Killgore said:
It has and it hasn't. After letting it settle for over a year, I went back and reread it and found that I had an affinity to Jessie and Tulip. But reading The Boys brought it all back. I truly feel that Ennis is a *****e, and he shouldn't be allowed within 100 yards of a superhero. He's a sadistic writer. As a writer myself, I understand putting your characters through hell, but he humiliates them at their weakest moments. He has difficulty committing to the scene, and allowing the moment to be sincere. Ennis is likened to Tarantino quite frequently, but Tarantino knows when to pull back and go for the heart rather than the gut. It's those moments, no matter how scant, that we are able to sympathize with the characters, rather than laugh at them. He gives us a moment where we can connect with the Bride without it being all irreverent. Imagine the scene in Kill Bill where Kiddo chats with Bill at the church. It endears us to the characters and makes the moment of betrayal that much more poignant. And that moment of brutal slaughter happens off camera. If Ennis had told it, Bill would have blew everyone away in gory but yet silly detail and Bill would have given her a pink sock and a nasty sanchez while Bud ejaculated on the alter. He cannot help but to humiliate his characters, and in return he is being disrespectful to the audience.
I kind of missed the part where frequent comparisons to Tarantino meant that Ennis has to somehow
defer to the man. You are waging a flawed argument by comparing too different artists working in two very different mediums.
Ennis' proposed sadism is predicated by his
love of imported American junk culture, it's what he, I, and millions of other kids grew up with: dumb as dirt, loud action flicks, trashy horror movies, and Dirt Harry's .357.
In fact, Ennis' view of America and his stories in which it frequently takes center stage is analogous to one of his favorite film genres: The Spaghetti Western. A European wrought mirror negative to the John Wayne, Gene Autry, white hats and white horses fables, that exposed a rougher, more ambivalent, and frankly, oft amoral side of the American headspace.
That isPreacher. Preacher is for a wide range of people, not just for 14 year olds who think
"Fat people, blood, anal rape, and ******ed s**t eating Jesus is kewl doodz!". It was special to me specifically because in reading it I discovered that Ennis is in fact a tremendously moral writer, moral for people who know that there was such thing as moral before the birth of Christianity (which frankly, I find to be an utterly regrettable event in human history).
Preacher is fearless in a lot of its subject matter, but what kept me reading was its wonderful depiction of friendship, devotion, and male bonding. It captured the ebb and flow of such relationships in both realistic and hyper-realistic ways, and rarely a step did it miss.
Ennis' only real failing as a writer is his devotion to excessively juvenile,
not offensive, but
juvenile humor. Ennis will constantly take that **** to the wall and never look back, and yes, it can be distracting. However, Ennis at his best, is one of the best, and has a terrific grasp of that battle that ensues when man clashes with society and when man clashes with himself than almost any other writer in mainstream comicdom.
*Also, it is my firm opinion, that morality should never,
ever be a prerequisite for a writer of fiction. To insinuate, as you have, that an artist should know when to "pull back" when taking on issues of viloence and sex is an affront to some of the most important literary and filmic figures that ever walked this bedraggled ball of dirt.
*And! I love the concept of the superhero, but superheroes are not sacred, and while I'm not quite ready to defend 'The Boys' (It's only just getting started) I'd say that it's meshing of the current political and popculture landscape is appropriate, and promising.
D
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