Written by Garth Ennis
Illustrated by Marcos Marz and Kewber BaalGarth Ennis’ newest creation continues with Jennifer Blood #4. Jennifer Blood is a suburban wife and mom by day, and a ruthless vigilante by night! This issue…enter the Three Ninjettes!
After a months-long absence, Garth Ennis’s other book from Dynamite resurfaces. More on whether or not you should care after the jump.
Here’s the pitch for Jennifer Blood: a suburban housewife living in idyllic domestic bliss is, by night, a murderous Mafia-hunting vigilante. The writer of this series is one Garth Ennis, and it’s only fair to wonder if the whole enterprise came about when, stuck for inspiration one day on a Punisher script, he thought: “Christ, this would be much easier if he was a Stepford Wife.” When the series debuted last year, it was drawn by Adriano Batista, who previously drew Frank Cho and Doug Murray’s Jungle Girl for Dynamite. Midway through issue three, he was replaced by Marcos Marz, and then the title disappeared for a couple months. Now, it’s back, with Marz doing most of an issue, and the plot continuing apace.
The gap between issues three and four led me to forget for a minute that the entire first arc of Jennifer Blood — wherein she kills the entire leadership hierarchy of a Mafia faction — takes place in the space of a week. (Issue four is Thursday.) What happens past that week is only partly Ennis’s problem, as Rob Williams takes the wheel with issue seven. The knowledge that Ennis is only fully writing that initial arc takes a bit of the air out of things: if Jennifer Blood‘s plan is to go awry, then it needs to both go awry and be reasonably resolved within two issues. (No doubt, the best-laid plans will fall prey to a neighbor’s terminal horniness.) Ennis is an old-school 2000 AD craftsman — efficiency of plot their specialty — but at the rate things are going, I’m not sure. There’s a certain thinness to Jennifer Blood that makes it particularly hard to engage with.
Where this “thinness” comes from has a lot to do with how Jennifer Blood stands among the rest of Ennis’s output. It undoubtedly falls within Ennis’s second-favorite genre: the competent, bold, and bastardly exacting brutal vigilante punishment upon the weak, stupid, and evil. (Consider Ennis villains: throughout his career, his heroes’ primary foils have been the incompetent and cowardly. Nearly always, this comes with a side of sexual deviance that varies to the degree of their relative evil. Steve, the relatively minor Mafioso in Jennifer Blood #2, pulls up on women’s noses and makes them oink like pigs during sex. Herr Starr, ultravillain of Preacher, gets a taxidermied swordfish poked up into his ass. Et cetera.) Not only has Ennis more or less mined this theme to death (including within his first-favorite genre, war stories), he’s actively doing it on another, longer-term project currently being published. Jennifer Blood doesn’t compete: his heart isn’t as obviously invested in it as it was with Punisher or is with Battlefields; the characters aren’t as cartoonish, the jokes aren’t as offensive, and neither are as memorable as within The Boys; the violence doesn’t even compare with Crossed.
The beauty of comics is that when illustration and text coexist, the deficiencies of one can be made up for by the other. Marcos Marz doesn’t live up to that necessity here. Before Jennifer Blood, he’s only ever crossed my radar as a DC fill-in guy; his highest-profile gig is probably co-illustrating the Blackest Night: JSA series with Eddy Barrows. In his DC work, Marz’s work had atmosphere. Here, it’s like the oxygen is curiously absent. Elongated, anatomically inconsistent bodies strike stiff, right-angled poses that make the whole enterprise look like a world of action figures (although for what it’s worth, Marwencol seems like the sort of thing Garth Ennis could have invented). Things look better in the last few pages, illustrated by Kewber Baal — things like shadows and facial expressions come back into play, and the overall tone of the artwork becomes more consistent with the rough-edged, full-bodied style that Batista brought to the first couple issues.
Continued belowMy problem with Marz’s art compounded my problem with the series in general: it lacks presence. The Boys may have one joke in its arsenal — “superheroes, they’re just like us, only mentally disabled, morally deficient, and astonishingly perverted” — but it knows how to tell it loudly and with panache. Jennifer Blood is a more muted story about a relatively more muted topic (as far as murdering scumbags goes), and its eccentricities are similarly small in scale. Jennifer tranquilizes her family to keep them from waking up while she’s out on her missions and debates the usefulness of stimulants in keeping her war campaign going at full steam. A team of schoolgirl-ninja assassins plays up the Gogo Yubari Hello Kitty schtick for their clients, then debates the racism of their kunoichi-minstrelsy in private. Jennifer’s recurring foe is a horny neighbor who puts The Situation to shame in terms of giving off musclebound-rapist vibes. It’s all very… cute, to be frank. Cute, and not particularly cutting. This is Sitcom Garth Ennis, with Jennifer playing faintly annoyed straight woman to it all — but the straight woman bit only works when there’s appropriately wacky stuff to react to. Otherwise it’s just called being bland.
By virtue of both his long career and the consistency of his themes, Ennis is more easily plugged into auteur theory than most comic book artists. The continuum of his work can be seen as one long development, a lifelong project of refining a couple ideas. Even the loftiest of auteurs had the occasional blip, though, and that seems to be the case with Jennifer Blood. Rather than pushing his pet themes forward, he lets them relax and putter around a bit. While his expertise is such that the Ennis faithful will find things to like, this is a minor work in his canon, and barring a sudden seismic shift in the last two issues, so it shall remain.
Final Verdict: 5 / Let’s hope Baal stays on the art, seriously
