This book collects the first six issues of the on-going series written by Garth Ennis - who has written such series as The Punisher, The Authority: Kev and Chronicles of Wormwood amongst many others. He has been a long time favourite writer of mine most notably for one of the best runs on Hellblazer and his own Preacher series for Vertigo. He is not to everyone’s taste – he populates his books with sexist, misogynist characters and his storylines are often filled with extreme foul language, extreme sexual situations and graphic violence but also with a wicked black humour – quite often all at the same time. His co-creator on this series is the artist Darick Robertson who is best known to me as the artist on the Transmetropolitan series.
The book explores similar themes to the classic Marshal Law – in a world where superheroes run riot, with no regard to public safety, who can bring them to account for their actions. At the start of the book Hugh Campbell has his girlfriend killed in front of his eyes as a super-battle spills into a fair in Glasgow. He is recruited into a reactivated covert CIA unit whose remit is to gather intel on the 200,000 super powered individuals active in the world and keep them in check when necessary – by fair means or foul (though mostly foul). This first book introduces to this team, some of the superheroes and the first recon mission on a superhero team called Teenage Kix.
As this is an on-going series, the end of the book, although coming to the end of a storyline, just left me wanting more. All the trademark Ennis touches are here and if you liked the work he did on Preacher, the Punisher and Chronicles of Wormwood then you will probably love this. If you have never come across any of his work before (and why not?) then be warned that, as mentioned above, the situations portrayed are extreme but very funny. I will definitely be looking forward to reading more.
First published on RevolutionSF on Monday Dec 20, 2010
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