Newsgroup: it.cultura.horror
Titolo: [INTERVISTA] Garth Ennis

Continuo a postare cose di dubbio interesse per la maggioranza degli
ICHers:-)
Questa è un’intervista a Garth Ennis, l’autore di "Preacher", "Unknow
soldier" ecc.
The Wizard Q&A: Garth Ennis
From the perverse Preacher to the superheroic WildC.A.T.s, offbeat
writer
Garth Ennis continues to shock readers.
By Tom Russo
In writer Garth Ennis' monthly Vertigo comics mindscrew Preacher,
protagonist Jesse Custer finds a guardian angel in, of all people, John
Wayne. Possessed by a mysterious entity that's equal parts good and
evil,
Jesse wends his way through a devilishly twisted world, looking for God,
looking for answers-and looking over his shoulder for a moral boost from
the
Duke whenever it all gets to be too much.
Ennis, you'd like to think, must be similarly inspired. How else could
he
possibly capture the spirit of the legendary West so romantically, so
vividly-while sitting at a keyboard in Northern Ireland, no less? Of
course
Preacher is also raucously over the top in its (man) handling of
violence
and sex, it makes the wild, wild West look like a Girl Scout jamboree by
comparison.
Not that this is exactly news to longtime readers of DC's Hellblazer,
where
Ennis, 26, first made his mark on American comics with a 43-issue run
that
began in 1991. Born in Belfast and raised in the nearby suburb of
Holywood-
"with one l"- Ennis had been plying the comics trade ever since he was
19,
when he dropped out of a local university after just three months.
Hellblazer, though, opened new doors: Within a couple of years DC had
him
writing The Demon, and he soon moved into the creator owned area when
the
company's Vertigo imprint greenlighted Preacher. More recently, Ennis
launched the Demon-spawned superhero title Hitman, about a Gotham city
assassin who gained X-ray vision and telepathic powers when attacked by
alien parasites in The Demon Annual #2, part on 1993's bloodlines
crossover.
Wizard recently zipped across the Atlantic (through the magic of
long-distance fiber-optics, anyway) to peer inside Ennis' head. Of
course,
with that great Irush brouge of his, his voice has a tendency to rise
when
he wraps up his sentences, almost as though he's tacking on a question
mark
at the end. What you get, then, is a sense that rather than explaining
to
you where all his fantastically demented ideas spring from, he's asking
you.
Well, hell, Garth, we don't know-you tell us. Here, he does.
WIZARD: Call us impulsive, but we've got to know right up front: Where
did
the Preacher character Arseface come from?
GARTH ENNIS: Ah, Arseface. I suppose he grew out of the worrying
tendency
that a lot of impressionable young people have to follow their heroes
into
suicide, which is the crappiest, most unimaginative thing I think you
can
possibly do. If you're going to kill yourself because you've got
inoperable
cancer and you're in an enormous amount of pain, then it's more than
understandable. If, on the other hand, it's because daddy won't give you
the
keys to the car that night, and life is just so unfair and some
miserable
bloody singer who hasn't discovered soap is telling you that suicide is
a
good idea- and then you go and get a bottle of sleeping pills- then, to
be
honest, I'm not terribly impressed. But the nice thing about Arseface is
that he's been traumatized into being probably the most positive
character
in the book. He's decent, kind, thoughtful- probably the boy that all
the
girls would want to bring home to introduce to their mothers. If it
wasn't
for the fact that his face looks like an arse.
What are some of the things that just won't fly with DC?
Well, any level of violence seems to be okay. I haven't yet found
anything
that they'll draw back from. But when it comes to portraying sex, you
have
to be very careful. And actually, with Preacher and a lot of Vertigo
books I
get the feeling that we're getting away with stuff [the ownership] is
unaware of.
Why do you think it is that Preacher, more so than Hellblazer, is the
book
that really put you, artist Steve Dillon and cover artist Glenn Fabry in
the
spotlight?
Preacher just seems to have caught people's imagination and touched on a
lot
of what's hip at the minute. The extreme nature of the material, the
sense
that anything can happen anytime, the dark humor- all that has been
popular
in the past two or three years. With Hellblazer, really, we were just
another team on the book. Our work seems to have gone over well with a
lot
of people, but there had been people writing and drawing Constantine
before,
and there would be afterward.
How do you respond to readers who get on you for all the violence in
Preacher, or the way you deal with religion in the book?
Well, we haven't had too much trouble. There have been a couple of cases
where people kicked up a bit of a fuss, but people who don't like the
book
tend to drop it pretty quickly. And for those that are worried that
Preacher
has some kind of effect on its supposedly gullible readership, well, I
clearly don't agree with that kind of thinking at all. If the book
affected
behavior, we would now have 50,000 more lunatics in the world running
around
killing people and shooting each other's faces off and doing dreadful
things- and we quite plainly don't. I'm a great believer in the idea
that
anyone who goes nuts does so because of their own upbringing and
environment, not because of something they read.
Have you taken any heat at all from organized religious groups?
No, and I'm very much hoping we don't, because that is were we could run
into trouble. You know what evangelists and people like that are like-
they're the sort who tend to sink their teeth in and not let go. That
could
be the kind of situation where we really find out what DC and Vertigo's
commitment is to this kind of material, how far they're prepared to
support
us. I've got my fingers crossed on that one.
You said in Preacher's letter column that while you have put Tulip
through
the wringer, as a general rule, you recoil from depicting violence
against
women in your stories.
Pretty much. I'm not about to turn around and tell other people that
they
can't portray that; its just something I find unpleasant, and therefore
tend
to avoid. It's funny that you mention the letter column, though, because
I
probably get censored more there than anywhere else in the book. I'm
told
that because the column is seen as the voice of the company, the
"official
line"- even though I'm the one actually writing it- I have to be more
careful there. So for instance, there was going to be a letter column
competition once where, to win a script, you had to come up with a
method of
self-crucifixion. You know, how do you get that third nail in, that kind
of
thing. But they were worried that people would go out and try it.
[Laughs]
So I came up with the idea of, "Complete the following sentence in no
more
than 20 words: I want to have sex with Mother Theresa because..." And
they
nixed that as well . A friend of mine said, maybe they were worried that
people would go out and try that too. [Laughs] So that became the "I
want to
have sex with Arseface because..." competition, which was a roaring
success.
With the characterization skills you've got, you could probably work in
any
medium you want. Why comics?
Back when I started this seven years ago, I was at Queen's University in
Belfast having a miserable time. but I couldn't for the life of me
imagine
how to get out of there, get a job and support myself. I had always
wanted
to be a writer, but journalism was quite clearly too tough for me to get
into just starting from scratch. And I didn't want to do some
nine-to-five
grind. So I submitted a story proposal about the troubles in Northern
Ireland for a British political comic called Crisis, and they picked up
on
it. I'd always read 2000 A.D. as a kid, but I knew nothing about
American
comics. Then I started reading things like V for Vendetta, The Dark
Knight
Returns, Elektra and Concrete, and that's when I saw that publishers
were
taking advantage of comics as a medium, realizing that you can tell any
kind
of story with comics, just as you can with any other medium. And that's
how
I ended up writing comics. As for the screenplays and things like that,
yeah, I'd like to have a go at it, but I suppose I'll wait until I'm
asked.
Does being Irish color the work you do? That leprechaun-stomping scene
in
Medieval Spawn/Witchblade was tough to miss...
I've wanted to show something like that for a long time- little
bastards!
[Laughs] But yeah, I think it does inevitably. Growing up in Northern
Ireland, you're subjected to two political and national cultures:
British
and Irish. There are things I like in both, there are things I think in
both
that are quite shameful. British history has a lot of rather dark
corners.
Ireland's inability to escape the influence of the Catholic Church is
not
something I'm terribly impressed by either. But as I say, coming from
Ireland, it's impossible to avoid these influences. So the idea of
Irishness, of an Irish identity, is something I don't struggle too
strongly
to get away from. Take Cassidy, for instance, I just like the idea of an
Irish vampire, a guy who, as we'll se in issues #25 and #26 of Preacher,
was
actually turned into a vampire during the Irish Republican Easter
uprising
in Dublin in 1916. I thought that would be interesting because there's a
whole lot of Irish Republican history that can be tapped into that way.
And
there's that whole hedonistic, eternal partygoer element to Cassidy's
character, which I don't think anyone would deny has always been a
strong
part of Irish identity.
You've got a Hellblazer one-shot called Heartland scheduled for early
next
year. Why did you leave the book in the first place, and what brought
you
back?
I left Hellblazer because it was just time to go. I'd said everything
I'd
wanted to say with that character at that point. I think that with a
book as
good as that, when you're just turning it out for the money, that's
doing
the character and the book a real disservice. But I always thought there
was
more to tell about Constantine's ex-girlfriend, Kit, who left him at the
end
of my run on the book with Steve [Dillon]. I wrote Heartland two years
ago,
and it's really just her story. No John Constantine, no magic, no
horror.
It's just her trying to survive on her own, and the troubles she has
with
her family- a contemporary story of everyday Belfast folk. As for going
back
to Hellblazer, well, yeah, he's a character that I would always be
comfortable writing. I can't think of another, certainly in terms of
company-owned characters, that I would prefer.
Why is that?
He's morally adaptable, and then some. He doesn't have some sort of
preconceived code that he feels he has to live by- not like someone like
Batman. Constantine reminds me of people I know, and sometimes of
myself. He
acts the way real people act. He can never be counted on to do what's
predictable.
You've said Preacher has nothing to do with Hellblazer- and yet Genesis,
the
angelic/demonic entity that gives Jesse his powers, appears to have
roots
tracing directly back to Hellblazer.
Lots of people seem to think that. Because I once did I storyline about
an
angel and a demon having a love affair in Hellblazer, and their child
was
never seen, people assumed that Genesis must be the same character. It's
not. There's no link other than me wanting to go back an reuse a old
idea.
It was just one of those backburner ideas where you think, "Well, I must
either go back and sort that out someday or use it someday else."
Your work on The Demon seemed to be more humor-driven and slightly less
Ennis-brand violent. Was that something very deliberate on your part?
I think the humorous tone of the book had already been set by [previous
Demon writer] Alan Grant. I enjoyed a lot of the stuff Alan had written,
so
I certainly had no problem continuing in that same vein. And once it
became
obvious that the sales figures on the thing were going down the toilet,
[artist] John McCrea and I were just sort of told, "All right, lads, go
as
mad as you want." And that's why the whole thing turned into that last
fourteen issue story, which was just this madcap parody of every war
movie
you've ever seen. We had so much fun on that because, really, there was
no
one saying no to us. There was one thing we couldn't get off with,
though:
We had one demon called Baytor, and at the end of the book, he became
king
of Hell. So there was a scene where all the demons gathered around him
and
screamed, "All hail the master Baytor!" Practically at the last minute,
someone realized this and pulled it. But I had a lot of fun on The
Demon,
definitely. And the nicest thing about it was that we were able to bring
Hitman out of it, and that seems to be going well for us now.
Particularly with your long run on Hellblazer, it seems like staying
committed to a book is something that is important to you.
It depends on the book. The Demon, in retrospect, probably finished
roundabout when I had used up my ideas on it. But with Hellblazer, I
liked
the idea of building up this long, three-and-a-half year storyline with
all
these interlinking characters and themes and plot ideas. I think you get
a
nice sense of a major story and a real turning point in a character's
life
when you approach a book that way. Preacher takes this to an even
greater
extreme. This is a six or seven year story I'm going to tell.
Any characters that you've really got an urge to take a shot at and just
go
crazy? You made a half-joking plea for Sgt. Rock in the lettercol...
If the Unknown Soldier and Enemy Ace books that I'm doing at DC work out
okay, then Sgt Rock is looking like a genuine possibility. I love war
stories. British war comics were a large part of what I grew up reading,
and
these characters remind me of those books. I also wouldn't mind a crack
at
Aliens or Star Wars. Preadator would be fun- I'm talking to people at
Wildstorm about doing a WetWorks/Preadator crossover, although that's
for
some time down the line. And I have a vague urge to do Superman. I do
have a
fairly strong antipathy for superheroes, but he is the one, true
original,
and the whole "truth, justice, and the American way" thing is something
that
I find myself responding to, that even my cynicism can't overcome. So
maybe
one day.
After all this, we'd be remiss not to ask: What's your religious
background?
I'm an atheist, really. But everyone seems to think I'm some terrible
lapsed
Catholic who suffered the worst of a Catholic upbringing and had the
crap
kicked out of him by nuns and monks. In actual fact, I'm not a Catholic,
and
I've never had any kind of direct religious upbringing at all, although
I
was exposed to the inevitable religious influences that growing up in
Ireland will give you. And slightly more directly, my school had what
was
known as the Scripture Union or Christian Union, which young people were
very encouraged to join. They weren't too overt about it, but the kind
of
insidious propaganda they employed used to, quite frankly, annoy the
piss
out of me. But I've always been interested in the history of
Christianity
and its effect on the world, and more generally speaking, in the idea of
faith and of someone giving control over his destiny to what he sees as
a
higher power. These things have always fascinated just me and they're
bound
to show up in my work again and again. [Laughing] Negatively.
Ciao
Tommaso
-- 
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