average 3 out of 5

Chronicles of Wormwood (w/ Jacen Burrows) – 5 out of 5

Chronicles of Wormwood: The Last Enemy (w/ Rob Steen) – 3 out of 5

Chronicles of Wormwood: The Last Battle (w/Oscar Jimenez) – 2 out of 5

Well then.  You can see that decline, yes?  As with all writers who sprawl around between indie properties, and creator-owned properties, and freed-of-censorship properties, and back to the mainstream, Ennis has a few different modes of writing to which he adheres, depending on whether he has an agenda, or whether he’s just going for gross-outs.  I’d say that, lately, something has changed in Ennis’s life which has made him feel the need to more forcefully inject his work with SOMETHING, whether it’s a big ol’ head-stomping point (The Boys) or an over-the-top sense of fun.  He’s still trying to keep his output high, but the books on the fringes goes into his pile of interesting but not overwhelming works…  Now I say all of this accepting that I haven’t written a good god-damned thing for the public, so the fact that Garth is still putting this stuff out and that it’s uniquely him is a loftier claim than I’ll ever be able to make.  But here I am sittin’ high and mighty (or low and level to my desk) making some 3 outta 5 judgments and what not.  Life is fair?

The other thing to note is that, yes, Garth almost always has a point in his books, but there’s a line he crosses between preachin’ and tellin’ a story, and sometime in the mid-2000s, he starting leaning much more toward preaching more often than not.

Chronicles of Wormwood, with the three storylines currently published, has the distinction of taking place before the lean (the first arc), during the change (the prestige Last Enemy), and after the lean (the last arc).  It’s also possible that my take on these books in sequence is very much affected by the artists – Jacen Burrows is no stranger to the Avatar breed of gore, but there’s a talent for restraint in his work as well, even when allowed full imaginative flowing blood and guts on his wraparound covers for the series…  If not restraint, then its a visual of the full picture, that, instead of starting from “babies getting chopped in half” and building a picture from there, he seems to be mindful of the whole tableau, so that you’re marveling at the draftsmanship of it even while you’re contemplating the f’d up nature of what you’re looking at.  His cover for “The Last Enemy” is misleading when you get to Steen’s interiors.  Steen has a more comical bent to his work, and it doesn’t really match the Dillon-esque consistency Burrows brought to the first series.  In fact, Steen’s pens lean toward Ennis’s “Dicks” partner-in-crime Jon McCrea, all loosey-goosey, and it removes the serious undercurrent that made the original Chronicles so good to read and look at.  Finally, we get to Oscar Jimenez, who seems to belong more to the common Avatar school of “blood it up and the fans will come”, using some kind of computer layer to dehumanize his pencils (which are otherwise quite detailed and the panels mostly well composed, they just have that distracting computer quality).  His wraparounds aren’t as fascinating as Burrows, the eye just glosses over it as they’re almost too busy.  This sensibility, unfortunately, extends to his interiors as well.  Furthermore, though, once the focus is more on characters (and not just imagery), Jimenez’s work just can’t hold up – when the characters are meant to look horrified, they do, but unextreme emotions just don’t look right.

So to the writing.  The original Chronicles is everything Ennis just does, on occasion, so beautifully.  Whether with the anger behind Preacher, or the stoicism behind Punisher, sometimes he just finds a character who speaks to the inner hopeful / cynic, and he finds a vehicle through which to make a point – in this case the pointlessness of being led by religion (always a good thread for Ennis) – but has the patience to sit back and work through the character he’s made instead of hammering his voice into the narrative.  Danny Wormwood happens to be the antichrist, but he has no interest in actually being the antichrist.  He’s got a good girlfriend, a good job, and a good friend in Jesus Christ who, though also disinterested in fulfilling whatever futures may have been written, lost his memory when struck across the head by the LAPD during a protest.  He works as a television producer, making reprehensible yet somehow morally responsible (?) entertainment, and here again is where the differences in the series’ tone becomes more apparent, as we get the idea that some devilish intent is coming out to play with a lot of the filth Wormwood Productions puts out, and Ennis doesn’t avoid making it clear that he feels there’s a thin line between being overt with your offense and the kind of attempt-to-justify-it nonsense that is currently playing on TV, but through some television and newspaper interviews with our lead, we not only get to flesh out the vibe of the blend of “humanity for better or worse,” but understand more about why he is who he is, and why the decisions he makes follow…  In other words, Ennis doesn’t just use it as a cheap joke.  Until he does, starting with the second series.  But, by having that story function as somewhat of an epilogue to the main Chronicles, it holds its up just above water.  Alas, The Last Battle feels mostly pointless, just a sketch of itself and of the characters, and fer fucks sake falls on a “love saves the day” message that started popping up in Ennis’s writing around the time, along with his voice in The Boys as a bitter, old man… so some kind of aging crisis, perhaps, who knows.  But LB is truly just sequel territory – just written to be written, not really adding anything to the Wormwood world.  It probably would’ve worked better without the uncomfortable computer-tweaked art, more tolerable as just an Ennis being Ennisy, but.  Yeah.  Stuff happens.

Exhaustive review?  Meh?