I find myself now reading comic books that have extreme violence in them. I can’t say I have a preference for this sort of thing, but it seems like these are the only comics I find enjoyable to read, verbally and visually. Observe:

"Crossed": written by Garth Ennis, drawn by Jacen Burrows

There’s a 2-for-1 for you, dear readers; the word “horsecock” and the literal thing as well. I’ve been going on Ennis for some time now and I’m always excited and eager to read his next project, especially if it’s his own personal project. Really, the sophistication of his work lies within how well he does tone and perspective; there’s nothing complex about his storytelling but he does a very good interpretation of characters.
Jacen Burrows has been a long time favorite artist for me. There’s this real irony/humor to his artwork sometimes, that I feel also has a bit of “shock” factor in it. Will you ever see a more crisp, detailed drawing of a horse’s penis from anyone or in any other comic?

And a lot more comics/graphic novels have been sort of catching on to this style. Marvel has its MAX series which they’ve labeled with “EXPLICIT” (lots of nudity and violence), and even outside the MAX series, you’ll still have some sort of extremely violence like seeing a person getting pulled apart or getting his head sliced in half. Image comics also has a few series that show the same style and DC comics seem to be jumping aboard the “let’s kill some villains/superheroes” game as well.

Comics are also very easily crossing the “Seven Dirty Words” rule, though there are still attempts to censor them with !#$*^#&$@, but that tends to ruin the mood of the story. Really, if you’re going to show extreme violence, why not just give readers the full monty and throw in profanity?

However, I am surprised to see that there are more male genitals showing up in comics. Lately, there seems to be movies that also show full, upfront male genitalia as well, so maybe I’m assuming we’re pretty much over this hump of trying to censor certain body parts or our society has grown to slowly accept it. Anyways, some comic book series  will still have male/female characters with their genitals or female breasts covered with shadows, speech bubbles, other people’s body parts, etc…


But it’s come to a point that these kinds of comics is just only that kind of comics: “Cheesecake” or comics that just feature a lot of busty and voluptuous female superheroes wearing different costumes/produce/or nothing at all from different perspectives and angles. Clearly this is one way to sell comics and obviously male characters don’t get this kind of treatment.

So should this kind of graphic violence be a surprise to a lot of people? Not really. Should this be a surprise to a lot of people who haven’t read comics in a while, say, for about a decade? Perhaps. The quality of artwork in a lot of comics has expanded quite a lot. I always felt Jim Lee and Joe Madureira were the heavy hitters during the 90′s (though I can’t say I actually liked their work…) so other artists that had a style completely different then theirs didn’t necessarily have a strong fanbase. Now, there seems to be a lot more diversity with artists (and a lot more better artists at that…) to bring some different style and taste into comics. Of course, there’s also certainly still comics aimed specifically towards children. We can’t have all of our next generation be sucked in by manga.

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