there's people out there who've been trying to regulate it for goodness knows how long, which has only made things worse for any science-fiction venue. Something to also consider is that from what's described in the puff piece, it sounds more like we're being lectured that any movement by superheroes carries terrible consequences even worse than what villains do, and the Boys is less interested in condemning what criminals do than in what heroes of any sort do. It's sad to think of how many future writers will be influenced by Ennis' statements, and concern themselves more with exploring consequences of violence than in developing tasteful entertainment and giving escapism and heroism a good name. Predictably, Ennis even made sure to let know what side of the political spectrum he sticks with:

Ennis, however, views the future with deep pessimism. He has even claimed that horror has become “obsolete” since someone like Donald Trump reached the White House. From Avilés, where he received a standing ovation, he warned: “I think idealism is dying. More and more, all over the world, I think all we are left with is pure survival.”

When somebody considers Trump far more of a problem than the Islamic terrorism that's minimized in The Boys, something is terribly wrong. If anything, doesn't the bleak vision itself in the comics represent what Ennis ostensibly complains about? So why complain at all? And it's sad the crowd at Aviles buys into this whole mess and believes it's literally the best way to handle anything. It most certainly isn't. Ennis is just one of quite a few scribes who's brought down the quality of entertainment to repulsive levels, all for the sake of making heroism look worse than villainy. And here, when if he really doesn't like the superhero genre, he could've written a busload of comics about sports like basketball and soccer. Instead, he sticks with basically the same obsession, and nothing else.

Labels: conventions, dc comics, Europe and Asia, history, islam and jihad, marvel comics, misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, politics, terrorism, violence