Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson's series The Boys was doing rather well for DC, but the book has still been cancelled over content issues.  Amusingly, DC apparently objected more strongly to the book's treatment of superheroes than to its graphic sex and violence.  Anal hamster jokes are fine, it seems, but mock the Teen Titans and you can pack your bags.

Fortunately, The Boys is a creator-owned book, and Ennis and Robertson now find themselves free to shop it around to other publishers - well, other publishers not named Marvel, at least.  There are a number of credible destinations, but one possible destination would be Avatar.  The plucky little indie has carved out a curious niche in the market over the last decade.  They do licensed books like Stargate.  They do dreary soft porn like (dear lord, is this a real book?) Jungle Fantasy.  And they do pet projects from creators like Garth Ennis, Mark Millar and Warren Ellis which the major publishers wouldn't touch - usually on rather more conventional content ground.

By a happy coincidence, one such project is Ennis' six-issue miniseries Chronicles of Wormwood, which starts this week.  In fact, if anything this is a lot less puerile than The Boys, and yet it would be easier to understand DC turning it down.  It's a series about Danny Wormwood, who is the Antichrist.

As the Antichrist, however, Danny is incarnated in human form and doesn't seem to have much interest in the whole world-ending business.  Instead, while he's a bit of a bastard on a personal level, he's basically just going about his business in a relatively harmless way.  He runs a thinly disguised HBO and commissions shows apparently because he genuinely likes them.  He regards Jesus - tragically sidelined after a firm thwack to the head from the riot cops during an anti-war protest - as a friend.  Although selfish and cynical, he seems to have no villainous agenda at all, and genuinely disapproves of the truly gratuitous, supposedly issue-oriented controversy-baiting shows made by his main rival.  ("Like that one about juvie last year, where you confronted quite a startling amount of anal rape?")

In short, while Danny is the Antichrist, he's not actually doing the job.  Dad is not happy.  And therein lies the plot.

Frankly, this is a lot better than The Boys, which degenerated into a fairly puerile and mean-spirited assault on a barn door target.  This series actually feels like it's got a story and a point.  I know which one I'd rather read.

He's joined here by Jacen Burrows, easily Avatar's most respected house artist, perhaps because he actually draws people and stories rather than tits and thongs.  Now, he's not perfect by any means - read the TV interview scene in this book and watch the chairs teleport around the room - but he's certainly got something.  Wormwood reads like something that would be ideally suited to Ennis' regular collaborator Steve Dillon, and Burrows has some of the same instincts for subtle expressions and body language.

Now, it's easy to see why DC wouldn't touch this thing with a bargepole.  It's not actually violent in the slightest.  It's only marginally more sexually explicit than Vertigo books tend to be.  It's got casual use of controversial language, but in a satirically defensible context.  And it's got a sympathetic Antichrist who's mates with Brain Damaged Jesus. 

I see that last bit as a dealbreaker for DC.

Books like this will always end up with the minor publishers, but at least there's still an avenue for them to see the light of day.  Surprisingly, when you consider the sort of material Avatar regularly produce, and the sort of thing Ennis has been writing recently, this turn out not to be the gratuitous controversy-fest you might be expecting.

Rating: A-

back | continue