Chronicles of Wormwood: The Last Battle #6

[stolisomancer]

Yeah, issue #4 of Jennifer Blood wasn't too much fun, so here I am to put up pages from Garth Ennis that I actually like.

For some reason, The Last Battle took a really damned long time to conclude. The last issue came out in February and, of course, ended on a cliffhanger before the series disappeared into a black hole. Fortunately, issue #6 finally came out last week.

The main plot of The Last Battle is almost irrelevant. The main plot threads involve Jay, who's finally recovering his faculties, and Wormwood himself dealing with the pressures of imminent fatherhood. Jay, the second coming of Christ, and Wormwood, who happens to be a successful television producer, have a new plan.











(The woman is a reporter that Wormwood ran into during the first series. He accidentally put a mind-whammy on her, but she appears to have recovered nicely.)



I don't mind telling you that I would watch Jesus's talk show every damn day.

Comments

[proteus_lives]

Meh, Wormwood doesn't grab me.

Ennis has done this sorry with these characters so many times before.

[turtlefu]

Yes, Ennis surely is a one-trick pony.

[stolisomancer]

Yeah, no. If your only exposure to his work was s_d posting pages so they can sit around and feel superior because they don't like it, then maybe you'd think that.

[turtlefu]

Yeah no.
I've read about half of Preacher, a third or so of The Boys, some Hellblazer, some War Stories, that Thor mini he did, that Spider-man mini he did, a little bit of Punisher.
And I completely agree that you can't properly critique something you haven't read, which is why I did bother to read so much of his work.
I read Preacher because it was so highly praised, and I hated nearly everything about it.

[proteus_lives]

You too?

I praise Ennis for his war comics, Punisher and portions of the Hitman run.

I even liked the Thor mini for the yucks.

But preacher? I borrowed a friends trades and at the end I was like and "and what was the point of that?" I do like his love affair with the concept of America though.

[stolisomancer]

If you can read that much of his work and still claim he's a "one-trick pony," then I don't know what to tell you, aside from that you don't seem to know what a one-trick pony is.

[stolisomancer]

No, he really hasn't.

[proteus_lives]

Yeah, he kinda has.

[stolisomancer]

Name it. The first series is very much another run at stuff Ennis did in Hellblazer, yeah; nobody can deny that it's got a lot in common with that. This series, on the other hand, has a lot more fun with Jesus than the first did, and is much more about the relationship between Maggie and Danny than anything else. If you're going to whip out the "meh, seen it" brand of threadshitting, it would be nice if it was even remotely accurate.

[proteus_lives]

Wormwood, Hellblazer, Preacher.

Same vibe, same concept, same rant.

Ennis has been hitting same button on religion for decades.

[stolisomancer]

I'll grant you that he's clearly very angry at religion in general and Christianity in specific, but they are three very different stories with three very different plots, casts, arcs, and outcomes. You seem to have confused three stories that deal explicitly with Christian theology/mythology for three stories that are somehow the "same" when they aren't.

[proteus_lives]

Sorry, I disagree.

Ennis can switch-out a topping or two but it's still the same cheese and bread, cooked in the same oven.

Ennis needs to stick to war stories, his religious stuff is played-out.

[stolisomancer]

I cannot disagree with that strongly enough, and respectfully suggest that you are biasing your own opinion. Hellblazer is not Preacher is not Wormwood.

Hellblazer is a pure horror book with an absent God, putting Constantine against the devil in the end. It's Ennis's early work and has a lot of stuff in it that he's built upon later, one way or another: friendships, relationships, self-destruction, heaven and hell.

Preacher is a horror-comedy-Western that concerns God as a creature made monstrous by his own self-importance, but is at least as much about America itself. Even if you say something like, "Well, what about Damnation's Flame?" that arc in Hellblazer is about America as a damned place, as hell. Preacher deals chiefly with its promise and reality.

Wormwood's devil is a lot like the one from Hellblazer, but the larger story beat is that both the devil and God are irrelevant, along with a fair amount of black comedy and media criticism. It's a more strongly theological work in the beginning than either of the preceding books were, and the second volume often omits the heaven and hell stuff entirely in favor of dealing with Wormwood's relationship and his sheer terror at the notion of impending fatherhood.

Three books, three very different protagonists, three different approaches. If you honestly think that the three books are exactly the same, I don't know what to tell you, because you're dealing with such a flawed initial premise that I think you might be from an alternate universe.

[proteus_lives]

You're a fan, I get it.

But I still disagree.

My above comment still stands. I don't see anything in Wormwood he hasn't said about a half-dozen times before.

[halloweenjack]

This bit is actually not so bad, partly because Jay was pretty much a non-character in the first series. I don't know if it's enough to make me want to buy the rest of it, though.

[kamino_neko]

... Dammit, every time I see this title, I initially think it's Ben Templesmith's Wormwood Gentleman Corpse and get excited. It's a crushing blow when I realize it's not.

[lissa_quon]

Motto

[golden_orange]

I like the bit about pinot grigio.

[glprime]

Can I just say... who they heck is the inker or shader on this (is that Jimenez?), because the way they're doing the darker spots makes it seem like everyone in the audience just survived a fire (really noticed at the bottom of the first page).

Also, I liked Leonardo DiCaprio on page three mugging to the camera.

EspanolBot Essay Ahoy!

[espanolbot]

I'd typed out my analysis of Garth Ennis' and his approach to religion, or at least belief, but it ended up being much, MUCH longer than I expected.

You can find it over on my blog though if you're interested.
http://espanolbot.blogspot.com/2011/09/garth-ennis-and-religion-my-rambley.html

Re: EspanolBot Essay Ahoy!

[glprime]

Left a comment for you. As a fellow writer, I'd like to ask, do produce copy in stream of consciousness with copy-editing and re-writer after (that's how I do, usually)? I can see places where the thoughts were flowing, but a little bit of grammar error snuck in that your copy-editing didn't catch.

Re: EspanolBot Essay Ahoy!

[espanolbot]

Yeah, that's pretty much how it went. Sorry about the typos, I thought I'd gotten them all. XP

A lot of the time when it comes to writing the forces of Heaven and Hell, the main difference seems to be that Hell doesn't pretend that what they're doing is in our interest, or that humanity would just except it just because they're nominally the side fo good.

A similiar idea is in evidence in the DCU when it comes to portraying the Greek Pantheon, in which even the good gods would do something horrible on the basis that they don't understand why people wouldn't like it. Like the story from the late Eighties/Early Nineties where Zeus is enraged by the idea that Wonder Woman wouldn't want him to get her pregnant, against her will, as a reward for her saving the world for the first time. In his mind, being chosen by one of her objects of worship as a sexual partner should be something she'd be greatful for, and he punishes her with a deadly quest when she rejects him.

Though the idea of the supernatural not having an adequate reference to understand regular people is kind of a reoccuring feature in fiction. From folklore of fairies rewarding people in horrible ways to even "good" goddesses like Athena blinding people who saw her skinny dipping (and then giving them second sight as an apology), they don't really seem to have a good way of judging what humans want or need.

As you said, normally in situations like that, the protagonists are more of a neutral standpoint to act as a contrast between the two sides. This pretty much happens in Good Omens, Hellblazer, Avatar to an extent...

[shadur]

I dunno.

This looks promising, but so did his original Wormwood run right up until we got a finale with the senile chronic masturbator God.

[blackruzsa]

I try not to think about the issues at all here, I just tend to enjoy how the characters roll. Plus, Jay and Danny are incredibly lovable in a weird way, Christ and Anti-Christ or not.