I love Hitman. It's a perfect example of a heartfelt story where the punctuation of humor elevated the serious parts. Most Ennis stories have the same darkness with over the top humor, which generally works very well. His Hellblazer stories, Punisher, Preacher, and The Boys are all great.

 

It really is. It's one of his best. I prefer it to his other works. I think the constraints DC put on him kept it from getting a little too over the top and forced him to focus on the human element as opposed to all the blood and gore. Still, all of his stuff is enjoyable to me.

 

Absolutely. The Boys in particular suffered from that. Also, note that I did not include Crossed in my list. I just felt dirty after reading some of that. Preacher is still my favorite but Hitman isn't too far off.

 

At least The Boys wasn't Millar's Wanted. That was enough for me for books that had horrible things just to have horrible things. I wonder what Ennis would do with a TF book. Would kind of be a challenge, I'd bet, given how much he really relies on the human element to ground the fantastic/shocking elements of his stories.

 

Millar is the poster child for self-important comics that go over the top and end up sucking.

Regarding your point about having someone do an all-out serious TF comic, my vote would be Hickman and has been for years. Not that he's deadly serious all the time but his Marvel runs, particularly through Fantastic Four and Avengers, don't have a lot of particularly funny moments that really stand out. His current, fairly serious X-Men is the Gong Show compared to those but they're still very smart and readable. I think he could do a very long-form, continuity-heavy TF story that would be amazing. And the charts would be spectacular. Nobody does a mid-story infographic like Hickman.

 

He's got NOTHING on Warren Ellis in that department...

 

I really want to argue about that because I'm an Ellis fan, then I remember everything he did for Avatar. And his Excalibur run. Truth hurts sometimes. Though I still think Millar is more consistently bad.

 

Pretty much every book I've liked that he's gotten ahold of is absolute swill. Excalibur, the mockery he made of Stormwatch, and DON'T get me started on Ultraforce...

 

I don't mind a little but IDW over the last few years became more like a sitcom. Way too much humor from every character. Just gets tiresome and goofy to me.

 

Better to be fun and entertaining than overly serious to the point of bland and tedious like we getting now.

 

I think it's hard to write effective stories without using humor, to what degree it's necessary is debatable. It's hard to write something compelling that is devoid of humor and warmth (although I think one could point out the opposite is true as well).

Additionally, I find Sci-Fi to be a very self-serious genre. One of my favorite movies is Blade Runner and it's not exactly humorous, but it features a known charmer in Harrison Ford as the lead, a cheeky police chief, and some witty banter ("Is this testing whether I'm a replicant or a lesbian Mr. Deckard"). Even in the midst of a Civil War, you would expect *some* characters to try to liven things up a bit among the troops.

I agree with this. Wasn't a fan. This is a good case for the other extreme.

It's not just Transformers either. It's been a trend across comics, which were once more like Soap Operas, to write them like sitcoms.

 

There's been no humor at all in IDW2. Everything is played so straight and serious.

 

Why not add some levity?

 

I wasn't a huge fan of the IDW humour (although i did like some of the Rodimus / Megatron stuff). When I was younger I had one of the UK comic collections - a small yellow Earthforce graphic novel - I used to love that. I thought it was transformers humor done right without making them Caricatures.

 

Idw 2.0 has had some funny moments but they are somewhat few and far between.

Keep in mind, Ruckley is first and foremost a Novel writer.

 

Novels can be humorous. Ruckley isn't though. And he's not writing a novel here.

 

One for the Doctor Who fans; are we seeing a Season Eighteen effect here?

To slightly elaborate for the uninitiated, Doctor Who's twelfth season had seen the casting of Tom Baker; a renownedly eccentric person who, in his own words, "couldn't even come through a door naturalistically, so instead I would try to come through a door interestingly." That didn't have to mean humour, but it often does, at the least as a counterpoint to the drama (so, More than Meets the Eye season One, where the humour makes the characters relatable and averts darkness-induced apathy, making us care about the drama they go through).

After three series generally reckoned to be about the best in the show's run, culminating in a story which is possibly one of the very best, the then current producer was fired for, essentially, setting out to piss off the particularly odious Moral Guardians of the time, one Mary Whitehouse, and his replacement was specifically ordered to cut out the gothic horror. He brought in more stylised humour and literary pastiche to cover for both this, and budgetary depletion. This style, combined with Tom Baker's performance, upped the comedy levels substantially... and then in season 17, the show acquired Douglas Adams - yes, that Douglas Adams, as Script Editor. (Head writer, in modern parlance, really). Season 17 of the show came in for considerable accusations that it was essentially a sitcom just without a laughter track. Of course, there was still a lot of sci-fi going on, but frequently every third line either was a joke, or was played as a joke by Tom Baker and the rest of the cast taking his lead. Lost Light, perhaps?

So, next year, season Eighteen happened, and a new producer and script editor responded to this by ruthlessly cutting all the jokes. This, combined with Baker being angry and depressed about it, angry and depressed about other things, and falling quite seriously Ill led to what felt like a complete relaunch (it was also 1980) and a shocking stylistic swerve from a light hearted rollicking adventure serial with rather a lot of jokes, a highly charismatic if overbearing star and a somewhat self indulgent feel, to a bleak, bitter science fantasy odyssey with a shattered, drawn, and fragile lead and a mostly bizarrely unnatural po-faced view of the universe. It looks good, but it's utterly emotionally dead.

 

Though from what I've heard, season 18 is beloved by most classic Who fans.

 

Humor was a staple of the TF universe since the first G1 cartoon. However it was not idiotic like, lets say in Lostlight (for the love of all that is holy, I lost count of the ''how many times Magnus cant spell fun'' joke...... ), it was subtle and clever.

So yeah, if done right its an indispensable part.

Beastwars did it right too.

 

Humor is a way of making characters relatable. You can't be serious all the time. Now as for the type of humor that's debatable.