Time & Perspective Quote by Garth Ennis

Ennis is puncturing the cozy fantasy that comics arrive in real time, like a diarist tossing fresh thoughts onto the page. He’s talking shop, but the subtext is reputational self-defense: if a run suddenly looks like it’s “responding” to the moment, it probably isn’t. Publishing schedules, artists’ timelines, editorial passes, and the slow churn of production can make a book feel eerily current or accidentally tone-deaf, simply because culture moved while the pages were stuck in transit.

The line’s awkward little snag - “even though I wrote anything between one and five years ago” - reads like a frustrated shrug. It’s Ennis reminding readers and critics that intent lives in a past tense. A joke that landed in 2021 can sound meaner in 2026; a political riff can feel prophetic or clueless depending on what the world did while the book sat in a queue. He’s also quietly insisting on authorship as labor, not vibe: these stories aren’t hot takes, they’re constructed objects.

Context matters because Ennis has spent decades writing material that courts controversy (war stories, institutional hypocrisy, extreme satire). When multiple projects “start coming out at once,” audiences may assume a coordinated statement or an escalation. He’s preempting that narrative. The real point isn’t “don’t judge me”; it’s “judge the work with an understanding of the lag.” In a media ecosystem trained to treat every release as a response, Ennis is insisting on the tyranny of production time - and the odd way it can make yesterday’s pages look like today’s argument.