Deciding on the best Ennis

The ongoing mission to put more of my comics into storage hit a significant bump last week, when I slammed straight into the Ennis comics, and I had to decide how much Garth I needed for the next couple of years. 

I've been reading Ennis comics since he was a goddamn teenager, and have a sizable chunk of his output. And I'm obviously keeping the best close by, because I never know when I want to Hitman, or feel the nostalgic burn of the Preacher, or even take a glimpse at the bottomless void inside the human soul that is his Punisher Max comics.

But I've also grown an unnerving fondness for the most unloved of his comics, the dopiest shit he writes, and I don't know how much of that is going into storage. I never know when I might need A Train Called Love or Dicks.

These comics never seem to get much love, but there is always something appealing to me about the stories that embrace the dumbest sense of humour, like Ennis clearly relishes doing. His dopey comics are almost always punching up, while occasionally slapping sideways, and sometimes lean so heavily into ironic stereotypes that they come out the other side, but I dunno. He still makes me laugh.. 

Dicks is still the most puerile, silly and offensive he's ever done, and yeah, that's the point of the whole thing. If you're going to have a wanker, it might as well be the biggest wanker in the whole world.

It's been there since the start. The man himself might vigorously denounce Time Flight, but the bit in the first episode where the Nazi guard blurts out 'When Will I Be Famous', and then goes straight faced stone dead, that shit still cracks me up.

I still like his mean and moody War Stories - the 'come fight a gurkha!' part in his recent Lion And The Eagle series was as good as anything he's ever written - but maybe I need more dumb humour in my life, not less. Maybe I shouldn't be locking away those laffs into storage.