John McCreaCritiques

Gets a lot better with "I am Baylor!"

*Warning: NSFW*

This was ... not great. Hughie is having a crisis of faith (which is a long time coming). In doing so, he goes back home to Scotland... and strange things happen.



Hughie certainly has some interesting friends.



Veeeery interesting.



And that's ... most of the story. His work does follow him home more or less (drugs laced with Compound V), but that's about it. It really does feel like a filler episode.

So it goes.

*Warning: NSFW*

Once a year, the comics run a big teamup event where all the superheroes get together to save the world from a terrible threat. Except... of course they don't. Instead, they go to an island resort and have a giant super-orgy.

As if we needed more reasons to distrust the supes. It's interesting, they take the 'absolute power corrupts absolutely' and amps it up. I think it would be more realistic if they were just people: some good, some bad, some great, and some terrible, but I suppose that wouldn't be as good a story.

It's quite the diversion and more than a little gratuitous (in both violence and especially nudity this time around), but that's about what you'd expect from the Boys.

And hey, people are realizing that Homelander is terrible:



And Stormfront:



Who is comically terrible. This is one place where the series really shines over the comics: TV Stormfront being at first a relatively likeable anti-hero and only later you find out she's a literal Nazi? Much preferable.

Sometimes you read something that leaves you scratching your head. I think this is one of those books. Either that or I need to change shampoo.

Garth Ennis' Hitman is an interesting tale, almost something you would expect from a different publishing house to DC Comics. Tommy Monaghan is a freelance hitman working in Gotham city when he is bitten by a demon and picks up the ability to hear people's thoughts, see through walls and wear sunglasses at night without looking like a douchebag. With his new abilities he makes the move into killing supercriminals. And since he works in Gotham, Tommy is soon confronting Batman. Well, Garth Ennis' version of Batman....

I'm a huge fan of Garth Ennis' work. He combines interesting story lines with humour and irreverence, simultaneously embracing and satirising whatever genre he is writing in. The Boys would have to be one of my favourite series, and Garth's run in Punisher Max is legendary. It is these two series that leave me scratching my head about Hitman. There are a lot of similarities between Hitman and Punisher, and the main character of Tommy bears no small resemblance to Butcher from The Boys. So for me, having read Punisher and The Boys first, Hitman feels like a pale imitation - despite coming first.

So despite this being at times confusing (a poetic demon who inhabits a human discusses stuff with himself... oookaaay...) and unpolished versions of the above mentioned series, I did enjoy reading about Tommy killing people in Gotham.

I hate Garth Ennis.
I hate comics about dudes who shoot people.

And yet, I really liked this comic. There's a sense of humor and humanity about it that's missing from the other "gritty" comics.

I just love this comic. It's kind of the much-less-incredibly rude version of "The Boyz." Tommy Monaghan and Nat the Hat are good characters. In this volume, they meet some really tough guys – some former SAS soldiers. It's an eye-opening experience for our heroes!

LIDO!

D-I'm still missing Darick Robertson as the principal artist, but John McCrea seems to "get" the characters better than John Higgons did in Volume 4. This book is clearly laying plot for upcoming episodes, so, as such, it's a bit slow, especially when compared to the finale of the preceding volume.

Not my kind of comic - funny charachters, but repetitive action, and the artwork is simply too simplistic for my liking.½

LIDO!