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reading comics (DC in this case) from this odd time period where it was exploring more mature issues is. like saying racial slurs including the N word is fine.

But characters can't say 'fuck'

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The Mission, in Batman: No Man’s Land 2

Penciller: Jim Balent

Inker: Marlo Alquiza

Colors: Patricia Mulvihill

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submitted by @uh-oh-spagettio​

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love this picture theyre all so cunty

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"Why do you hate found family" you guys will call characters who r literally coworkers siblings its stupid.

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When a fic doesn’t fit my head canons but it’s well-written

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every time i see fanart of adaptation footage of that scene in brothers karamazov when ivan takes the stand i can just think of 'congrats that's the worst everyone has ever done it'

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genuinely one of the best fanworks i have ever seen... i rewatch it regularly

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I should probably watch the boys tv show at some point (the stuff i have seen does not endear me to it)-

but like

one of my favourite Butcher moments is him taking hughie to meet the tied-down A-train and then playing recordings of the seven disparaging robin and then sexualizing annie even when hughie pleads him to stop... all to get hughie to get to perform violence (when hughie just opened up to buther and the team about being sexually assaulted!)

And even with this all hughie fails to perform masculinity the way butcher does in the end (which saves they day in the end!)

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one of the things in the boys comic I think about a lot is what happens with the two genuinely evil women in the story: the cia director susan rayner, a literal war criminal (I don't mean this in the cutesy way tumblr likes to use the label. she committed war crimes and was islamophobic about it), and jessica bradley, an executive working in the company that makes the supe compound. amongst her crimes is using/taking advantage of two transfem sex workers as part of a plan to frame a character for murder.

and they both end up fucked: susan tries to launch a political career but her underling kessler leaks a recording of her having (consensual!) sex and it ruins her candidacy. jessica is set up by her boss to take the fall for the crimes the company committed; he just walks her right off that glass cliff...

they're both genuinely evil, but it's them being women that puts them in a position where they will face actual consequences while the men get to walk away. kessler is a literal rapist (whose mistake was being too obvious about sexual assault: the point the comic makes constantly and directly is that as long as men go after vulnerable women and aren't too obvious they get away with rape) who just loses his job and just lands an another well paying job

Like yeah it kinda sucks, maybe have complicated feelings about it?

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"military time" do NOT disrespect miss 24hs she would never join the imperialist machine

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Crossed exists because Ennis went to see Iron Man and it depressed him so bad he had to go write Crossed, which I feel is completely reasonable reaction to watching any MCU movie...

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NGL Ennis just straight up is one of my favourite writers. To begin with he has written so many different things I don't think people are even aware of but he always brings in the humanity and the willingness to engage with things like vigilantism or status quo in superhero comics or wider issues and yes lot of it is fucking insane too (I have been thinking about The Boys recently a lot and I'm sooorrryy but you do actually need to stop and think through things like 'so what does this bit about a guy raping a chinchilla to death has to say about homophobia?' to engage with the text.)

Even when he fails or miststeps I can generally see what he is trying to do and then I find it enjoyable to think why it doesn't work; I think his later arc on Hellblazer (son of man) is the work of his I dislike the most and it's because it just fails to say anything or know what it really is doing.

I think there's things to critique about his work for sure but I'm sorry you actually have to engage with his work and so much of criticism I see just shows a complete lack of effort on that front. Which is fair if you don't want to but I'd prefer it if the criticisms were actually about what he has written and not things people think his work probably has.

Also RE: your tags about Crossed... I liked Ennis Crossed and don't think it's problematic at all and it's always weird to me when people lump it and The Boys together as Ennis being too Ennis when they're just totally different works... Saying this as someone who does find sexual assault disturbing and has criticisms on how it's almost always used in media... It's used with restraint in Crossed and you're supposed to feel bad looking at That Scene. Later Ennis Crossed stuff doesn't even have that sorta shock content, Fatal Englishman is largely a series of conversations between two guys: an atheist military guy and a Catholic priest who is trying to keep children safe in the horror that is going on.

When Garth Ennis writes the Punisher he genuinely engages with the idea of what kind of a person you'd need to be to be the Punisher. To be a marvel comic books vigilante like that. And the answer Ennis arrives to is that you can't be a person in any real sense, to be able to go in and kill people and do it forever, because what is the Punisher gonna do if not that? Stop? Change? Die? Of course not, there will always be a new Punisher comic.

When Ennis has approached the question of how it'd possibly ever end (like in the fittingly named Punisher: The End) the answer is that Frank Castle would keep on killing until there's nothing left to kill and then he'd die. Because the unending status quo by its very nature requires an inhuman killing machine. Even when Ennis writes about the start of things (in Born) there's no real change beyond Frank just admitting what he has always been.

This is btw why I also don't' agree that Billy Butcher from The Boys is similar to Ennis take on the Punisher, because the narrative Butcher exists in has consequences. There is a scene in The Boys where Mallory describes Butcher as someone seeking an unending war (as the Punisher does) but Mallory never understood Billy as a person. Perhaps Mallory, who is in some ways less of a realist, can believe, or want to believe in a person like the Punisher being possible.

No, Butcher was capable of change at least once and changed first when Becky gave him the belief things could be changed for the better, and later on after Becky's death where he took every lesson he had learned to become the worst possible version of himself. There were several times when things could have ended quite different on an individual level...

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i really like this image

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Honestly any analysis or criticism of the boys (comic) that doesn't even acknowledge the context of it being about the usamerican response on 9/11 or that the titular boys are a part of the CIA just baffles me like... 9/11 literally happens in the comic??? Butcher's abuses of power are almost entirely tied to him being a CIA operative???

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Icon commission ✨🐱

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Suicide Squad Scarecrow Concept Art High Quality