2 out of 5

I feel like Garth Ennis has said all he needs to say with ‘Crossed’ by this point.  ‘Thin Red Line’ is actually better than the non-Ennis Crossed books (this is judgmental as I haven’t read them, but from a glance, the other writers seem to glorify the violence more than highlight the tumultuous human journey through it as Ennis does, as he did similarly – and as other writers also can’t emulate – in his Punisher MAX series), but it’s the first of his additions to the world that feels more like a publisher request than a tale that needed to be told.  This is, essentially, a prequel to our last time with Garth on Crossed, filling in not only some beginnings of the outbreak, but also how his military troupe featured in his last go-round got involved.  We get who appears to be a ‘patient zero,’ and the protection detail attached to the PM at the time (who, in my total obliviousness I had no idea was a real person) – our familiar troupe – butt heads with the PM’s adviser (a spin doctor to the Nth degree) when they all wind up in a ‘secure’ quarantine facility with the patient.  The original Crossed mini was expansive, but it was justified as we Ennis gave us room to understand the horrors of his creation.  However, his tales since then have been pretty tight and focused.  ‘Red Line,’ in comparison, has a lot of extras, and extras that, to me, didn’t have a clear reason for being part of the script.  There’s some male bonding with the protection detail on their night off, necessitating a secondary detail being introduced (and killed off) when we flash to events around the Prime Minister; there’s some true love and Ennis’ masturbatory war imagery with a navigator (male) and fighter pilot (female) tasked with shooting down some planes sent by, probably, a ‘Crossed’ Russia; there’s the doctor in the facility, given a couple panels of science and then she disappears for the majority of the series; there are, randomly, a whole bunch of military and government extras to fill in procedural details.  On the one hand, yes, it makes the new reality dawning to the characters a bit more grounded in a ‘real’ fleshed-out world, but on the other hand, I’m not sure what couldn’t have been accomplished by narrowing it down to the protection detail, the PM, and the adviser.

In other words, this just doesn’t feel like ‘Crossed,’ and instead of expanding on things, it feels like a flirt – patient zero, we’ll find out something new! – and a soapbox, where Garth can explore this real-life Prime Minister and show how his decisions (which, apparently, were notoriously wishy-washy) were influenced by those around him.  And the violence just didn’t sit right either.  We get what might be a jab at previous Crossed books’ ‘gorno’ style, which was a totally misplaced gag, or we get Ennis searching for violent imagery (not shown, but explained) that simply makes you cringe but doesn’t hit you in the gut.  And to top it all off, I’m not sure who the guy running away at the beginning of issue #50 was supposed to be.  The PM?  Patient zero?  Either way, the fact that it didn’t really end up connecting to anything sort of underlines the lack of import offered by the events of these issues.

‘The Thin Red Line’ is, alas, latter-day Ennis, where a need to explain something takes precedence over story or character.