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Saturday 13 January 2018

Hitman, Volume 2: Ten Thousand Bullets Review (Garth Ennis, John McCrea)


I read the first Hitman book a few years ago and didn’t like it much but decided to revisit it and give it another shot - maybe I initially read it wrong/wasn’t in the right frame of mind? After all, it’s Garth Ennis writing a character who’s essentially DC’s Punisher and Ennis’ Punisher was fracking awesome! But no, I was right the first time: Hitman is complete drivel! 

In Volume 2: Ten Thousand Bullets a mob boss wants Tommy dead so hires a hotshot assassin to take him out - no prizes for guessing whether he does or not. There’s an overlong one-shot where Tommy and his boring buddies sit in a bar and share boring war stories, and then the book closes out with a derivative story of Tommy going to save some one horse town being terrorised by gangsters. 

Ennis’ writing is flat and uninteresting, the jokes aren’t funny, the stories are uninspired and generic, full of predictable cliches and are as dull as dull can be to read. I hated John McCrea’s shitty art which was hard to look at and annoying in how the characters changed proportions from one page to the next. I usually enjoy Carlos Ezquerra’s art but unfortunately here he’s modified his style to match McCrea’s so it too ends up looking like crap on a stick. 

It’s stunning how Ennis went from this to the high quality of The Punisher in just a few short years. Hitman is a dated, amateurish and utter snore of a comic while his Punisher run was the polar opposite. I recommend checking that out over this garbage nothing. I said it about the first book but it applies to the second as well: Hitman is shit, man!

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