Art & Creativity Quote by Garth Ennis

Ennis is taking a swing at the central hustle of mainstream superhero comics: the pretense of permanence disguised as myth-making. “Designed to go on forever” isn’t praise for longevity; it’s an indictment of a business model that treats narrative like a treadmill. The “of course, very few of them do” jab lands because it punctures the industry’s fantasy of endless relevance. Even the immortal icons get rebooted, renumbered, “reimagined” into oblivion. Forever is the marketing copy; entropy is the reality.

The real bite is in the metaphor. “Throw mud against the wall” frames serialized superhero storytelling as improvisational and scattershot, less deliberate architecture than frantic content production. Mud is messy, cheap, and plentiful; it suggests plots engineered for immediate impact rather than lasting coherence. The wall is the audience, the culture, the marketplace - hard, vertical, indifferent. “Hope it will stick” exposes the wager: keep generating twists, crossovers, new costumes, new “events,” and trust that something becomes canon by sheer repetition.

Ennis’s subtext, consistent with his broader work, is contempt for corporate captivity. When characters can’t meaningfully change - because the IP has to remain usable - stories default to superficial shocks and reversible consequences. Most of it “slides off” because readers can feel the reset button under every cliffhanger. The context is a creator who built a career puncturing superhero pieties (often with glee), calling out the gap between the genre’s self-serious rhetoric and its industrial constraints. The line isn’t just a critique of bad books; it’s a critique of a system that makes stickiness the exception rather than the goal.