'The Thousand'

[cyberghostface]

Since S_D seems to be on an Ennis kick atm I figured I'd repost an entry I did a while back for his Spider-Man story 'The Thousand' which was part of the 'Tangled Web' anthology book.

While it's more SFW than your average Ennis book, there is quite a bit of gruesome body horror that wouldn't be out of place in a Cronenberg film, so take that as a warning.

Disclaimer: Three issues, seven pages from each.

The story opens with a surly guy at a diner watching Spider-Man battle the Rhino outside his window.





We go to Peter at the Bugle where Jonah's turning down his photo of Spider-Man and the Rhino.





She attempts to mace him when she sees Carl but it doesn't do anything.







#2...

Beginning of the issue has "Miss Patton" telling Peter that she needs a place to stay for the night. Peter offers her his.







She throws Peter out the window. He manages to get dressed up as Spider-Man and takes on "Miss Patton" who identifies herself as "The Thousand". The Thousand ends up biting Spidey on the neck, paralyzing and knocking him out. He wakes up tied to a chair.



Heh, so Jessica Jones was there when Pete got bit by the spider and so was this guy. Wonder if there have been any other retconned characters present?

EDIT: And since writing this we now have Cindy Moon AKA Silk who was present.







#3...

The issue opens with Mr. Ambrose, the super, coming in and seeing Spider-Man surrounded by the spiders. Spidey tells him to run but it's too late as the spiders jump down his throat and devour him from the inside.



(Back to Silk, this is one of the reasons why "Someone else got powers from the spider" never bothered me like it did others because this guy beat her to it.)

Carl tells him that his body began to break down as his insides were being consumed by a thousand spiders with his consciousness. He eventually moves onto his own parents, first his mother and then his father. Each time he moves from a body he gets stronger.

Spider-Man tells him that all his time he's been monologuing, the poison has worn off.



The battle goes outside. Carl tells Peter he doesn't know how easy he's had it. "The death-defying exploits. The lethal array of colorful villains. The string of beautiful girlfriends -- all because some nerd gets bitten by a spider? You know what happened to my beautiful girlfriend? I had to eat her."







Carl, in his rage, doesn't realize he's about to hit a high-voltage box. Spider-Man tries to warn him but Carl ends up electrocuting himself.

Comments

[espanolbot]

The one that was intended as a homage to 70s/80s cop movies? I was going to post some of that...

Though admittedly it's early Ennis, so the glorification of macho behaviour is still there to an extent. That's kind of what was interesting about the Boys' non-superhero plot, as it was about Hughie actively learning that acting like Butcher isn't healthy and being a more rounded, emotional person who can make genuine connections to other people rather than stoic sadism of character like Billy.

[lucean]

Interesting, I was also considering posting a pieces of it, but I did once before and dear lord I hated that story. To you it might be a homage to those cop movies, and I can see where the interpretation comes from, but to me it was just awful. Ennis a three issue Batman story where Batman or any other actual GCPD police officers are side characters to his awesome, violent, uber-machismo former NYPD officers can stroll in to the city and be all that awesomeness. I especially love the scene where they lure GCPD officers in to a trap to create a distraction from themselves and then have the gall to be angry at those officers, or the scene where they try to execute a criminal in front of people and have the audacity to ask what crime was done. Or where the god of all men was so awesome that he could hear Batman lurking around, because hey, it's not that it was a Batmna book or anything.

And I've seen you raise the point that Ennis glorification of macho behaviour at early stages of his career, although I struggle to comprehend how it was only there for some extent in the story in question, but I think here's were we disagree at a fundamental level. For me, it is still there in his current work. He has done some really great stories, I will never deny that, but almost all of his stories which don't glorify that kind of behaviour involve war and people in them. To him, it almost seem that the only people who matter are people who experienced war and they always echo the same character traits. I can pick up an Ennis story by random and pretty much guess spot on what his main character is going to be like and how everything is going to be solved.

As for The Boys, I can again see why that would an interpretation of Ennis's story, but to me, it is a hypocritical story as the only person that really solves anything in the story is Billy through the use of sadistic violence. So while the story may have shown Billy to be a traumatized veteran uncapable of real human interaction, quite similar to Ennis's Punisher, it also makes Butcher and his methods the only effective ways to combat the threats of the world. That is why to me Ennis's story glorify violence and uber-machismo, as they are shown as the only solution to almost anything and the people using them as more of martyrs than sociopaths.

[espanolbot]

Though Billy's methods are ultimate proven to be wrong though, as his targets begin including not just non-violent superheroes (the group in the Innocents, for example, where both harmless and good people and he was fully prepared to murder them if not for Hughie's intervention) but EVERYONE who had traces of the superpower compound in their blood stream.

This didn't just include superheroes, but also his friends and just regular people with the misfortune of getting exposed to it by accident (the daughter of one of the Boys suffered from hormone problems due to her dad's infected bloodstream, which he only had because his mother was herself infected by working in a factory that used to produce the stuff).

Billy IS a hypocrite (his solo story implied that he got it from his abusive dad to an extent), and he's not so much a traumatised veteran as he is an inherently violent person willing to do anything he likes to get what he wants. The fact that the story comes down to Hughie (who is a normal, decent person) versus Billy (an uber-macho psychopath) seems to underline that Billy isn't really the person we should be attaching ourselves to as an audience, it's Hughie.

He seemed to be making a point regarding what kind of person would it take to be a stoic retro-action film badass when it came to Billy... whether he succeeded or not is another matter entirely.

The contrast between "old fashioned male protagonist versus reality" was also made in his first Nick Fury series for Marvel... which seemed partly a satire of how the 1990s had removed the teeth from the action/spy genre, with Traditional Action Protagonist Nick Fury quickly realising that the world neither needs nor wants him anymore... Personally I prefer his WW2-set Peacemaker series more, as it's more of a straight homage to films like the Dirty Dozen and Where Eagles Dare without the tedious "Why isn't life like an Arnie movie anymore?" commentary.

[lucean]

First of all Billy's methods and goals are completely separate issues. The fact that Billy's ultimate goal was to kill everyone didn't implicate anything about the effectiveness of Billy's methods to eliminate Supers in the story. Before that, Billy and his methods are the ways every Super is eliminated and how the Voight-American is taken down. Brutal, sadistic violence achieved that. The fact that it then started to spin out of control is kind of a moot point, because again, you conflate methods and objectives.

And yeah, absolutely Hughie was the one we were supposed to see as the hero, but it also important to note that at that point of the story, he was much closer to that uber-macho approach to problem solving than he was in the beginning and that the other large problem, the supers and Vaughn-American, had already been stopped literally due to Billy's uber-macho psychopath approach.

The thing is Ennis's main characters are almost always presented as damaged individuals who are not supposed to be characters you wish to be. That is not at the base of the accusation of glorification. The reason I write that he glorifies such characters is that they are almost always the only people in his stories who achieve anything of value. Other characters who are not psychotic or violent may at times be shown as in a positive light, yet they never achieve anything of any worth in those stories.

I mean if we honestly have to start making asterisks about Ennis's work at different times, with the Batman story being somehow a homage to 70s/80s cop movies or how his Nick Fury was partially a satire, to explain why same themes are constantly repeating in his stories. This isn't to say that I think you or anyone can't enjoy Ennis's stories, to me in the narrow area he inhabits he is a really good comic book writer, but rather that, to me personally, a lot of these defenses I've seen posted for him seem almost dismissive to people's complaints about him and his style.

[espanolbot]

Oh I totally get your complaints and I really didn't intend to come off as dismissive of your opinions on the subject. I can see why people would dislike his work, and I'll admit that there are ones I'm not to fond of either. That Fury satire series, for example, or that comedy series Adventures of the Rifle Brigade (which was intended as a parody of British warcomics like Commando). Or large chunks of Preacher.

I can see why people like them, and I admit that he seems to like a lot of the same kinds of films that I grew up watching, but I do understand that a lot of the themes carried over are hella problematic in some cases (rewatching the early Bond films for example... sheesh).

I suppose that the question becomes whether he's homaging something, or is just writing something in the same style of as another piece of media that he liked... although I personally think that there is a marked difference in his writing from earlier in his carrier compared to now, for example.

As said elsewhere, it really seems to boil down to whether he's writing something that he personally finds interesting or not. Hence, his Dan Dare, Shadow etc stories are generally high quality, while stuff written because he was hired to write something in the vein of Preacher... Yeah.

[lucean]

I must begin by apologizing for being slightly oversensitive on the dismissive issue. I was reading at the same time another discussion concerning MoS, which have a tendency to make my head hurt so, so bad, and I fear my reaction from it bled over to this discussion. My sincerest apologies for that.

After some pondering, I actually have to agree that there has been a change in his stories, but I perhaps believe it is more due to the fact that he is no able to write more of the stories that he wanted to then, as you pointed out in your last paragraph. Even then, though, I feel there is a constant presence of the same character types and glorification of certain actions/approaches as the only ways to really solve anything.

I do, to repeat myself, completely understand why people like Ennis's work. He is an excellent writer with a good grasp of pacing and scene building in the medium of his work. For me personally, the reason I can never really consider him a great writer is that he remains so nestled in his comfort area to truly ever challenge him to tell a different story or to use a different perspective.

And by the way, I agree that Adventures of the Rifle Brigade was truly ghastly and to me perhaps illustrated a larger problem with when Ellis tries to something satirical as his work as he, for me, rarely manages to truly make fun of those character types at the heart of them. Although I do have to admit that despite my many problems with The Boys, it is probably the closest Ennis has ever gone to examine his problematic main characters.