this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2025
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The comics sucked, the show is a big improvement
Eh, I'm not talking about the quality of the show or comics.
Ennis is pretty well known for having neat ideas and then pissing all over them with hack dialogue and over doing shock scenes. So it wouldn't be hard at all to improve that kind of stuff. And the show had incredible production value, with vastly improved dialogue overall.
But one of the things that way too many adaptations get wrong is fucking with the characters. Butcher, his whole story is his drive to fuck every super in the ass (metaphorically) because of what happened to his wife.
Then, they undid that entire idea at the end of the first season, but kept trying to make Butcher the same guy, with the same behaviors. That's a complete failure to make use of the best parts of what Ennis wrote. The characters, and the core ideas, that's what Ennis is good at.
They had already kinda shifted Huey a good bit via making him american, but they kept his motivation, the core of him. Then they just said "fuck it" and basically mangled Butcher's entire arc.
Like, why bother paying for the rights if you're not going to use the good parts of it?
Same thing happened with Preacher. They dumped a ton of money and time into making a slick, well crafted show, but completely undid the characters motivations and personalities in a single scene.
Ennis may be a hack, but fuck, just do something original if you aren't going to really adapt what matters most.
Devil's advocate: it's a good thing to change things up a bit in an adaptation, both to keep old fans on their toes and maybe come up with new ideas and interpretations.
I had a similar reaction to the s1 ending but I was going to give them the benefit of the doubt that they have some idea of how to work with this.
My big issue came a bit later, when they had Homelander kill Stillwell. To me the main point of the comics was that all the capes were ultimately a non-issue, a theatre. Stilwell was THE most dangerous, evil and scary character, personifying Vogue.
And they replaced him (her, I guess) basically with some comic relief idiots afterwards.
I'm actually okay with changes, when they don't mess up the "spirit" of the characters, and don't totally blow apart a plot
But, yeah, Stillwell, that's such a horrible choice to kill him off at all, much less that way. I had quit watching, but you pick up bits and pieces anyway, and hearing that had made me glad I had already stopped
Man I read those Comics they were garbage. Even pretending that the characters had depth to them in the comics is absurd. The show added so much more depth and interesting aspects to the characters than those stupid Comics did. They were legit bad. The only good part in the comic was the overall world. The show added everything that's special about the concept.
I don't think they are suggesting Butcher had depth. Just that they think the core of the characters and what made them interesting was changed needlessly.
By the way, I also loved the show Preacher and I'm glad they changed it from the comics. But I also understand being upset by it. Sometimes I want adaptations to get the core of the characters right and sometimes I'm totally fine with a more inspired interpretation of a story that I like.
But there was nothing interesting about the characters of the comic is my point. Depth is what makes characters interesting. The show adds literally everything you think is interesting about that story and those characters. I mean really I don't know if you've never read it but those comics are absurd. Butcher and his boys are basically Garth Ennis projecting how much he hates superheroes on to comic book pages. It's just him thinking how awesome it is to murder Comic Book Heroes. That's it there's no depth of character there's nothing interesting there. It's a bad comic.
Which is not the point.
The point is that they wasted money on the source material when they could have just done their own thing instead.
Yeah there's a lot of times that sentiment is true. This is not one of those times. This isn't someone taking a story and bastardizing it to make a different story. This is people with creative ability taking a story that's like an inch deep and adding everything to it. It's not that they're telling a different story, it's that they're telling the story that Garth Ennis should have told if he wasn't as shit writer.
Like I said there's only one interesting thing about the comics and that's the general concept. The overall world. So that's what they're really using when they bought that rights to it, the only worthwhile part of it. Even then they added a lot of the depth to that too.
I mean, you're welcome to that opinion, but it still isn't the same thing I'm talking about because what I'm saying is that it doesn't matter how good or bad either version is at all.
See, when a production company buys or options an IP, they aren't doing it blind. They're partially paying for the established fan base.
Once you step far enough away from what made those people fans in the first place, again regardless of quality, the less value that IP still has because it isn't the same thing at all.
I get it, you don't like Ennis as a writer at all, no big. I think he's kinda mid overall, an idea man with meh to poor execution over the run of most of his arcs. He's bad at taking established characters and writing them, but his own are consistent. Yes, consistently hammy and overwrought, but that's actually harder than it seems.
But, again, that has nothing to do with the concept of adapting an established property and scrubbing it being shitty. Doesn't matter how well you do it, it's a waste.
Those writers for the show could have come up with some kind of show on their own instead of being given the sorry job of retreading someone else's work. It doesn't matter if the end result was fight club or queen of the damned, once you start abandoning core pieces of the work, you're wasting resources, and insulting the people you're counting on to be your initial audience.
It's like the live action disney shit. The same time, effort, and money could have gone into something original. But, in this case, the production company started with something they didn't already own.
You keep saying that it's beside the point. It's not. I get your point. It's not an overly novel argument. I've made the exact same argument multiple times. It's a very commonly made argument. I get it. 100%. Nothing about what you're saying is a mystery to me whatsoever.
What I'm saying is it doesn't apply to this scenario. This is not people taking an IP and pushing Their Own Story into it. This is people taking an IP and expanding it to degree to which the incompetent original author wasn't capable of. It's in no way like live action Disney at all. Not even remotely. They put so much more effort and Care into this story then the original author ever did. Than he's ever capable of. This is creative people taking a concept and fulfilling it. They're not scrubbing the work they're finishing it. Do you see what I'm saying?
To put it in comic terms, all Garth Ennis did was the rough sketch. Not even the draft before it's colored, but the very first roughest sketch available. The show did everything else. The story the show tells for the most part is there in his book, almost all of the story elements the show tells originate in the book, he just never bothered to fulfill it or expand upon it. Or even considered it at all really. Because he's a cringe-worthy loser who didn't actually want to write anything meaningful or impactful.