Life & Wisdom Quote by Garth Ennis

Ennis doesn’t just dislike Marvel; he’s diagnosing a whole creative ecosystem he finds unappetizing. The line lands because it’s framed as a shrug rather than a manifesto: “very few” is the polite veneer over a deeper contempt for the brand’s default settings. Coming from the writer of Preacher and The Boys, it reads like a values statement. Ennis gravitates toward war stories, black comedy, institutional hypocrisy, and the ugly mechanics of power. Most marquee Marvel heroes are built to be frictionless icons: endlessly extensible, morally legible, protected by corporate stewardship and continuity maintenance. That’s exactly the kind of architecture that starves his instincts.

The subtext is also professional. To say he “would like to write” is to talk about desire, not ability. Ennis has written mainstream superhero work (his Punisher run is a key example), but he tends to thrive where he can puncture the myth and let consequences stick. Marvel, especially at its most prominent, optimizes for reversibility: death is temporary, trauma is a costume change, and the status quo is sacred because it’s a product line. Ennis is attracted to the opposite: finality, mess, and human limitation.

Context matters: this isn’t a random potshot; it’s a long-running tension in comics culture between creator-driven transgression and IP-driven stewardship. Ennis positions himself as the guy who’d rather interrogate the superhero fantasy than polish it. The irony is that the Marvel characters he’s most likely to “like” are the ones that already strain against Marvel’s bright, heroic brand - the Punisher, Nick Fury, maybe Wolverine - the figures closest to the kind of moral corrosion Ennis actually wants to write about.