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

[alienfish]

Oh yes, I read the Crossed comics. As usual, I was left with an exasperated sigh. Yeah, not zombies. Infected by a horrible brain damage monstrosity. What tends to annoy me about this sort of thing (and the recent remake of The Crazies) is that, in order that we should not be confused, they have to make some blatant sign to show that someone's been infected. As if their behavior wouldn't be clue enough.

I admit to being amused by the Crossed group who, um... contaminated their bullets.

[ladyruby07]

I'm twisted enough to be amused by a couple of things. But I like backstory. I wouldn't mind the Crossed not being zombies, but tell me what happened. Give me something for it. This gives nothing. I'm not even sure I could give it brain damage as an excuse.

[polarisdib]

I'm reading Preacher off and on over time, and Ennis still hasn't gotten my trust as a writer. He seems mentally incapable of imagining a character who doesn't cuss, unless that soft-spokenness is indicative of some underlying character flaw and constantly commented upon by other characters.

Preacher is STARTING, after the third book, to go an interesting place, but how much time has been wasted with, "Fuck God, fucking hell, God's a shit fuck fucker cunt fuck of shitness, that fucking fucker, Jesus Christ (who is also a shitcumming stupid retard dipshit), fuck." "Yeah man, life's hard, I've learned that, but shit you know, you fucking just fucking go with it, and at least we fucking have each other." "Yeah you cunt-noggin', you gotta point, as pussy as you come off sounding."

--PolarisDiB

[ladyruby07]

I was easily enthralled by Preacher, but a lot of that was because it wasn't a plot I had seen before. It had a lot of originality in it. And since language in a book has never really been something I get turned off by, I read it easily.

What I have an issue with is no defined structural plot. I know Ennis is capable of writing one. This is not one of those things. What saddens me most is that another author actually published his own comics set in the same world.

(Also, book 4 of Preacher (called Ancient History) has a story about arseface that nearly made me cry.)

[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

[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.