Time & Perspective Quote by Garth Ennis

Ennis is admitting, with a grin you can hear, that mainstream superhero comics are less a playground than a gated community. The “immense fun” isn’t the sanctioned kind - it’s the thrill of contraband: slipping irreverence, uglier psychology, or political bite “past DC,” the corporate custodian of mythic brands. In that one verb, “sneak,” he frames the publisher not as a partner in storytelling but as a border patrol for tone, canon, and marketability.

The subtext is a long-running argument about who these icons are for. DC’s characters are treated like civic monuments: Batman and Superman as cultural infrastructure, meant to be protected from the messy particulars of real life. Ennis, coming out of the British comics tradition that produced a lot of gleeful blasphemers, positions himself as the guy with a can of spray paint and a point to make. His best work often tests the claim that superheroes are “aspirational” by asking what the fantasy conceals: violence, power worship, nationalist aesthetics, the weird intimacy between heroism and policing.

“I need to have more respect for these characters” is doing double duty. It’s a quote from editors, sure, but it’s also a critique of reverence itself - the idea that fictional people can demand deference like institutions. Ennis isn’t confessing disrespect so much as mocking the expectation that respect is the job. His intent is friction: to make the reader feel the tension between corporate-owned legend and the writer’s urge to puncture it, because puncturing it is where the laughter - and the truth - leaks out.