Art & Creativity Quote by Garth Ennis

Ennis is doing that very comics-creator two-step: disclaim the prestige while quietly acknowledging the machinery that manufactures it. The line is ostensibly practical - he writes without presuming a later collected edition - but the phrasing is loaded with industry weather. In the direct market era that shaped his career, "collected" is a kind of afterlife: trade paperbacks turn disposable monthly floppies into capital-L Literature, keep titles in print, reach bookstores, and recalibrate how a run is judged. To say you don't assume collection is to reject writing toward that afterlife: no decompressed padding, no "six issues equals a movie", no obligatory cliffhangers designed to make a spine look neat on a shelf.

But Ennis also leaves the door open: "though it might be". That last clause is the wink. It recognizes that canonization is often retroactive and only partly earned. The market decides, readers decide, sometimes an editor decides three years later when a character spikes in popularity. Ennis's intent reads like a defense of craft against format drift: he wants each installment to land as its own meal, not a chapter in a book that may never exist. The subtext is a mild rebuke to how commercial incentives reshape storytelling rhythms.

Context matters: Hitman is exactly the kind of cult book that collection can rescue from the churn - a mid-list DC title whose reputation grows in hindsight. Ennis is refusing to write for the algorithm of posterity while still understanding how posterity gets distributed.