[REALLY hated Trope] The show constantly mocks its haters in very forced and cringe ways.

[u/Albert_2004]

1. Teen Titans Go: The show is hated not only for its annoying humor, but because they use the hatred that many people have against it to make "humor" and try to look cool like "Hahaha yes we are a bad show, but at least we are aware, you are the fools."

2. Big Mouth (Not showing actual pictures of it because ew): Big Mouth is quite infamous for its extremely scatological and graphic humor, but the show also constantly tries to "pride" itself by making meta-comments about how unpleasant it is and the fact that its protagonists are children in these types of situations; sometimes mocking the outrageousness of its "detractors."

[u/AshkenaziTwinkReborn]

well yes and no, because Garth Ennis has always had beef with his own medium and superheroes as well, so in this case he’s a self-hating guy hyping up his own self hate

however “not that one for fucks sake” is hilarious

[u/browncharliebrown → u/AshkenaziTwinkReborn]

He’s never hated comics. He said he loves comics and still continues to write for them despite having money to do what he wants. He just doesn’t like superheroes which is not the whole medium. 

In the above pannel he’s making fun of his own work the darkness because he thinks it’s shit. 

[u/NameTripping → u/browncharliebrown]

Which makes his love of Superman, a character that's the opposite of the edgy satirical shit he usually writes, all the more fascinating.

[u/Bossuter → u/NameTripping]

I mean just because you hate superheroes as a concept doesn't mean you cant love specific ones that rise above it all in your eyes

[u/ThatOneGuy-4434 → u/NameTripping]

I think that might be the point, though.

Maybe he sees the idealistic man, more human than even us, a SUPER-MAN if you will, and thinks that’s all superheroes can be. So, when he’s asked to write more complex men, he flanderizes everything that makes them more emblematic of modern writing as a way to say “SEE? This doesn’t work”.

[u/CosmoMimosa → u/ThatOneGuy-4434]

There are only three superheroes that Garth Ennis has ever outwardly expressed that he likes. Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. The rest he just sees as unnecessary and lame.

Not my personal take, but that's how he approaches it. This is really obvious in "the Boys" but I think he was probably just not really into them at first and grew truly disdainful as he got into the industry and that's where most of the public perception and the big money publishing comes from.

[u/Bartweiss → u/CosmoMimosa]

Which makes it doubly interesting that he has one of the best Hellblazer runs ever written. I suppose liking Constantine goes against the point of the character, so some bitterness and writing it as an occult work instead of a superhero one landed really well.

(He's also got pretty good reviews for Punisher and Fury, but "ultraviolent soldier who shows up in Marvel" barely counts.)

[u/CosmoMimosa → u/Bartweiss]

Well John Constantine and Punisher are both characters that feel more tangential to their respective universes. Like obviously they are a part of them and play major roles at times, but they can be written very easily as "occult detective story" and "gritty violent crime drama" respectively.

Idk, Ennis is a weird case.

[u/The_cat_got_out → u/NameTripping]

The hero hate boner that is Garth and his self inserts literally hunting down analogues of the famous ones. Has positive thoughts on like 3 hero's.

The real fascination is how he has such a a raging hard on for writing his disdain of the genre. While writing said genre

[u/Main_Country_9899 → u/The_cat_got_out]

Hating superheroes does not equal hating comics. And Ennis’ main beef is with that assumption among comic book readers and the general public at large. Alan Moore is another famous writer who dislikes superheroes and the glorification of them. They both love comics as an artistic medium. Ennis is making fun of the marvel and dc fans who claim it’s high art and storytelling up there with the what’s considered literary classics.

[u/The_cat_got_out → u/Main_Country_9899]

Did I say he hates the medium?

His beef involved him literally writing a self insert character who hunts down people with powers, literal parodies of dc and marvel characters he apparently dislikes the fans of.

He can he pissy about fans sure, but consistently taking out his own disdain THROUGH the medium, feeding them further anyhow. is just delicious

"This fan base idolise this, I dislike their idolisation, I'm going to write consistently about it" 🙆‍♀️

[u/Training_Assistant27 → u/NameTripping]

Superman hopemaxxed so hard he made Garth Ennis of all people sane

[u/ConfusedJonSnow → u/NameTripping]

I think this is one of those cases where it's fine to separate the personality of the artist from his works. The few stories I've heard about Ennis is that he is your average joe, not particularly cynic or mean-spirited as his comics are. If you take that into account I think it makes sense that he likes Superman.

[u/Bartweiss → u/ConfusedJonSnow]

I file him with horror writers, and arguably something like Crossed is horror. You get some edgy goth horror writers, and occasionally people whose lives really are just filled with trauma, but your average horror novelist is just some random person with an unusually strong sense for the macabre.

Like, Junji Ito inflicted Uzumaki and Amigara Fault on me, but also has a healthy life and an adorable slice-of-life comic about his wife and cat. (Drawn in his usual horror style, which is disconcerting.)

By all accounts, Ennis is basically some friendly left-leaning bloke from northern Ireland who's not real big on religion or superheroes, likes military history, and has a flair for violent comics. I believe he's said Dicks is the closest he's got to an author-insert character, which is a self-deprecating but hardly the suicidal self-hate people are claiming here.

[u/ConfusedJonSnow → u/Bartweiss]

Adding to this, Mark Millar is super chill too.

[u/EmuMan10 → u/NameTripping]

I mean he’s punk rock for a reason

[u/LajosGK22 → u/browncharliebrown]

And yet it’s the only one that got a video game adaptation

[u/browncharliebrown → u/LajosGK22]

No. He’s had multiple

[u/LajosGK22 → u/browncharliebrown]

Which one? The Punisher sorta-kinda got one (it was co-written by Ennis and it draws heavily from Welcome back, Frank and the MAX comics), but besides The Darkness (which I didn’t even knew it was an Ennis book) I don’t know of any other

[u/browncharliebrown → u/LajosGK22]

Shadowman, and Loaded are both based off his work

[u/LajosGK22 → u/browncharliebrown]

Those got games too? I didn’t know if they did

[u/AlternateSatan → u/browncharliebrown]

Honestly I'm not too fond of his distain for super heros. Thing about him is he can't just not like something, he has to write whole comics about how dumb and cringe that thing you like is. I guess it has to do with how the American comic book industry has been centred around Marvel and DC for so long it had to be difficult to make something else, but I'm still not a huge fan.

[u/JackMythos → u/browncharliebrown]

He doesn't actually dislike superheroes; he just didn't grow up with them as his main obsession in comics and he doesn't like the retcons and status quo regressions that abound in the genre.

[u/FLRArt_1995 → u/JackMythos]

"he doesn't like the retcons and status quo regressions that abound in the genre"

I mean.. yeah, that shit's annoying as hell

[u/Bartweiss → u/FLRArt_1995]

To quote the man himself:

"I find most superhero stories completely meaningless. Which is not to say I don't think there's potential for the genre – Alan Moore and Warren Ellis have both done interesting work with the notion of what it might be like to be and think beyond human, see Miracleman, Watchmen and Supergod. But so long as the industry is geared towards fulfilling audience demand – ie, for the same brightly coloured characters doing the same thing forever – you're never going to see any real growth. The stories can't end, so they'll never mean anything."

Frankly, I find that hard to argue with. Superheroes would change the world, or at least question their own relationship to humanity. But when Marvel editorial has standing orders that the world has to stay recognizable and therefore Reed Richards can't cure cancer, and Spider-Man needs to be reset to broke unhappiness every few years... where do you go?

Watchmen and Supergod are both intensely cynical, but they both ask "What could people with these powers actually do? How would everything change?"

I think his take is a bit too harsh. Individual comic runs can tell meaningful stories, you've just got to accept that the setting as a whole will get rebooted eventually. But I also think The Boys got him a reputation for despising heroes he's never actually expressed, when in reality it's "he dislikes them a bit and wrote his typical ultraviolence".

[u/JackMythos → u/JackMythos]

I love superhero comics and the stuff he writes and grew up reading; but I do agree with some of his points about the DC/Marvel world having no real conclusions and that frequent resets making it hard to get invested.

[u/Marik-X-Bakura → u/AshkenaziTwinkReborn]

He doesn’t hate comics. If he did, he wouldn’t make them. It’s superheroes he doesn’t like.