I know I shouldn't have been expecting Hitman to wow me right out of the gate (my recommending friend told me it took a little while to get really good), but I was sort of stunned by how nonplussed it left me. Garth Ennis's writing is fine, but like most Ennis, it's something familiar. A handful of the details show up later in Preacher and probably in something else. My problem--the aforementioned nonplussing--relations to not being able to find anything particular about Hitman. The villain was boring... I guess I liked Killer Croc watching “Seinfeld,” but it was only for a panel or so and then it was over. Ennis establishes the character as a pseudo-contradiction, which I'm not used to Ennis doing, sparkling up the Christmas tree to hide the thin center.
My other big problem with Hitman might be John McCrea's art. Hitman looks like a cartoon version of Sam Kieth (with a lot less lines). It's also really bright--almost cheerful--and it works against the issues, as far as setting the tone. I really wasn't expecting Hitman to feature a sitcom couch and it does... and, even discounting my surprise, Ennis is not ready to have a sitcom couch in a comic book about a “moral” hitman. Maybe I'm just mad about that simplistic “morality.” Ennis usually boils his complexities down at the end of a series, not at the start. There's also not much actual content in terms of character in these issues, besides over-explanatory narration (something else I don't tend to expect from Ennis or at least not coming from him without some recognition of it being too much).
I'll keep going with Hitman, but it's going to be a bit of an uphill climb from this inauspicious beginning....
