Hitman good

The wife was away for almost the whole weekend, so I spent the free time as wisely as possible – sitting around the house and reading Hitman comics by Ennis and McCrea.

I’ve only just completed the collection, after fuckin’ years of hunting down individual issues, but I’ve got the lot now and it has been extremely rewarding to read the entire series as it was meant to be told.

And it’s a bloody good comic, with a couple of moments where it becomes the best thing Garth Ennis has ever done. In keeping with recent tradition, here are some of them:

1. The way Tommy Monaghan never, ever tolerates a bully.

2. The size of the burgers at Bucket Burger.

3. “OH MY GOD, I TURNED MY ASS INTO A HAND GRENADE!”

4. Baytor’s ability to mix a mean drink.

5. “I’m American. What can I do to help?”

6. Tommy can’t kill Scarback the dinosaur.

7. That poor fat bloke in the burger joint.

8. The prayer spoken at the death of Tommy’s mother.

9. The bit where the elephant pisses on Tommy.

10. Carey on board the HMS Jervis Bay as the ship dies.

11. “So you live for tomorrow. Hoping there’ll be something better. Something more than death.”

12. The look on Pat’s face when Tommy introduces Natt as his best friend.

13. Hacken unnecessarily taking his own hand off during the Zombie Night at the Gotham Aquarium.

14. Bueno Excellente! He fights evil with the power of perversion!

15. Sixpack does what superheroes do, leaving behind his little hat and the quiet dignity of Sidney Speck.

16. “Tell you what I think it is. You think you’re the main event, right? You think your life’s the big story. But then you bump into somebody who’s really got it together, somebody serious – an’ it turns out you’re no more’n a chapter in their story, you know what I mean? It shows you just how small you are.”

17. Green Lantern not buying a drink.

18. The SAS team running into the Iraqi soldier in the desert.

19. The reluctant honour of Lieutenant Connolly and his hard-bitten commitment to squaring a debt.

20. “You gonna die alone?” impressions in the annual.

21. Vampire skulls nailed to a sign telling people to be nice.

22. The beautiful incompetence of the Injun Peak research facility.

23. The cat signal.

24. “You ain’t any kinda dog.”

25. The fact that Hacken makes it.

26. Tommy going back for Natt at the end.

27. Tommy’s little memorial on the moon at the end of the JLA story.