Guest of the Paris Fan Festival on April 15 and 16, screenwriter Garth Ennis, known for his ultra-violent comics with very dark humour, such as The Boys et Preacherretraces his career for BFMTV.com.
“I don’t think much about how my work is perceived. I often hear words like ‘violent’, ‘brutal’, ‘twisted’.” Screenwriter of The Boys et Preacher, and some of the most controversial comics of the last thirty years, Garth Ennis is not unhappy with this reputation. “I don’t disapprove of it,” he smiled during a recent videoconference meeting.
Guest of honor of Paris Fan Festival on April 15-16, this 53-year-old Irishman made a name for himself in the 1990s with ultra-violent stories with dark humour. “I tend to explore subjects that others don’t dare to touch on,” he admits. Preacher, his masterpiece, follows the adventures of a priest in search of God. In The Boyshe draws up an extreme satire of American superheroes.
If the general public has identified his name since the success of the serial adaptations of these two comics, it is however far from imagining what this prolific scriptwriter is capable of inventing to evoke in the pages of his comics the violence of a world that inspires less and less confidence in him.
“I find it increasingly difficult to be optimistic,” agrees the screenwriter, whose stories most often feature ordinary people having to face almighty and crazy beings. “But it is possible to keep the worst at bay, to survive. That is the first sign of progress, this ability to prevent things from getting worse.”
living with death
Garth Ennis has been carrying around this pessimism since his childhood in Northern Ireland. In the 1970s, Republicans and Loyalists clashed violently, killing and injuring thousands. “It clearly influenced me. I wasn’t involved, but living in the same country gave me a pessimistic and cynical outlook on life.” He remembers:
“Every morning, we ate breakfast listening to the count of the dead and wounded of the night. People had resigned themselves and had learned to live with that. Nobody did anything for almost two decades. That gave me very early the measure of what people were ready to bear. A friend told me recently that this situation had been the perfect training for what we have been living for 15 years.
Around this time, young Garth also developed a sharp sense of humor. But not in reaction to the events, he assures: “I grew up in an absolutely classic suburban suburb. That does not mean that we did not practice a macabre humor to overcome what was happening. But my humor comes more of what I was watching and reading at the time, like a lot of screenwriters.”
Unlike renowned screenwriters like Alan Moore or Grant Morrison, he did not grow up in contact with superheroes. He rather devours “war comics”. “As soon as I understood that these stories, beyond their hyperbolic dimension, had really taken place, I immersed myself in the books of military history, to learn what had happened, and what the comics couldn’t talk.”
nuclear apocalypse
This fascination never left him. “Once I was able to do my own war comics, I went all out,” he laughs. In these stories, “which explore the horrors of life”, his characters “must survive situations beyond our imagination”. In one of his most famous stories, the Punisher, famous contract killer of the Marvel universe, faces the nuclear apocalypse.
Designed by Richard Corben, Punisher: The End (2004) was published in the midst of the Bush administration, and influenced by the second Gulf War. “This unpunished misdeed of the Americans drove me crazy,” he recalls. “This story was born when I wondered what a clash between the United States and the rest of the world would look like. It’s a story that I really like.”
Deeply concerned about the state of the world, Garth Ennis continues: “Fortunately, Bush could not turn this war into a global conflict. But what is happening today is much more worrying, with Vladimir Putin playing with fire with NATO. I hope this war will not lead to another war that will destroy us all.”
This great reader of the press and of history books adds: “I keep coming across things that are much darker and more unpleasant than I could imagine in my comics. The most horrible things that have happened are the things that humans get along with each other.” His scenarios work like this. Many readers love his stories, where you keep wondering what his next craze will be.
“The Suffering of Ordinary People”
Deeply atheist, Garth Ennis has also often denounced any proselytism in his comics. “We are often passionate about the things we hate. We see how they affect the world so we want to write about what pisses us off.” In Marjorie Finnegan, Temporal Criminaljust released in France, its heroine thus returns to the past to modify the perception of religion there.
“I talk about religion there as a scam. This is how I am most comfortable talking about religion”, comments the screenwriter, who denounces the same way in The Boys the fascination generated by superheroes.
To the Gods, Garth Ennis prefers “ordinary people” and their suffering. The Boys talks about the victims of superheroes, and denounces homophobia. In Dear Beckya spin-off from The Boys, he discusses the consequences of Brexit on the rights of trans people. “Brexit is one of the most incredible mistakes made by a nation. We will see the consequences for years.”
“As soon as we stop thinking about superheroes and think about how humanity is doing on its own, we see that it is not doing very well,” he adds. “Ordinary people trying to survive the madness of the world are much more interesting than superheroes. Of course it comes from the war stories I read as a child, where ordinary people manage without having any special powers.” A message of hope, in short: “I would not like to be too optimistic, but yes.”
