Garth Ennis' PREACHER is deservedly recognised as one of the great comic series of the past ten years. His work on HELLBLAZER and HITMAN also won him acclaim. Yet today his main output consists of war stories and violent comedy. The Ninth Art editorial board gathered round the pub table to ask, is Garth Ennis running out of ideas?

ANTONY JOHNSTON: Garth Ennis is getting a lot of stick for treading the same old ground, and in recent months it seems he's done nothing but war stories - and PUNISHER, which might as well be a war story. It's a lone soldier story. JUST A PILGRIM was essentially the same thing.

ALASDAIR WATSON: I think JUST A PILGRIM was much closer to a 2000AD piece.

ANDREW WHEELER: Do they all die horribly?

ALASDAIR: Some of them do. I think. The man who gets turned into a giant bollock doesn't survive.

ANDREW: Nice to know Garth is aiming high with the humour.

ANTONY: There is an accusation that Garth is phoning it in, and I don't think that's unfair to a certain extent. But I think he's expended so much energy on HELLBLAZER and then PREACHER, and now I think he's just resting. He keeps saying he has plans to do this huge graphic novel with Steve Dillon, and in the meantime he's just working for people who will pay him shedloads of money.

ALASDAIR: I don't think that's fair. I think he's doing the stories he wants to do.

ANTONY: I was talking more about PUNISHER than about WAR STORIES.

ALASDAIR: I think he's treating PUNISHER the way he treated HITMAN, and using it to tell stories he wants to tell. It almost doesn't matter that it's Frank Castle, he's just a bloke that goes around killing an awful lot of people. The character is almost personality free. Ennis has even stripped away the bits that used to make him human, like the regret about his family. Thankfully he also had the sense to strip away that godawful business about the angels.

ANTONY: But he has basically turned it into a war comic. The lone soldier where everyone is his enemy.

ALASDAIR: I think calling it a war is wrong. The point of the Punisher is that he's a sad little man who keeps killing people for no reason. He will never ever achieve anything no matter how many people he blows up. We see him have his victories, but there's always more people for him to kill.

ANTONY: From what I've read about it, didn't FURY #1 have the same theme?

ALASDAIR: FURY's a different beast. FURY I really was quite impressed with.

ANTONY: But isn't it basically about a soldier who just wants to keep on fighting? And isn't happy with peace?

ANDREW: But the point of FURY is that he doesn't have a war. So Ennis is playing off the same motifs. He's spinning it a different way, but it is very clearly the same motif. I wonder if it's a case of, now he doesn't have one long series to do, he's exploring one long theme over several series.

ANTONY: Rather than lots of themes in one series like he did in something like PREACHER? It's a different approach to the same writing problem, I suppose.

ALASDAIR: Although to be fair, his WAR STORIES are less about the war. JOHANN'S TIGER is about friendship and, to a certain extent, redemption.

ANDREW: A lot of his stories are about friendship and redemption.

ANTONY: Shock headline! Garth Ennis in macho friendship shocker!

ALASDAIR: This is what a lot of people have been saying. He just does this. But he does it very well.

ANTONY: He does do it extremely well, which is why I think that with this war stuff he's phoning it in to an extent, but only because he's so immersed in the genre. He's said he reads pretty much nothing but war novels and war histories

ALASDAIR: The point we're getting back to, though, is that his FURY and PUNISHER stuff is not about friendship and redemption, it's about war. Whereas his war stuff isn't about war, it's about the effects on people.

ANTONY: OK, but they are still about war.

ALASDAIR: I'm not convinced his war stories are about war.

ANDREW: But it's the context of war that fascinates him. I think he has this idea that men are at their most masculine in war, or in conflict, or when they are soldiers. And I think that's why he's fascinated by war and that's why he's exploring this theme, of machismo and what it means to be a man, so extensively. I mean, his female characters aren't very prominent, with the exception of Tulip.

ALASDAIR: And don't get me started on the horrific butchery of Tulip toward the end of PREACHER.

'His war stuff isn't about war, it's about the effects on people.' ANTONY: I haven't read it, but couldn't you make an argument about the character of Kit in HELLBLAZER?

ALASDAIR: Yes, that's the character that's always kind of saved him in that respect, in that she was so much better than John Constantine. You got the feeling that Tulip was a better person than Jesse right throughout PREACHER, but at the end she gives in.

ANDREW: She was a better person, but he was a stronger person. But Kit was stronger that John.

ALASDAIR: Kit was better that John in every possible way, because Constantine is basically a broken little fucker.

ANDREW: And there is more complexity in those HELLBLAZER stories, and it makes me wish he'd go back and do something more like that. The best Garth Ennis I've ever read is HEARTLAND.

ALASDAIR: HEARTLAND or TROUBLED SOULS.

ANTONY: Yeah, if you can forgive the slight naivete of it, TROUBLED SOULS is still a cracking story. I'm wondering if Ennis is maybe going in cycles. It could be said that Alan Moore goes in cycles. Every so often he'll turn out this flash of brilliance - I say flash, but it takes him five years to do it - and then he'll spend the next five or six years doing fun stuff that pays the bills. He's obviously enjoying doing it, but it isn't going to change the medium in any way.

ANDREW: Except he doesn't do it in cycles, he does things in parallel.

ANTONY: Yes, but the bigger works only come to prominence when they're finished. I know FROM HELL was being worked on for about eleven years, but how many people had actually read more than maybe one part of it in that time? Maybe Ennis is doing the same thing, and he just hasn't been doing it anywhere near as long as Moore.

ANDREW: So at the moment he's just tending his imagination? Waiting for his next big project?

ANTONY: I think it's possible, yeah. Ennis started off with TROUBLED SOULS, which kind of made him, then did stuff like TRUE FAITH and Judge Dredd, which was hardly art. Then he started HELLBLAZER and PREACHER and now...

ANDREW:Now he's hibernating.

ANTONY: I hope Ennis is going in cycles, because within a couple of years I really hope to see another significant work from him Because he does them so well.

ANDREW: So long as he manages to get rid of his war obsession.

ALASDAIR: He does his themes better than just about anyone else doing them, but he's been doing them for five years now.

ANTONY: I'm not sure if PREACHER... well, there is friendship, but that's been there since TROUBLED SOULS. But the war context and the obsession with military paraphernalia weren't present in PREACHER, apart from an unhealthy fascination with guns.

ALASDAIR: There weren't that many guns!

ANDREW: There was an unhealthy use of guns.

ANTONY: If he can get the war schtick out...

ANDREW: The trouble is... we're at war now.

ANTONY: It's purely selfish on my part.

ANDREW: The war?

ALASDAIR: Antony's been investing in certain key stocks...

ANTONY: I read so much war fiction and non-fiction when I was a kid that I have no interest in war stories anymore. But I really like Garth as a writer.

ALASDAIR: I have no particular fascination with war stories either, but I'm not saturated with them, so I'm more than happy to give them a look. Ennis reads all these old EAGLE comics and BATTLE and COMMANDO, and I never read those as a kid, they passed me by. I'm sure what he's doing owes a lot to those comics, and the chance to do an updated version...

'He does his themes well, but he's been doing them for five years now.' ANTONY: The war stuff that he's done can be likened to the BATTLE strips, but none of it comes close to stuff like "Charlie's War", the long running Pat Mills/Joe Colquhoun story that starts in World War I and goes in to World War II...

ANDREW: That is long running.

ANTONY: It's probably Pat Mills' magnum opus. "Charlie's War" is rightfully seen as a classic, and it's not inherently better than Ennis's stuff, but it was certainly more worthy, judging by the stuff I've flicked through, like JUST A PILGRIM and the comedy stuff...

ALASDAIR: I don't think JUST A PILGRIM is a war story. Same themes, but it's sci-fi, and I don't think it's the same approach or the same way of thinking about it.

ANDREW: You seem to be disputing that anything Garth Ennis does is a war story!

ALASDAIR:No, there's the three books entitled WAR STORIES, maybe THE RIFLE BRIGADE, ENEMY ACE, which suffered horrifically from having Chris Weston on issue one and some bloke who wasn't Chris Weston on issue two.

ANTONY: What distinguishes JUST A PILGRIM as sci-fi, other than that it's set in a post-holocaust world?

ALASDAIR: It's not about the effects of the conflict on the humans. This is a story where a man gets raped by an underground squid thing and gets turned into a bollock. This is not a war story.

ANDREW: War is hell...

ANTONY: Sounds less and less like something I'd want to read.

ANDREW: It does sound like Garth Ennis. I would rather he were writing war stories than writing that.

ALASDAIR: JUST A PILGRIM is far from his best work, but it made me laugh in places and it entertained me, therefore he can have my money for it.

ANDREW: I do think he's an uneven talent, and he does excel most when he's writing his familiar themes. The thing I've enjoyed most since HEARTLAND was PREACHER: SALVATION, which I hated vehemently on a moral level, but I thought it was one of the best comics I'd read, and the best part of PREACHER, because it was a self-contained story with very strong characters. It was Ennis at his best, mining his themes of honour and manhood, and he clearly had a deep passion for what he was writing.

ALASDAIR: I don't think he's uneven, I just think he has two modes of writing, and one of them is the toilet humour...

ANDREW: Churning it out. HITMAN suffers from that in places. I like HITMAN, but it suffers from being something he's writing... between thoughts.

ALASDAIR: When HITMAN's at its best, it's easily up there with PREACHER. I had very much the same reaction to the last issue of HITMAN that I had to the second to last issue of PREACHER, which was the real climax of that series. The issue where Jesse and Cassidy are kicking the shit out of each other. Presumably because two characters talking in a bar wouldn't have worked that well.

ANTONY: Well, he did that in the issue before.

ANDREW: And the other 67 issues before that. Garth is not someone I've ever followed passionately. I do like some of his stuff, but he's not someone I'm passionate about because his themes don't generally appeal to me. I think that when he's good, he's challenging, and his ideas inspire and aggravate and promote thought. But I don't think I'm interested in reading his war stories. Garth is not a writer I need to read, and I don't need to read him at the moment.

ANTONY: But you would read his significant work if he were to produce another one?

ANDREW: Yes, I think so.

ANTONY: I pretty much agree with that.

ALASDAIR: I'm more willing to give him time, because I think there's more weight in WAR STORIES than there is in PUNISHER and FURY, and I'm buying those anyway.

ANDREW: Is he your favourite writer?

ALASDAIR: I dunno. I'm trying to think what he's done since HELLBLAZER that I've not bought, and I honestly don't think there is anything. DICKS I regret buying. I have no urge to re-read it.

ANDREW: If only they'd published PREACHER: THE SEX DETECTIVES.

ALASDAIR: I'm hoping they still will.

ANDREW: Maybe they can get Yoshitaki Amano to do paintings for it. That'd be nice.

ALASDAIR: But I think even when he's not at his best, he's one of the better talents in the field.

ANTONY: Yes, but why would I want to read workmanlike Garth when I can pull out one of the PREACHER trade paperbacks and get much better Garth?

ALASDAIR: Because I want something new, damn it!

Wheeler, Johnston and Watson are the Ninth Art editorial board.

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