I’ve come to expect a certain amount of quality from Garth Ennis. I guess I’m going to have to promote that distinction to ‘demand’ after trying to read Fury: Peacemaker, Ennis’s adventures of Nick Fury during World War II. Foolishly, I bought all of the issues without having read any, gleefully anticipating the complete reading. From the first page of the first issue, I knew something was very, very wrong. Peacemaker is like any World War II story. The locations are all the same--in that first issue’s case, The Big Red One’s Kasserine Pass scene and later on, a briefing straight out of Where Eagles Dare--but Ennis does recycle some of his own creations. He wrote a very funny World War II series, Adventures in the Rifle Brigade (and an absolutely horrendous sequel), and Peacemaker features more serious--but not fully--versions of a few of those characters. Ennis also lifts some of his theses from his Punisher: Born series, which ultimately failed, but not for lack of trying. Peacemaker has no trying. There’s no attempt at any real conflict--the McGuffin (which comes late) is so obvious, so predictable, so dull, my eyes glossed over once I read it. Ennis couldn’t care less about Peacemaker, so why should I?
Darick Robertson’s art doesn’t help either. I noticed it on the second page. Some character has lazy eyes and not because he’s supposed to have lazy eyes, but because inker Jimmy Palmiotti didn’t care either. A friend of mine says Jimmy Palmiotti’s inks can make anyone look good. I can’t wait to show him some of these Peacemaker pages. Characters don’t look the same from frame to frame and if there are two characters in a panel, only the nearer gets any realistic detail--the list goes on and on. In all, only one (full-page) panel looked any good. I think the last issue was late because of the art too, which means Darick Robertson’s either been getting a lot of restful sleep or he’s working on something he cares about.
The utter lack of interest coming from the creators might be--moderately--off-set if Ennis actually had anything to say about the main character, but he doesn’t. Nick Fury is nothing more than a caricature in Peacemaker. He’s a talkative one too. Peacemaker’s got a whole bunch of dialogue and all of it bleeds boredom. Ennis alternates between lots of talking and lots of action, always a good sign for a masterly approach. If the coffee I’d been drinking had been any weaker, Peacemaker would have put me to sleep. Then again, writing about it is a pretty good sedative too.