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The man who gave Frank Castle his balls back.
Comic Book writer from Holywood, Stroke Country, known for his love of graphic violence and Black Comedy and his intense dislike of superheroes and organized religion. As you can imagine, he has developed quite the devoted Hatedom among some people in the comics community. Some being not very fond of his writing quirks and pet themes, others find that in his strongest works like Hitman, Preacher and Hellblazer Ennis writes with an engaging intensity and even humanity.
He is infamously fond of Author Tracts, though whether he integrates them well or writes stories just to justify these tracts is very YMMV. Many of his characters function as Badass Longcoats, but he is also very good at writing down to earth, mortal characters as well (Agent Clive in Unknown Soldier, Tommy in Hitman, Kev in The Authority). The exception to his disrespect of superheroes is none other than Superman himself, surprisingly enough; Ennis writes the character with complete and total respect. Also known for reminding us of the many Crowning Moments Of Awesome in World War II.
His most famous works are his four-year run on Marvel's adults-only MAX imprint version of The Punisher (aka Punisher MAX) and Preacher (Comic Book), which he co-created with artist Steve Dillon.
He has also written for:
- Judge Dredd
- Hellblazer
- Ghost Rider
- Dan Dare
- Unknown Soldier
- Enemy Ace: War In Heaven
- the Marvel Comics continuity version of The Punisher, with his work on the character even providing inspiration for Punisher's depiction in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
and created:
- The Boys - Inglourious Basterds meets Super Heroes; A squad of Heroic Sociopaths cause all sorts of hell for the local Villain with Good Publicity Smug Supers.
- The Pro - A foul-mouthed hooker gets superpowers, then gets inducted into an Expy Justice League. Essentially a crude semi-porn parody of Power Girl.
- Just a Pilgrim - A group of survivors in a post-apocalyptic wasteland encounter a tough gunslinger who leads them. He turns out to be a psychopathic cannibal and his leadership gets them enmeshed in a conflict that leaves them all dead.
- Preacher - A preacher with a Dark and Troubled Past finds himself the Right Man in the Wrong Place, empowered with a Compelling Voice and makes a vow to use it to Call The Old Man Out - by the Old Man I mean God.
- Hitman - An underrated series about Tommy Monaghan, a hitman with superpowers who operates in the mainstream DCU.
- Crossed - Twenty Eight Days Later meets "The Screwfly Solution"; a mysterious plague turns numerous people into psychotic rapists with crosslike scars on their face.
- War Stories Exactly What It Says on the Tin, with each issue focusing on different characters and their involvement in a campaign or battle of various 20th century wars.
- 303 - A Russian soldier discovers a well-kept secret about the American President and sets out to exact revenge, using an old Lee-Enfeld .303 rifle with one bullet left. Readable, but very much an anti-Bush II revenge fantasy.
- The Chronicles of Wormwood - Danny Wormwood, cable TV producer, is the Antichrist, and his best buddy Jay is the second coming of Christ. Many people want them to bring about the Apocalypse, but they aren't willing to play ball.
- Jennifer Blood - A woman is a loving housewife by day, and a crusading vigilante by night. Ennis appears to have intended the book as a comedy, but instead it reads like a distaff version of his run on Punisher. It's one of his less popular works.
- Battlefields - A collection of stories set in the Second World War.
- Stitched - An American helicopter crew crash-lands in the mountains of Afghanistan. They and the SAS crew they're there to pick up must then contend with a particularly sadistic breed of zombie. A comic version of the story is still ongoing as of this writing, and a short film of the same name, written and directed by Ennis himself, was shown at a couple of comic conventions in 2011.
Tropes Present In His Works:
- Anti-Hero: Type V mostly, a few Type IVs. Danny Wormwood might just barely qualify as Type III. Jesse Custer is actually a pretty good example of Type III.
- Author Appeal: Military history, well-researched, noble soldiers brutalized by amoral superiors. Black Comedy, with occasional forays into Toilet Humour.
- Author Filibuster: There's always at least one in all his works.
- Berserk Button: The one superhero that Ennis really, really hates is Captain America. A student of the brutality of war, Ennis has no love for what he views as a War Is Glorious/The Theme Park Version of the horrors of World War II.
- Given Black Noir, it can also be inferred that Ennis has a passionate hatred for Batman.
- Black Comedy
- Broken Aesop: A critique of his attacks on superheroes. For all that Ennis likes to say that superheroes are unnecessary and that the Badass Normals can solve it all on their own, a lot of his anti-superhero works feature the protagonists be empowered in some way to fight superhero level threats; such as the Boys taking Compound V, the title character of The Pro needing a Great Gazoo to empower her, the three normal humans in Thor: Vikings needing Strange's magic and Thor's leadership to survive or even the Punisher, in Punisher Kills the Marvel Universe, being backed by a Nebulous Evil Organisation with unlimited funding on top of him already being an army veteran.
- Creator Provincialism: Despite his Eagle Land tendencies (see below), people from the United Kingdom are always treated as the real shakers and movers in his books.
- Crossover: Ennis doesn't do it a lot, but characters from his major works tend to wander back and forth between stories. Cassidy from Preacher shows up in The Boys as the owner of a bar in New York, Kathryn O'Brien from Punisher is the same CIA agent from the last arc of Hitman, and the vampires that Tommy Monaghan kills in the "Dead Man's Land" arc in Hitman are led by the new King of the Vampires, after the previous king was killed by John Constantine. There are other examples, of course.
- Depraved Bisexual: A lot of Ennis's villains will bang anything that doesn't run away fast enough. He frequently uses a particular brand of anything-goes, hedonistic bisexuality as a character trait for his villains, as further evidence of their utter amorality. Almost as if to balance this out, though, he's gone well out of his way in many stories, including "The Punisher" and "The Boys," to depict gay people in dedicated, healthy relationships.
- Don't Shoot the Message: A critique of his work.
- The political themes in his work. Ennis passionately rallies against conservative beliefs and worldviews but he does so in such a way that makes people think he supports those beliefs he's criticizing. For example, the setting of The Boys bears a similarity to the Deep State conspiracy theory believed by the American right and the protagonists express a lot of casual bigotry towards minorities.
- His take on the superhero genre. Rather than any substantial critique of the genre, Ennis leans into shock value and sex jokes with a surface level parody of superheroes, overshadowing whatever salient points he might make. His critics argue that this just makes him come across as a hater who didn't seem to research what he's parodying rather than someone worth listening to.
- Eagle Land: An odd, yet intriguing form of it. He believes the United States is way too self-righteous and full of itself, but he also believes that when Americans choose to get over themselves they showcase what is best and brightest about humanity. The clearest expression of this is from Gunther Hahn in Preacher:
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The Myth of America: that simple, honest men, born of her great plains and woods and skies have made a nation of her, and will prove worthy of her when the time is right. Under harsh light, it is false. But a good myth to live up to, all the same. |
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- Evil Versus Evil: Most of his works are various groups of assholes trying to kill each other.
- Even Ennis Has Standards:
- Though his hatred of superheroes is well known, those that he likes, or at the very least their expies in The Boys, tend to get treated with respect, the most prominent being Superman who is treated with nothing short of complete respect. Even though Superman's counterpart in The Boys is one the Big Bads, he's also implied to have once been as genuinely wholesome as Superman and is the only villain to have Death Equals Redemption apply to them. Through their expies in The Boys, Ennis also appears to respect Iron Man, Wonder Woman (though he's said in an interview that he admires more the idea of her than her as a character) and Supergirl.
- While Ennis has come up with a great deal of thinly-veiled parodies of various superheroes, most notoriously in The Boys and Hitman, he's more even-handed when he actually writes those characters than many fans give him credit for being. Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman are all depicted in his work as thoroughly competent. Similarly, Ennis' depiction of Spider-Man in TANGLED WEB #1-3 was extremely sympathetic and touching, showcasing Spidey's compassion and genuine heroism. Kyle Rayner was portrayed as naïve, well-meaning but ultimately ineffectual, and Wally West was, well, really kind of a dick. The only mainstream superhero that Ennis has consistently refused to write well is Wolverine, who is an idiotic collection of his own clichés every time he appears in Ennis's work.
- While Ennis is not shy to deliver Author Tracts about how superheroes have created a Crapsack World, in both The Punisher Kills the Marvel Universe and The Boys, the protagonists draw the line at an outright genocide of supers.
- Fan Nickname: Ennis, Warren Ellis, and Grant Morrison all became popular in America at about the same time, which led many fans at the time to refer to them as the Trinity.
- God Is Evil: Ennis is an atheist, and is very forthcoming about that fact. In his work that deals explicitly with the Judeo-Christian religion, God Himself is either a drooling imbecile (Hellblazer, Chronicles of Wormwood) or a complete asshole (Preacher). Summarized briefly, the world in Ennis's fiction is so deeply flawed that any God responsible for creating it is either insane or unthinkably cruel. God's servants, on the other hand, run the gamut from good to bad to indifferent.
- Groin Attack: Ennis is very fond of writing these - both Preacher and The Boys are littered with them, but his Hellblazer run is particularly notorious for them. It was a horror comic where the ultimate horror was always literal castration.
- Heterosexual Life Partners: Some of Ennis' best work revolves around exploring deep male friendships, generally Ho Yay-free (even when one of them is gay).
- Humans Are Flawed: A recurring theme in his work and why he hates superheroes, arguing that superheroes are, psychologically at least, ordinary people who can't be trusted to make world-shaking decisions that Ennis thinks should fall to trained government agents.
- Names to Run Away From Really Fast: Soldiers in general, veterans in particular. Ennis routinely depicts blooded soldiers as being capable of slaughtering mooks by the dozen.
- His specific favorites are Russian and British veterans: Spetsnaz are frenzied killing machines, SAS are undetectable kill-stealers.
- Pop Cultural Osmosis Failure: By his own account, he never picked up a traditional superhero comic from Marvel or DC until he was in his 20s. The result was that, after reading things like Judge Dredd, he only saw the Fridge Horror of living in such a world.
- Promoted Fanboy: He was a big fan of 2000 AD and especially Judge Dredd as a kid.
- Protagonist-Centered Morality: Whether by accident or by design, a lot of his works end up featuring this. If delivered by one of the protagonists, many of his Author Filibusters can be boiled down to "It's okay if I do it."
- His Author Tract against Captain America in The Boys is flagging that Soldier Boy is a Phony Veteran because he didn't fight in World War II, critiquing that Cap is just a fictionalized symbol of WWII. Expect he's saying it through Billy Butcher who, by Ennis' own logic, is also a Phony Veteran because he only fought in the comic' version of the Falklands War, not the real thing and would therefore be a fictionalized symbol of the war, no different from Cap.
- Shallow Parody: A critique of his work. To get his Author Filibusters across, Ennis often ignores details in the source work and/or invokes a few Ass Pulls to make his points more salient.
- For example, while The Boys is meant to deconstruct Marvel and DC's superhero comics, the world of The Boys features no supervillains. Of course superheroes will be seen as adding nothing worthwhile to society when their natural reason for existing isn't present.
- Thor: Vikings is probably the best example of this. Ennis uses the book to make clear just how much he hates Thor but he does so by blatantly ignoring established rules of how the Marvel Universe works and writing the characters as Out of Character.
- The Punisher Kills the Marvel Universe. That is all. Yes, to show what a badass the Punisher is, Ennis actually nerfed heavy hitters like the Hulk, Wolverine and Doctor Doom to the point that one ordinary man could kill them. The result is that the Punisher just seems like a murderer instead of a Badass Normal who can throw down with gods. He also never pauses to consider what the Galactic Conquerors might get up to if every superhero on Earth is now dead.
- His Nick Fury series in the Marvel MAX line has the title character embroiled in real-world warfare... which isn't Nick Fury's job. It's also set in a very realistic universe that lacks any of the Fantasy Kitchen Sink aspects of the Marvel Universe so it wasn't really an examination of how Spy Fiction would work in Marvel. Nick Fury co-creator Stan Lee was not amused.
- Shown Their Work: Zig-zagged. Ennis does put an effort to get historical facts right but he stops researching when he comes across facts that contradict his worldview and biases. For a student of World War II history, Ennis seems to have completely missed that Captain America, a character whom Ennis hates, was actually a huge morale booster for US troops and was co-created by an actual WWII veteran (Jack Kirby) in a controversial anti-fascist stance even before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Ennis is also insistent that the Nazis were an industrial powerhouse, fielding tech decades ahead of what the Allies had. Ask anyone who has actually done WWII research and they'll tell you that many Nazi designs were Awesome but Impractical and the USA being an actual industrial powerhouse is what led to the Nazis' defeat.
- Straight Gay
- Rage Against the Heavens: Religious figures are not treated very kindly in Ennis' work. Expect Jesus.
- Rated "M" for Manly: Ennis tends to give high praise to traditional masculine values, at the expense of more feminine values. As a result, many of his works have a conservative and sexist feel to them. Though he does this as a form of satire, showing how destructive machoism can be when taken to its extreme.
- This is a common criticism of his work, but at the same time, he manages to avert it in several of his higher-profile stories. A good example example is in the Butcher, Baker, Candlestickmaker miniseries from The Boys, where Rebecca successfully manages to talk Billy into breaking the cycle of violence that started with his father. One of the morals of Preacher, in the end, is that Jesse's entire sense of self is mostly bullshit.
- Reality Ensues: Well, this what he claims he's going for. Whether or not he succeeds is best left to the YMMV pages and forums.
- Shout-Out: Especially to movies like Where Eagles Dare and Kelly's Heroes.
- The Troubles: As one might expect from the best known comic book writer from the disputed area, he has addressed this in several stories.
- War Is Hell: His view and his main argument for why he hates Captain America, viewing the Star-Spangled Man with a Plan as promoting "War Is Glorious".
- Write Who You Know: A lot of his best-written characters are Irish.