Garth Ennis' 303

303 by Garth Ennis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Being my all-time favorite writer in the graphic novel tradition after Alan Moore, Ennis is right in his element in this mini series. Ennis is well-known for his extreme, sarcastic and cynically witty style as displayed in books like Preacher, The Pro, The Boys etc. but to me, his true calling lies in war stories. The series Battlefields, the two volume War Stories and even the farcical Adventures of the Bollock Patrol demonstrate his strange and creepy fascination with war machinery, strategy, weaponry but without an obsessive, fascistic and militaristic point of view. In fact what makes Ennis' stories so poignant is the balance he is able to draw between the truly heroic (!) esssence of human battle as been practised for centuries in its various forms and paraphernalia along with the inescapable paradox that it creates, which is the cruelty that man exacts upon man. Ennis is fascinated by war (especially the two world wars) but no matter how much guts go flying around the panels and limbs are torn to pieces in multicolor, Ennis never leaves the reader without a deep sense of sadness about [the misery that man hands upon man / that deepens like a coastal shelf] all the while praising some indistinct innate glory that physical conflict between bodies carry with them. This is why Ennis is a good writer: he doesn't try to solve the paradoxes of human existence nor does he pretend to have any ambitious certainties in mind, he just marvels at them with a compassion that is cynical enough to be seriously down-to-earth - thus to be taken seriously....



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