Garth Ennis and Superman

@Primo: There's also, of course, Watchmen. Judge Dredd Megazine interviewed Dave Gibbons not long ago, and he said that the whole reason he and Alan Moore did Watchmen was because they both loved superheroes and wanted to see what they could really do with the genre.

@Cider: Ennis satirises the dominant genre of the medium he works in. If 70%+ of comics were westerns, he'd be doing over-the-top ultraviolent western comics. Now, you can argue that his pastiches are poorly done, but I don't see what's so wrong with making fun of a genre.

American comics are loaded with superheroes. So if you hate superheroes, making fun of them, isn't helping to decrease their presence if its done in American comics. Show us what you can do without them. Punisher removed the superheroes he's known for fighting, it worked. Manthing and Howard the Duck aren't superheroes, use them. Write for Vertigo. Surprise us!

Kevin Grevioux, for contrast, liked tights. His ideas were inspired, his run on the New Warriors was a good contrast in Marvel among many who obviously didn't like who they were writing, and didn't care about anything established. Guggenheim, you don't like Blade? Well we don't like what you turned him into. Huldin, your book's set in a fictional African nation, you don't have to use white people if you can't say anything nice about them. Maybe you don't agree with me, you don't have to, but hate fic is partially why I don't read American comics anymore.

"American comics are loaded with superheroes. So if you hate superheroes, making fun of them, isn't helping to decrease their presence if its done in American comics."

He is not making some ideological campaing against superheos, like Eric Powell, he just wants to make fun of superheroes. Call it Author Appeal, he just likes seeing superheroes being idiots, assholes or getting humilated and he certainly isn't on some mission to get rid of them. It's like you say to Stephen Colbert that lampooning George W. Bush does not solve problems Bush caused.

I've never read Preacher, but from what I've heard the main character, Jesse Custer, is a heroic person with the superhuman ability to mind control people. Technically, that makes him a superhero.

Not really. First of all - I don't know if you would call him heroic. His main mission in the series is to find God so he can bring him to justice for screwing up the world.

But then again, God in Preacher comes off as a massive prick.

Doesn't he tend to do that to God often as well.

Namely write him as a villain.

Not that that is anything new, plus depending on where you stand, it can be a pretty valid interpretation of all he does.

@Raven: I've also never read Preacher, so this is just based on what I've read about it online, but no, I don't think Jesse counts as a superhero due to not having a distinctive costume or codename. In my view, you need at least two out of those two factors plus superpowers to qualify as a superhero. It's the same reason I don't consider the likes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer or MAX Punisher*

I do think that Garth Ennis is at his absolute best when writing material that doesn't contain superheroes. Having read the first volume of Battlefields, I think it's easily the best thing he's written, and I say that as a pretty big Garth Ennis fan.

Preacher isn't superhero, it's sort of a Western pastiche. The reason for the confusion is that, at their core, all action/adventure genres share a few concepts, the super-competent protagonist being one of them.

I do remember reading an interview with Ennis where he said he didn't like a lot of super-heroes because he felt they were plain ridiculous. He thought the idea of a man dressing up as a bat was silly, and he felt Green Lantern was stupid from his name on down. I love super-heroes, personally, but I can sort of see his point; if you didn;t grow up on super-heroes and you can't embrace some of their ridiculousness or whimsy, then you're just not going to get into them. Ennis did mention Superman being a notable exception, because he felt the concept was sound and admirable; he views Superman in the "ultimate immigrant" light, a newcomer trying to make good, and as a gifted individual using his abilities to help others. He apparently doesn't have a problem with that concept, and even likes it quite a bit.

I don't it's that he hates superheroes so much as he believes straight up that power corrupts.

The way Ennis writes superheroes is consistent with how he writes non-superheroes with too much power. Ennis' characters are inherently bad (with a few exceptions of course). Ennis' comics have the opposite world view of most comics, it's more remarkable for someone to actually be good in an Ennis book than for them to be bad.

Actually, Ennis' views are quite commonplace among UK comics, which is where he came from.

Yeah, basically this. Brit comic writers don't seem to have much truck with super heroes in general. That doesn't mean they won't write them, or write them well, but they tend to be more interested in other genres.

To be fair, most American comic book writers don't write super-hero comics either; there are a lot more non-super hero comics than super-hero comics at present, they just aren't as popular or as well known.

Garth Ennis is actually Northern Irish, not British*

It's not so much that UK writers really dislike superheroes. OK, some do, like Ennis, John Wagner, and Pat Mills; but others, like Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and Mark Millar love the genre and got into the medium because they wanted to write Batman and Spider-Man.

However, Britain never had anything like the Comics Code, so the situation never arose for any one subgenre to rise to dominance. The result of this is that, among teenage- and adult-oriented comics, general scifi dominates rather than just superheroes; the dominance of scifi can be attributed to Eagle launching right at the start of the space race, and 2000 AD successfully riding the publicity wave of Star Wars.

However, there is a general tendency for British media to be considerably more cynical than American media, and comics are no exception. Colin Smith goes into an impressive analysis of this idea here.

I'm pretty sure Northern Ireland is still part of the British Isles.

Northern Ireland is a (largely self-governed) part of the United Kingdom, which makes them part of the British Empire. The whole island of Ireland, along with Scotland, England, Wales, the Isle of Man, and various and sundry lesser islands, are all considered the British Isles. I don't know how a Northern Irishman would take being called British (it stems from one of the ancient Celtic names for the island of Great Britain, Prydain), but I don't think it's technically incorrect.

Sorry. Went off on a tangent there.

Great Britain consists of England, Wales, Scotland, and a few small islands. The United Kingdom consists of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. These are political distinctions; 'the British Isles' is a geographical distinction, and really irrelevant to all this. So calling someone from Northern Ireland 'British' would be incorrect; while I doubt Garth Ennis would particularly mind, in certain parts of Ireland you'd run the risk of getting punched in the face.

Well living here I wouldn't make the mistake of calling an Irishman British. It's just the political semantics that I'm a little muddy with.

But yeah, Vampire Buddha has pretty much said everything I intended to say here. So that.

Geography and politics are fun that way. It's like calling someone from Canada, "American". While geographically accurate in that they are from the continent of North America, when we think, "American", we generally think "United States of America", and thus the person in question may argue that he is Canadian, not American.

Except that in the U.K., there's a lot more bad blood mixed into it.

edited 3rd Dec '12 7:34:56 AM by TobiasDrake

On-Topic: Based on my (admittedly limited) exposure to Garth Ennis, I'd say his views on superheroes are by no means uncommon. It's just that, while most people prefer to ignore genres they don't care for, Ennis is the kind of guy who loves ranting about everything that annoys him.

Off-Topic: Actually, Canadians are North American. There's no continent just called "America".

Well, I suppose if you view North and South America as one geographic entity it would make sense to use "American" to refer to anyone from either continent. However, whenever I hear anyone talk about those two continents collectively, they're always referred to as "the Americas" rather than "the American continents", so I always think of them as completely separate things that happen to have similar names.

edited 3rd Dec '12 10:47:59 PM by RavenWilder

There's this, for what it's worth.

I'd consider a Northern Irish person to be British in the same way that I would consider a Falklander to be British, personally.

Yes there is. The same way there is a continent called Eurasia. The continents are divided in many ways, just because it is not a division you are familiar with, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Also, different places have different divisions as the standard. Over here, we tend to call the whole thing America.

But since the Panama Canal was built, North America and South America aren't even connected anymore.