NOTE: The posts on Garth Ennis’ “Demon” comics were originally on another side, published back in 2015, reprinted here for posterity

In 1993, there weren’t a lot of reasons to read comic books.  And then a little-known Irishman whose experience was mostly in the British anthology 2000 AD (home to Judge Dredd) scored his first “Big Two” assignment.  He would take over for Steven Grant on DC’s The Demon, a book with moderate sales and no real “center.”  It was hard to say what it was really about.  Was it a horror book?  Superhero?  Comedy, even?

But Garth Ennis had a wild, crazy, completely out there sense of imagination, which exploded on the splash page of his very first issue (#40)….

Profane.  Anti-church.  Funny.  You can see, in this splash page alone, so many of Ennis’ future projects: Preacher, Bloody Mary, Hitman, Hellblazer…

And it didn’t hurt that he partnered with John McCrea, who also had previously been pretty much confined to working on 2000 AD and Judge Dredd.  McCrea’s eclectic and almost grotesque style fit perfectly with a character like The Demon.  It was also wholly unlike anything else in the early 1990s.  This wasn’t another Jim Lee/Rob Liefeld/Todd MacFarlane wannabe.  This was someone with a distinct voice.

The duo would work together throughout the run, with the occasional fill-in artist, and together would create pretty much the only “timeless” run on The Demon ever.  Seriously.  Demon comics on the whole are pretty lame.

Oh, and remember what I said about foreshadowing Ennis’ later works?  We’ll see a lot of that.  To wit:

Ennis left the book in 1994 to follow The Hitman, a character he created in Demon Annual #2, into a solo book and to begin an acclaimed run on Hellblazer for Vertigo.  But over the next month or so, we will examine each of the eighteen wonderful issues he wrote for this comic.

Click the series tag below to see all my posts on this comic!