5 out of 5

Despite evolving into a grumpy old man with The Boys, Ennis has still shown that, with the right material, the right characters, he can still produce some amazing writing.  ‘Crossed’ mines all those themes of questioning authority and religion and examining the innate goodness and evils in man that have rumbled around Garth’s work since ‘True Faith,’ but if some recent writings have leaned too far into cynical to be effective, something about the depravity of the Crossed world seems to force Ennis to dig deep.  It seems like such a limited concept – viewing the Crossed as semi-aware, unhinged zombies, it’s basically a zombie apocalypse scenario, and how many of those have we seen?  …Which is why the other writers on the series don’t quite seem to nail the tone as Garth does.  He got the initial structure of what the Crossed may represent out of the way with his initial run, and good on him that his two returning stints haven’t tried to flesh that out more, because it’s truly unneeded.  Better instead to focus on what it does to us, and what it does to realize there’s no hope, to realize that the evil you’re seeing is all just locked inside your brain.

Previously we dealt with a coward, now we deal with hardened men – 4 soldiers with a plan to get access to nuclear weapons and just nuke this corner of the world.  On the way they run into a pastor who’s trying to protect several children.  Soldiers, church – seems like normal Ennis territory.  And he drops in some of his battle talk and gets some religious explorative jabs out of the way, but again, digging deep, it’s all in service of exploring our inner strengths and weaknesses.

And it’s a powerful ending, and a powerful story, packed with powerful moments that are so smoothly wended in the man should be lauded.  When a non-Burrows artist touched his Wormwood series, it didn’t go over so well for me.  I was worried in the same way for Raulo Caceres’ art – like other writers, it just seems like the artists don’t get the balance between the gore and making sure the gore actually has effect and isn’t just plain ‘cool’ and gratuitous – but Raulo does an amazing job.  His Crossed might not have the same sort believable animalistic look as Burrows’, but he seems to understand the soul of creepiness at work, and puts equal pain and strain into the non-violent, non-action scenes as he does any other panel.  The rich summery greens are also a welcome color change from Ennis’ winter-based previous arcs, and grossly juxtapose with the encroaching terror.