5 out of 5

Sometimes Ennis writes ideas.  These are, to me, the most identifiable ‘Ennis’ stories and can be typified by The Boys.  They’re also the worst form of Garth, as he tends to funnel all his rage and energy into belaboring points about that idea and it leaves things like likeable characters on the wayside.  Sometimes Ennis writes stories.  These are generally interesting – see some of his War Story books, and more recently Battlefields – but lack a heart.  But it gives the man a chance to do some research and get jiggy.  Then sometimes we get a character driven story.  It takes some development, but this turns into the amazing adventures we’ve seen in Preacher.  Problem is that it’ll be bumpy along the way – like the sheriff arc in Preacher – because Garth falls in love with his character and then wants to take it somewhere not really necessitated by the story.

To me, the best – the pinnacle – of Garth’s various writing aims is, surprise, when he combines several of these elements – ideas backed by character and story.  Punisher MAX was such a sweet engine for this, and now, showing he can pull it off more concisely, the 13-part Fury: My War Gone By gets to go up on the mantle with other devastating Ennis works.  It does, admittedly, stumble toward the end – you can sense that Garth took a page from his Battlefields 3-issue structure and planned Fury out as three 3-issue arcs with a concluding book, and frankly the last arc needed a little bit more room to make sense of its conclusion, and this might’ve made the lead-in to the final book more graceful – but this one misstep aside, the series allowed for Garth’s recent more gabby writing sensibilities to join with his strong and wizened connection to his fractured male character type – embracing masculinity, but disenchanted with what pursuing those traits may mean – here embodied by Nick Fury over the course of several decades and several wars.  Where his straight war books get to slobber over the details thanks to their premise and his non war-books always get somewhat uncomfortably shuttled into a war influence for at least one issue, ‘Gone By’ spends its conversation and details on its characters, and lets Goran Parlov’s amazing art and framing speak for the settings.  Garth even – god bless him – properly uses the recap page to set the scene and drop in some extra details that only need a sentence to explain but might’ve taken up precious page space to detail.  He completely nurtures these original creations – a government attache Nick Hatherly, a totally un-Garth character, well-intentioned and brave but not manly, per se; the senator McCluskey, who is given a disgustingly believable humanity without fully sinking into the depths of Garthisms, and McCluskey’s wife / Fury’s casual lay Shirley DeFabio, the seemingly generic strong female Garth type also reduced to a shattered realism – by doing as my descriptions belie, presenting us with the caricatures we’re expecting and then splintering them, as he peels apart Fury’s addiction to war over the course of the series, lying the peels alongside our need for dreams and goals and growth…  As Garth gets older his world view only grows darker, as evidenced in Crossed, also some of his best writing, but it is when he is able to get inside the head of a character he really understands that this is funneled into something impactful and not just whiny.

There’s a nice goodbye letter from editor Nick Lowe at the end of the series, praising all its elements and especially its sense of heightened action.  But this sort of misses the point to me.  The series is couched in a framing tale of an elder Nick recounting these woes to a tape recorder.  So we know he’ll get out of any given scrape.  And the inclusion of Punisher and Barracuda are just icing on the Marvel MAX mini-world Ennis has built.  The action is generally brutal, not exciting.  Chaos, as depicted by Goran.  The point is wrapped around and through the nonsense I’m spewing above… but what’s important is that it’s truly felt, a cohesion of writing and art, every panel, every page (again, misstep aside, though the pointless brutality of that moment does fit in with the book’s themes…), and when it does conclude, it comes down like a guillotine.  Mark Millar will never understand how to write like this.