I came across this “100 Issues Ago” panel in an old JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA and thought I’d tidy it up and re-purpose it. If one month = one issue, what was I reading 100 Issues Ago?
Ahh, THE BOYS, Garth Ennis’s take on the superhero genre filled with hate and contempt for the subject material.
As much as I like superheroes and can happily suspend disbelief while reading them, I’m also happy to read this vicious skewering of the whole thing. When I saw this cover in my list of November 2010 titles, I had to include it!
Can’t wait to see what the new TV series does with this.
Crisis on Earth-Prime 
I could never get into The Boys. I prefer gentle lampooning when it comes to making fun of superhero comics (more like Dwayne McDuffie’s Damage Control). Where you can tell they actually like the things they make fun of. With Ennis, I’m just left wondering why the hell he writes superheroes if he hates them so damn much. It’d be like me writing a musical.
As for me, a lot of flux that month. Boom’s Darkwing Duck series (which was pretty good until the last few issues). Secret Six, the Steph Brown Batgirl book. I started buying Tony Bedard’s run on REBELS (because I’d enjoyed his work on Exiles a few years earlier). There was a Batman Beyond mini-series wrapping up. Oh, and I bought a one-shot called Nightmaster: Monsters of Rock. I remember it being, OK?
At Marvel, it was mostly mini-series. I tried Ant-Man and the Wasp’s first issue, didn’t keep buying it. There was the first issue of a She-Hulks mini-series, that wound up being pretty good. Thanos Imperative ended with a thud (Abnett and Lanning couldn’t stick the landing). Avengers and the Infinity Gauntlet ended that month. Hawkeye and Mockingbird got canceled at 6 issues.
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I’m with you on the musical side of things – to this day I’ve still not seen Grease, Les Mis or any of the other big musicals. If someone starts singing when they could be using dialogue, I’m out.
Aside from THE BOYS, Ennis actually hasn’t done a great deal of superhero stuff. THE DEMON and HITMAN had guest stars every now and then, but were pretty much self-contained humour/horror/crime stories; his PUNISHER run under Marvel Knights was much the same, while the 2004 onwards series was straight crime; his BATTLEFIELDS stories are war, and he’s done a ton of horror (PREACHER, CHRONICLES OF WORMWOOD, and the excellent A WALK THROUGH HELL.)
While he definitely poked fun at superheroes in several of his titles – Green Lantern not being able to buy a beer in HITMAN for example – it was really only THE BOYS that he had a go at the whole genre.
And yeah, SECRET SIX – I still miss that series.
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I get he’s not a big fan of superheroes and all, but I don’t get his obsession with constantly bashing them all the time. Just don’t write about them then.
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