5 out of 5

Ennis’ snark at its hilarious peak.

Garth unleashed is a sight to behold, but his humor is of the type that, to me, is generally more successful when it’s moderated to a certain extent.  In his lesser-censored works, the jokes sometimes go straight for crass or gross-out too easily; with something like Hitman, under the DC banner, he definitely pushes things, but the reigns make him buck a bit more surreptitiously.

Not that that prevents him from making some bald-faced “why is Hitman in this crossover?” comments regarding Grant Morrison’s DC 1,000,000 venture (which catapulted issue numbers to 7 digits and transported all into the future for a Grant-y time-twisty thing).

On the cusp of getting much more serious in the ongoing of this title, Ennis and McCrea bring back some of the earlier outlandishness, both in art and writing: some future kids warp Tommy to their time, wanting to essentially ‘inherit’ what they determine to be his heroism.  We’re prepared for Tommy to slaughter.  Instead, Ennis has his yuks by halting Monaghan with a slew of supers from the era, all with ridiculous names and hilarious, soap-y dialogue, and hair-trigger impulses to battle one another.  …Maybe Tommy urges that on a bit, and, yeah, we wind up with a slaughter, but it’s a much funnier way of getting there.

There’s no lasting effect to the book; Tommy would head back to Gotham a few minutes later, but it’s a breezy breath of inanity in the midst of an Event series, becoming a five star read exactly because of how isolated and self-aware it is.