Garth Ennis - Favourite Comic Book Author - Reason 731**

To give a small background on this I was originally going to make this one blog and over a few days I sat and wrote it out and once I hit page three I realized there are far too many reasons I like Garth Ennis to write only a single blog. So instead it will be many small ones.

Reason 731 - Using the monologue to round out scenes

This is an important one and here is why. Comic panels basically only ever capture the highlights of the action, and can't always tell the full story, it is up to the reader to fill the gap between the panels with help from the writing to give a flowing context and story. I feel that Garth Ennis does this in a way that is properly meaningful and for this I will cite Punisher Max and Crossed.

In Crossed the monologue was great to tell the audience the social commentary that Ennis was trying to achieve with such a disturbing comic. More to the point it was able to reveal certain details of what was happening on in the story either between the artwork or just out of site of the artwork. For example, a character monologuing about how an infected is raping a knife wound in a person's back who is still alive, adds to the tone. It tells the audience just how fucked up what they are about to read is, without going too overboard by graphically showing the act.

In the Punisher Max, the character was all in the monologue. That is why the Punisher movies have never really done all that well, is they never captured that same magic that the comics have. If you were to do a Punisher movie properly you would need to have it basically be set up the sane way that the TV show Dexter is. Here is what I am on about. Firstly when Frank gets hit really hard, the monologue saying how his vision is now blurry or taking an inventory of the cracked ribs adds to the overall effect in conjunction with the artwork. Makes the impacts more powerful. It also explains enemy movements and motivations, and reveals when the character is concerned which makes the audience concerned it is a good sort of comic. It is a great way to tell jokes as the audience has the third person omniscient view on the story and little quibs can be made. For the Punisher, it is almost the single thing that makes the character relatable to the audience. It is Frank's voice, sharing his reasoning, his motivations, his emotions. In the Max series it is the thing that makes a four digit mass murder seem sane in a world where so many insane villains are explored and developed.

Reason number 731 of why Garth Ennis is my favourite comic book author is how well he does to give more feeling and emotion to his comics. This is especially true given some of the content that Garth Ennis puts out is pretty intense, and to graphically show everything would be even more extreme.


As an aside think about this. The power of comics is combining images and words. In the artwork is sometimes some really intense and fantastic detail. If you were to try to take certain comic images and translate them into words, or rather novelize them, a single image could take pages to describe. And that is the narrative power of comics. It is also hard to do, as I said you are only ever capturing the highlights of the action. In between it can be easy to miss details. Or sometimes you can go from image to image so fast, constructing the sort of visual subtitled movie in your mind that you can miss small details the artists have included. A good monolgue during the action slows the eye down, making you less likely to miss something and adding more value to the action sequences. The best comics in my mind are the ones where when you combine it all, the script, the art, each panel should actually make emotion jump off of each page. If you ware reading a comic and that isn't happening the comic you are reading is not very good.



**Reasons aren't in any actual order. I am not that OCD.