Wagner and Ezquerra, Brubaker and Phillips, Morrison and Quietly … Ennis and Burrows? Ever since the unlikely success of Crossed these two have teamed-up several times, including Punisher: Soviet (reviewed here) and Ribbon Queen (reviewed here) and 303 (Reviewed nowhere, which is quite a shame), and the results have always been, well… at least interesting. Garth Ennis had his share of long-term collaborators before (Steve Dillon, John McCrea) but Jacen Burrows seems to bringing out something else out of him, something pretty nasty. Crossed is probably as violent as mainstream American comics can be, and Soviet played in the normal territory of action comics until they reached the part in which they show you an anatomically correct illustration of a person skinned alive. Ennis had his share of graphic violence before and after, but it usually came with a side-dish of grisly humor to lighten the load. Not so with (most) of his works with Burrows. These comics are as grimly written and they are drawn, some of them are the closest approximation I’ve seen on the comics page to Cormac McCarthy.
Yes, it’s bloody. But it’s bloody with a sense of purpose to it. A certain lyricism that goes deep into the soul of humanity, the soul of a nation, just as a bullet goes into the depth of the human body. Beware of exit wounds. In the year 2024 this pair gave us two new projects, the recently-completed Get Fury (Marvel Comics) and the still-ongoing Babs (Ahoy Comics) I was called once more to the (TCJ) flag to see if there’s still magic in the blood.
Get Serious
When Garth Ennis took his first major 1 swing at the Punisher in 2000 series Welcome Back Frank I doubt he knew he’d still be writing the character a quarter of a century later. That series was big fun, but in a weightless sort of way. Ennis and Dillon didn’t take things too seriously, an issue dedicated to a visit to the Bronx Zoo has a particular Tex Avery charm to it. The intro to the first collected edition, now out of my hands, had a short written intro by Ennis in which he washes his hands of any sort of serious interpretation of the Punisher; to him this was pure entertainment – “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” 2
Yet it was successful enough to spawn an ongoing series, belonging to the then-cutting-edge Marvel Knights imprint; That series still had a lot of the previous zaniness to it, a villain called The Russian had his head attached to the body of a massive woman with large tits, but there was suddenly an undercurrent of solemnity to some of the stories. This Ennis was a bit older, a bit wiser. And also, the attacks on the Twin Towers happened. A New York lover before he even moved to America, Ennis seems to have taken the attack (and resultant surge in militarism) seriously. One issue in that run had Frank Castle sneak into the White House to threaten a government official (unnamed, but this was obviously president George W. Bush3). It's probably good social media was rather underdeveloped at the time because one suspects Marvel didn’t quite understand what they published. All of which lead to the Marvel Max Punisher run, which were the finest comics published by Marvel in the 21st century.
What started out as a lark became, to Ennis, a serious endeavor. A journey to the heart of darkness that is post-Vietnam America. This also meant all the stuff Ennis finds distasteful – the tenuous links with the wider superhero universe, the notion of a sliding timescale4 – had been banished. Ennis was writing in his own sub-universe, a world free of outside interference. In doing so he gave the Punisher a concrete chronology. Even though the stories had been published out of chronological order, we see Frank’s childhood (The Tyger), his first tour, his first command (The Platoon), his ascension to special forces (Fury: My war Gone By)… all given an attention to detail as if he was a real person.
Get Fury is another brick in that edifice and also the point in which one encounters some problems. So far Ennis’ chronology served the story he was trying to tell, the micro-story about a man going down a deep dark path, but also a macro story about a nation that renounced any sort of idealism in favor of naked power-grabs. However, by the time of Get Fury the story must bend to the needs of the chronology. Ennis had written enough Punisher and Nick Fury stories set around Vietnam that there is little left to uncover. The result is, oddly enough, that for all its on and off-page violence this series brings to mind Don Rosa’s Scrooge McDuck.
The story takes place in 1971. Nick Fury just got captured by the Vietnamese and, because he knows too much, people high-up send Castle to get him –and not "get" in the "rescue" meaning. Of course, what Frank’s new bosses don’t bother telling him is that the things Fury knows too much about include their involvement in narcotics trafficking; and what Frank doesn’t bother telling them is that he has his own reason to go. Stuck In the middle is a Vietnamese mother-daughter team that finds itself (again) a victim of American interference.
The reader of Get Fury is in for more of the same, which is mostly a positive for your typical Ennis fan (hard to imagine someone new picking this up as their entry point). There’s a lot of utilitarian dialogue as people try to think through the results of their choices as well as the consequences of history (Ennis drops more and more into James Ellroy territory), there are several well-written action scenes with clear understanding of geography and use of specific weapons and there’s Jacen Burrows. Burrows draws said action scenes things in his straightforward, almost classical, manner until the script calls for him to do what he does best – draw something utterly horrifying. These aren’t things Don Rosa is known for5 yet the effect is still similar. This is a grand puzzle, and we see the creators putting the pieces one after another. This was Rosa’s greatest work, piecing together the work of another.
True, Ennis is mostly playing in his own sandbox rather than in others’. He cares little about whatever Punisher chronology was established by the likes of Conway, Baron, Dixon, etc. Certainly his Fury has nothing to do with either the Kirby or the Steranko versions – his version of the one-eyed spy isn’t James Bond, but Smiley meets Rambo. Still a lot of Get Fury is about settling continuity questions –what happened to the South Vietnamese general from Punisher: Platoon? Why did the successful Special Forces soldier Frank Castle find himself commanding the output in Punisher: Born? Who was the CIA link to the drug conspiracy in My War Gone By? Ennis is playing Don Rosa to his own Carl Barks..
The result, unsurprisingly, means the story drifts away from the impact of preceding Punisher tales by Ennis. What animated the likes of “Valley Forge, Valley Forge” and “The Slavers” was a cold burning fury. Fury at specific objects, at the world that would allow these things to occur. You read these stories, these tales of horror informed by the world outside your window and, for a moment, a match lights inside and surges into a nuclear explosion. For a moment you could be Frank Castle as well. Getting angry at the world is easy, writing that anger well is something else entirely.
What animates Get Fury? On the outside it is not noticeably different from other stories in the series. Certainly the script doesn’t hold back about America’s foreign interventions6, a recurring theme in Ennis' career. When a Vietnamese woman talks about being "fucked over" by Fury she means it both figuratively and literally. There is also a moment, meant to be powerful, in which we get to see Fury finally break. The physical torture he’s been through cuts deep enough that it reaches into his soul. The man whose life has long been one horror show after another finally gets a to taste his own particular dish.
All of these, especially when illustrated by Burrows (with inker Guillermo Ortego), should elevate Get Fury. Burrows is the right man to tell this type of story: his figures are the right type of heroic (note these straight hard chins throughout) and he knows how layout a page to run through the more dialogue-heavy scenes; but his true value is in depicting gore. Drawing war in comics, even in R-rated comics, is almost always a clean affair. People get shot and fall over, sometimes with a bit of blood. Burrows goes all over to the other side, which should be comical but becomes deadly earnest, part of the text. This is what our tools can do to the human body. This is what people are inside, this what it is like outside.
None of this quite works in the case of Get Fury. When Nick Fury anguishes about what has been done to him there’s a call for the story to pause, to consider, but Get Fury rushes through the implication. There’s another action to scene to get through, some more spy-stuff, an ending fast approaching. Having done all this build-up, Ennis and Burrows rush past what should’ve been the centerpiece of the work, as if it's afraid to show a true breakdown of the human spirit. Fury wields a gun again fast enough, quipping bitterly, back to his status quo.
What has been achieved? A whole lot of nothing. One could make the point that the whole of Get Fury is a sophisticated meta-gag; what has been achieved in a whole bunch of meticulously-planned secret operations throughout the Vietnam war? A whole lot of nothing as well. But this is not real life, and the creators aren’t chronicling history, they are making up a story. A story has to make sense, at least on its own terms. Get Fury makes sense only as a puzzle piece. An impressive puzzle piece, I hasten to add, because its Ennis and Burrows and even the floor of their work is pretty high7, but it scarcely reaches the highs of Punisher Max and Fury my War Gone By. Which makes sense, Cormac McCarthy wasn’t expected to write Blood Meridian 2.
Dungeons and Dames
Babs is on the other end of the spectrum of Ennis’ career. Get Fury is serious, very serious. Babs is a comedy. I know enough people who sign-out right now. Ennis’ humor in not so much an acquired taste as an endurance test. It’s puerile and childish and the punchline is usually exactly what you expect. It’s also often pretty funny. Humor doesn’t have to be high-minded to be successful, Rifle Brigade only has one note but it plays that note very well. Babs has two notes, since it’s a genre mock-up and social satire, but it sadly plays them half as well.
The titular Babs is a Red Sonja-inspired battle maiden in a bikini armor with a talking sword (the sword only talks bullshit). First line of dialogue: “This goddamn scalemail’s going to chew my fucking nipples off!” Most of the jokes in the series are in that type of vein, poking at the familiar trappings of the genre with a pointed stick. I imagine Ennis doesn’t read a lot of genre humor in his spare time, all these heavy tomes about the use of horses in the Second World War can’t be an easy read (even if one ignores the endnotes), and it shows. These jokes are old and used-up. They're so old that in the year 2024 they almost have a sentimental value, like a post from an old message board. Some of the more successful gags of this sort simply take the obvious road only to end-up at a very Garth Ennis ending: the Elves are haughty and annoying aristocrats, a usual depiction in such parodies; but in Babs it also means they are sexual swingers with insatiable lust, something which mostly confuses our heroine rather than gross her out 8.
If the surface humor succeeds it's mostly thanks to its shamelessness. It’s hard to believe someone would tell these jokes. Not because they are so edgy but because they are so corny. Burrows is probably not the best humor artist one could find, for the most of its length the series looks like, well … like a generic action adventure series. The kind of thing that could come out of Image, Skybound, Vault, Aftershock, or Boom. A friend told me it looks, at a glance, like something Robert Kirkman would write. Only occasionally are you reminded who Jacen Burrows is and what he is capable of. A page of women riding through a horde of Leprechauns isn’t funny because it’s just a random elements pieced together, it’s funny (assuming you can find it funny) because Burrows draws it like a butchery scene straight out of his gore comics. These occasional flashes of blood and butchery are when Babs comes alive, artistically at least.
The other side of the humor it that which we would call "topical satire." Folks, Garth Ennis is often an unsubtle writer, especially when it comes to the subjects of his ire, but Babs makes the likes of The Boys or Preacher look like something that Ernest Lubitsch would direct. If there’s any subtlety therein it has been run through with a giant sword, then fed to a monster bear who proceeded to shit it all out right in front of the reader.
When Babs enters into a tavern she is a set upon by a group of angry men, who are convinced she took over an heroic role previously held by a man. These angry men then fight Babs (who naturally mops the floor with them, in a rather well-choreographed fight scene). After they lose, their leader starts to grumble about "the deep realm" being responsible for all their troubles (including uppity girls). Babs is a comics that is forever shouting its message at you. If things weren’t clear enough, the actual threat of the series is an order of knights that are modeled after modern racist organizations (from neo-nazis to the KKK), who promise to cleanse the land from all sorts of unwanted populations. Naturally, the aforementioned anti-Babs crew, composed mostly from non-human fantasy races, cheer-up on the knights who promise to get rid of all the non-humans (“Different inhumans. Shut up”).
This is veering very close to the territory of a Mark Russell comic, the type in which the joke is that you can recognize the parallel from the fictional universe to something that occurred in real life recently. By all means, portray these people as the fools that they are, but simply calling someone a "fool" isn’t by itself funny. Agreeing with a point of view isn’t the same as finding it hilarious.
Babs’ humor succeeds when the two disparate elements, the genre mockup and the topical satire, interacts. Mork the Ork is an angry nerd, the information he keeps from all sorts of stories and myths about his fantasy world is akin to that of the comics/fantasy reader with their endless trivia about their preferred fictional reality9. His anger at the mere presence of a woman at one his precious tales of heroic fantasy fuels his quick descent towards the selling out of his people to a fascist tyrant, forever convinced that as one the "good ones," he’s safe.
Critique of the intersection between heroic fiction and fascism is nothing new, Norman’s Spinard’s The Iron Dream is an early example, but there’s something to admire about Babs' depiction not of the would-be leaders but of the fools that follow them. Mork has an haphazard perception of his reality, informed first and foremost by his current grievances, and Babs has fun depicting him twisting previously deeply-held beliefs in favor of whatever helps him push the current argument. His evil is deeply informed by his stupidity and vice versa. This is a character who doesn’t need Big Brother indoctrination to adapt DoubleThink, he did it to himself. He did it because he is weak, not just physically, and needs to believe the enemies he creates are strong enough to justify any response and yet weak enough to be easily defeated. Ork the Mork gazes into the abyss and can’t quite understand who’s the idiot looking back at him
Did you notice I didn’t write a lot about the protagonist of the series? That’s because there isn’t a lot to say. It’s not that narrative pushes her aside, she dominates most of the issues, but since she’s such a cynical character who exists mainly to mock the conventions of the world around her there’s nothing to connect with. Maybe future issues 10 would reveal something that would make her interesting, but so far she appears to be not much of a ‘character’ but an implement. I don’t believe her as a native of this world, which means I don’t believe the world she inhabits.
E Dou Unum
Is there something that unites these two books other than the creative team and the publishing dates? Not much, though one can certainly posit that they are at their best when dealing with people who make all the wrong decisions. Some of the best stories by Ennis are about "hard men" making "difficult choices" … only to find out that they chose badly. It would be a stretch though to call any of men in Babs "hard" (hard in the head, maybe), and Babs herself is rather free of delusions of righteousness. It’s easy to justify dirty deeds of politics and warfare when you position yourself as a cold rationalist against the idiot horde. What Get Fury understands is that is just another form of posturing. In the end Nick Fury cracks, and makes the emotional call, something he always did but simply refused to admit it. Ennis often gives us cynical worlds, and in terms of depicting humanity it’s hard to point at something more cynical than his first cooperation with Burrows (Crossed), but the work doesn’t accept these worlds as natural. The road to hell is paved on realpolitik.
Guillermo Ortego, colored by Nolan Woodard, lettered by Rob Steen
Beyond that, Get Fury plays to the established strengths of its creators while Babs challenges them to overcome their weaknesses. None of them quite succeed in their goals, mainly because they become trapped within the demands of their fictional realties, but even in their failure there is something alluring. Burrows, I believe, is still looking for his masterwork. He has worked with some of the biggest writers of the previous century (Moore, Ennis, Ellis11) and did it all at a rather young age, mostly powered by his willingness to draw stuff other people would rather not think about. Yet he’s not quite there. He did great work on decent scripts (Soviet) and decent work on great scripts (Providence) but a true marriage of the right story and his talent is still waiting to be found. I believe it will be.
Ennis is ... a man I have written plenty about. Ennis is a writer of great virtues, but also a clear example of the writer as a worker. He has been scripting comics professionally since before his 18th birthday and has done so at a prodigious rate for over three decades now. He has acquired a certain skill for scripting, a certain base level, which puts him ahead of the pack of many of his peers. The writing equivalent of his beloved Carlos Ezquerra, where even a mediocre swing will get you to the next base.
I think these two recent works are united by a certain failure to square the circle of their being. Babs wants to go for the cheap laughs while making a genuine point about creeping fascism in male nerd spaces. It can’t seem to manage it because it doesn’t really have a lot to say about its main female character. Get Fury wants to depict a man at his breaking point, while still ending up with his macho image intact.
There is no proper end to Get Fury, partly because the series is a prequel to a lot of previously-told Punisher stories and partly because Ennis and Burrows might want to dive back into that world once more. Maybe it’s good that it doesn’t have an ending. Nick Fury will never learn his lesson, will never accept that he had been broken, because to do so would be the shatter the image of himself that he has constructed. Just like the comics he appears, he can never quite square the circle that is his life. He must never look at the abyss, and see the idiot grinning back at him.
The post Two for Tango: Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows in love and war appeared first on The Comics Journal.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
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