I don’t think anyone considers Ennis some kind of master of his craft. He’s essentially an edge lord with a publisher.
But what he does well is consistent characters. Within any given work he’s done, as per the top as the characters can be, they have a certain “realness” in that they go through his stories with a sense of cohesion and usually make sense in any changes they go through.
Every show from his stuff so far has utterly ignored that, and thrown in utterly stupid changes to the story without changing the characters in a believable way. You can’t just throw Butcher a curve ball like at the end of season one and then try to keep him the same character, it just doesn’t work.
It really seems like the producers that have mined the Ennis body of work don’t really get it. All the edgelord crap is set dressing. The books have a character driven basis, with a central concept. If you fuck with those, you’re left with nothing other than the shock value at all, and that’s what happened to both the Preacher and the Boys. Both shows turned into shitty b-movie versions of their first season because nobody involved understood what made the originals interesting. They thought it was just the outrageousness of it all
The reason Ennis isn’t just a footnote in graphic storytelling is the way he throws absurdity and over-the-top shock value everywhere and makes characters that navigate it all. In the case of the Boys, the whole thing is about Hughie and how he tries to stay sane and human in the madness. Butcher is the foil to that, he personifies the madness, the way a human can be broken and turned into a caricature of themselves in the world of superheroes.
Well got to remember the source material for this thing kind of sucked. The show is way better than the comics.
For a given value of “better”, maybe.
I don’t think anyone considers Ennis some kind of master of his craft. He’s essentially an edge lord with a publisher.
But what he does well is consistent characters. Within any given work he’s done, as per the top as the characters can be, they have a certain “realness” in that they go through his stories with a sense of cohesion and usually make sense in any changes they go through.
Every show from his stuff so far has utterly ignored that, and thrown in utterly stupid changes to the story without changing the characters in a believable way. You can’t just throw Butcher a curve ball like at the end of season one and then try to keep him the same character, it just doesn’t work.
It really seems like the producers that have mined the Ennis body of work don’t really get it. All the edgelord crap is set dressing. The books have a character driven basis, with a central concept. If you fuck with those, you’re left with nothing other than the shock value at all, and that’s what happened to both the Preacher and the Boys. Both shows turned into shitty b-movie versions of their first season because nobody involved understood what made the originals interesting. They thought it was just the outrageousness of it all
The reason Ennis isn’t just a footnote in graphic storytelling is the way he throws absurdity and over-the-top shock value everywhere and makes characters that navigate it all. In the case of the Boys, the whole thing is about Hughie and how he tries to stay sane and human in the madness. Butcher is the foil to that, he personifies the madness, the way a human can be broken and turned into a caricature of themselves in the world of superheroes.
They fucked that up too early