Comics can be anything - Garth Ennis

Garth Ennis grew up in a small, Northern Ireland town outside the city of Belfast. Being so secluded from the comic world as a young man, Ennis grew up reading not the superhero and action comics that held major popularity in the US, but anthologies such as Judge Dredd’s 2000 AD and the readily available Picture Libraries featuring one-shot army stories. When a publication team from Fleetway visited Belfast, the young Ennis confronted the group and offered up his services to write a story about the Northern Island troubles. This story, titled Troubled Souls was the first of many instances of Ennis’s particular honest irreverence, challenging traditional Irish perspectives of the religious turmoil. Ennis would later write the series True Faith for Fleetway, a story about a young man caught up in another’s hatred for God. The release was met with intense backlash from religious communities and ultimately pulled from publication but presented a running theme of Ennis’s work: his atheistic upbringing and immense distaste for organized religion. While not raised aggressively atheistic, Ennis recalls thinking at a young age that religion was simply a stupid idea and felt as though he were an outcast when other kids who had been raised on religion simply accepted the idea of an omnipotent and omnipresent God.

Ennis at a comic expo

By 1991, Ennis had made it over to the United States and was writing for Vertigo comics, where he was given the opportunity to author DC’s Hellblazer. After major success on his three-year run, Garth was given complete creative control on his next project, which would prove to be one of his most well-known works. When asked about the origin of Preacher, Ennis refers to the process as coming “in stages, almost in fits and starts. I put it together instinctively.” The separate elements formed over his last months working on Hellblazer. The way Ennis describes the process is as if the whole thing was incubating in his head as he finished his previous work and the salience network was picking out ideas for characters, such as a hero with a tense relationship with religion, and ideas for the most disgusting villain he could come up with. Here again arises Ennis’s well-documented hatred for organized religion when he describes Preacher as pure, intentional blasphemy.

After writing multiple other successful comic runs for DC, Ennis was brought over to Marvel, where he had the chance to write Punisher Kills the Marvel Universe. The Punisher, an already brutal Marvel character not afraid of killing, was given the Ennis makeover, involving an ultra-violent story and an irreverence towards the Marvel universe that only Ennis’s genocide of superheroes could bring. This type of bold story reflected Ennis’s desire to express that comics as a medium were limitless, and the story deserved to be written because it “was just too much fun not to do.”

Perhaps what most people would know Garth Ennis by outside of the comic world would be the recent cultural sensation of Amazon’s The Boys based off the comic series of the same name. The story follows a rag-tag group of C.I.A operatives tasked with watching over corporate superheroes. Besides satirizing much of the superhero genre, the story is also an indictment of capitalist and consumer culture, portraying an evil, globally powerful corporate entity attempting to force genetically advanced super soldiers onto the US defense market. Ennis says the move to an independent publishing firm gave him the freedom he needed to truly capture the work, as DC remained hesitant regarding the intense anti-superhero tones of the series. Ennis also said that the move gave the story the marketing attention and company focus that got the story the attention is deserved.

Cover of The Boys

Comic creation is a very collaborative process. Writer and artist must work closely together to create a very harmonious interplay between page art and writing. This process takes years and involves constant rewrites and redrawing, but the end results are limitless.

Sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyQemZOzEWY

https://web.archive.org/web/20160602083712/http://observer.com/2016/06/preacher-scribe-garth-ennis-talks-faith-blasphemy-and-getting-your-story-on-screen/

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art-and-design/preacher-to-the-converted-1.608709

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGMWvsFOuZE