this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2025
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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.
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.