Garth Ennis - Crossed

[ladyruby07]

WARNING: MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
Don’t like?  Read the book first.

Okay so after reading Preacher, my sister’s boyfriend got into everything Garth Ennis.  One of the stand-alone books that he did was called Crossed. 

Comments

[miritsu]

To be fair, the story having no point was the point. The actions of the "Crossed" were based on real-world horrors like Rwandan genocide. For people in that situation in the real world there's nowhere to go, no cure to find, and no solution; you just survive as best you can as long as you can, because what else can you do? Ennis wanted to write his characters the same way. (Quote: The world's a pretty grim place at the moment, and little is being done to alleviate matters. We're able to tolerate war, genocide, and famine; we're happy to ignore devastation by earthquake, hurricane and tsunami. Body counts mean nothing. Our governments are full of scum who plainly don't care about the welfare of their people and are happy to let them founder....I went to see ‘Iron Man’ recently, which attempts to incorporate real world problems into a superhero story, and to me that simply rendered the guy-with-powers fantasy even more meaningless than usual. There is no one like this, nor will there ever be. The world cannot be knocked into the kind of shape we want. It actually helped crystallize some of the thoughts I've had about Crossed: there are no heroes, no one's coming to save you, you're on your own. Now: survive.)

That said, I agree with you that "Crossed" was a fail. I like Ennis a lot, but "Crossed" was just gross without any redeeming characteristics. It's blatant torture porn, and the follow-up writers (a THIRD creative team is doing a third "Crossed" series called "Psychopath" now, yuck) are all trying to outdo Ennis's grotesqueness.

Then again, Ennis always was sick. That Arseface story that nearly made you cry (me too)? Ennis wrote it as a JOKE. When a woman wrote that it "haunted" her and maybe DC could give money to childrens abuse charities, Ennis's response was: "Is this a bad time to mention it was supposed to be funny?"

Cute.

[ladyruby07]

He could have done a much better job of showing that fact, though, if that's what he wanted to get across. As you said, what it results in is blatant torture porn.

He wanted the Arseface backstory to be funny? Should I even give him credit as a writer then if what he writes to be funny comes off serious?

[miritsu]

*cough* Yeah, "Story of You-Know-Who" wasn't one of his big successes either as far as I'm concerned.