Miller vs. Millar vs. Ennis

lol otm

Delano's one-off return story about the monkey sticking a finger up Chas' bum was good though, and the Bad Blood mini about geriatric Constantine and regicide, drawn by Phil Bond, is enormous fun

I'm not the biggest fan of Ennis's Hellblazer, but I gotta agree with Ward that Delano's Moore-influenced purple prose in those early Hellblazer is hella grating. Because of that I've never managed to get past the first trade - does it get any better later on?

this is a hard poll, in that I have to decide if I'm weighing the highs of each, the lows of each, or trying some near-impossible averaging

Miller at least has Ronin and Elektra:Assassin to his credit.

Jesus, "Elektra: Assassin" is evidence for the prosecution. Or maybe I need to reread it.

does it get any better later on?

Obviously not a popular opinion, but Delano's Hellblazer is one of my favorite comic runs ever. And his dialogue is a good deal less purple than Moore on Swamp Thing.

ennis hellblazers = let's have a pint mate oh feck i've got the old cancer

OTM, but if he wanted to write that story, I wish he'd done his own thing and left Constantine out of it. Ennis and Ellis have both been guilty of hijacking existing characters as their mouthpieces by proxy. It's a really irritating tic.

Jesus, "Elektra: Assassin" is evidence for the prosecution. Or maybe I need to reread it.

Gotta agree with this too. Cool art, but it's an unreadable mess, or at least that's how I recall it (it's been 10+ years since I last read it).

I like E:A quite a bit! I need to dig out the floppies and reread.

Basically, I don't think any comic that's over 10 pages long should have narrative that's painful to follow because of the art style. Sienkiewicz's postmodern style might've been cool for comic book and album covers, but it was bad for storytelling.

I don't recall finding Kevitch's art difficult to follow at all.

Year One is still probably the best Batman comic ever

Jamie Delano severely underrated in some quarters. Still can't believe DC didn't collect/reprint 2020 Visions and he took it elsewhere to have that b&w version

Was World Without End ever collected? I quite liked that at the time but haven't read it in 20 years.

Doesn't look like it.

Disagree on ELEKTRA's art making it rough going. The first issue is rough going because it's fragmented flashback. After that, it's perfectly readable and damn fine.

Ennis and Ellis have both been guilty of hijacking existing characters as their mouthpieces by proxy. It's a really irritating tic.

still seems barmy, to me, to get irritated by diff ppl doing different things w/ corporately owned characters, and it's not as if there's some platonic ideal of constantine that all writers must adhere to forever after. if anything, yr ire shld be directed at the editors and publishers who 'allowed' these writers to make the characters their 'own' - but why not enjoy variety/different flavours? i mean, i love the englehart run on captain america - but i also love the kirby run straight after, which is 100% different in tone/execution etc, but just as great. corporate characters should always be the playthings of the talented.

ppl only get irritated when they dislike they way the writer does it

tbf sometimes they make characters have a better voice

Don't let Tuomas read that post Ward. He was all in a tizzy over some Wonder Woman stories he hasn't read because of that very thing.

The first issue is rough going because it's fragmented flashback. After that, it's perfectly readable and damn fine.

^^^

not sure what's so incomprehensible about it, it's not like every page is dense collage of random imagery or something. there are panels, they read from left to right iirc

still seems barmy, to me, to get irritated by diff ppl doing different things w/ corporately owned characters

That's not what I'm talking about at all. I'm complaining about the Ennis/Ellis schtick (at least back in the day...Ellis, at least, has gotten much better about this, afaict) of writing a central character who's a barely-disguised (and probably highly-idealized) version of themselves. Like, if you want to write an essay, write your own book. Don't shoehorn yourself into an established world and riff on off-topic bullshit. It's nagl. On the other hand, I don't have any problems when writers want to put a new spin on an established book or character, as long as it isn't just Aquaman being all, "HI I'M A HARDMAN ENNIS AVATAR AND HERE ARE MY AMAZING OPINIONS AND THE MUSIC I LIKE AND THE PUBS I DRINK AT IN IRELAND ME ME ME".

If Ellis wrote Aquaman he'd have a hook again and someone would call him Mr. Sliceyhands and there would be dolphinsex jokes and the villain would be some sort of thinly-veiled Jim Cameron who's doing something evil in the ocean's depths. Also, whiskey.

lol, I will grant you Mr Sliceyhands

The fact that cigarettes can't get wet is a guarantee that Ellis will never write Aquaman.

Like when he wrote a cross between Bruce Sterling and a scientist as Iron Man's best old dude friend

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Ennis' stuff can be a lot of fun, Millar's can be diverting enough, but the third choice is one of comic's all time great stylistic innovators.

Of course he hasn't been good for twenty years, but Miller at his peak is Galactus to the other two's Hawkeye.

^ this. i don't care how far he's fallen, he did great work once upon a time. he's still an extremely talented artist and designer. frankly, being able to draw is at least half the battle afaic.

he's still an extremely talented artist and designer.

not since the end of the DHP Sin City imo

frankly, being able to draw is at least half the battle afaic

being able to draw /= being able to cartoon panel-to-panel tho

Frank Miller was a pretty important artist in that he brought together so many different influences from Eisner, to manga and the darker european styled artists (like Jose Munoz although subpat from Argentina) together and the combination had a big impact on American comics and other mediums those comics influenced. I'd put him on a different level than Millar and Ennis, even if the guy's comic work has been pretty half hearted or seemingly tossed off for years. I don't think the writing is the main thing at all. It's kind of like "oh yeah, Willie Mays could steal bases too."

I still don't get Millar's popularity or greatness. I haven't really read anything by him yet that I thought was really a singular creation as he seems almost most known for just taking existing ideas and kind of perverting them or at least inversing them. That said, I haven't read the earlier DC or UK comics, so maybe those are the ones that got a bit of soul.

I like Garth Ennis quite a bit. He's done a ton of comics and some are not really that much there or are kind of juvenile, but even then they are still usually funny. Ennis definitely has things that interest him and when he writes in those areas, the guy puts it all out there. The guy is really good at war comics, it's just that's not going to pay the bills, so he does other things. There are alot of comics out there, but not a whole lot like Preacher. I can kind of get the differences on Hellblazer from Delano (and by that measure Moore), but to an extent, it seems that Ennis run was really the one that kind of cemented the popularity of the character (or at least that is how I read it).

I guess I should've mentioned that this poll is supposed to be about three as writers. Taking Miller's (undeniable) artistic contribution to American comics into account would be unfair to the other two, as they aren't artists... I just thought it'd be interesting to compare the three, as there are similar themes, as well as points of criticism, to their writing.

well NOW you tell us

That said, I haven't read the earlier DC or UK comics, so maybe those are the ones that got a bit of soul.

You should try Superman: Red Son, that's the probably the one comic by him that everybody likes.

His Superman Adventures stories are worth a go.

I forgot he did Red Son! It's definitely from his period of actually creating interesting work that wasn't trying to be "edgy"

I'm not convinced that there's any such division of his work into periods, in fairness - he was writing The Ultimates at the time, and the same year Red Son Came out, so did issue 1 of Wanted (probably the nadir of that side of his work?)

I don't know, I think that it was a transition over time, though.

RED SON, as word has it, had Grant Morrison on as an uncredited co-writer.

That said, his SUPERMAN ADVENTURES stories are pretty good.

Morrison claims that he was co-writing all of Millar's stuff to some extent for ages

Apart from the stuff they were co-writing, which they were taking turns writing?

From his Rolling Stone interview

When he got the Authority book, his star started to rise, and at that point, he felt he was in my shadow and he had to get out, and the way to get out was to do this fairly uncool split. It was quite hard, I felt, but he had to make his own way, and he was in denial that I'd been there, because I saw a lot of his work had been plotted or devised, even dialogue suggestions were done by me right up until the point of The Ultimates. It was seen by him as a dimunition of his position, even though it wasn't, I was quite proud of him as a mentor. He's done well without me, he has his own style, he does his own stuff. It was kind of that archetype, you get caught up in that story.

Red Son had been on the shelf for several years before it finally came out iirc.

(and I have a vaguer r that its non-publication might have been a big factor in driving him away from DC permanently)

Yeah, I'd heard that too. And as I recall, it was on the sort of the tail end of the whole ELSEWORLDS thing, which DC had slowed way down on in the early part of the 2000s.

It's certainly possible that it was part of a cash-in on Millar's name. Though my understanding of things was that Marvel had been courting Millar since the very start of him writing THE AUTHORITY and the ever-escalating insanity on the book was part of making him more marketable to Marvel.

I still wish that Morrison/Millar/Waid/Peyer(?) Supes team had happened

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Yeah, Peyer was the last leg in that. I suspect a lot of GM's contribution to that ended up in ALL-STAR, but still it would have been nice to have "the real" Superman go through those changes.

Morrison has said that All-Star was not the same ideas.

There was this from a couple years back
http://nypost.com/2012/10/10/ex-staffer-sues-dark-knight-comic-creator-girlfriend-for-hostile-work-environment/

Jesus, just one of things would be enough to cause me to quit, amongst other things

They probably had a poster of a cat hanging in there to counterbalance.

Jesus, Miller looks 87, not 57. I don't much care for the man and his work now, but that is a shocking decline in the six years since this picture was taken.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/99/FrankMillerSanDiego_crop.jpg

the implication of drug use explains a lot

I'm repulsed by a lot of his politics but I feel really bad for the guy