Time & Perspective Quote by Garth Ennis

Ennis is doing that very Ennis thing: shrugging while smuggling a thesis statement. “Yeah” and “I suppose” are verbal shoulder-shrugs, a way of disarming the listener before he drops the real point: the tonal gap between Hitman and Preacher isn’t an accident, it’s design. The line “most of the time” is the tell. He’s not claiming Hitman is fluff, just that its default setting is lighter, with room for beer jokes and camaraderie even when the violence spikes. “Most of the time” also protects his brand: Ennis wants credit for emotional range without surrendering the pitch-black edge that defines both books.

The subtext is also a quiet defense against fan taxonomy. Comics discourse loves to flatten creators into a single “voice” (Ennis = profanity + gore + blasphemy). Here he’s insisting on craft categories: different series, different contracts with the reader. Preacher is built to be operatic and confrontational, a road-trip theology brawl that escalates toward judgment. Hitman, despite the body count, is structured like a hangout book in superhero drag, a chance to write loyalty and banter inside a ridiculous DC sandbox.

“It was always going to be” reads like inevitability but it’s really authorship. He’s asserting control over tone the way a director talks about genre: you can’t play Preacher “light” without betraying its premise, and you can’t make Hitman relentlessly grim without killing what makes it sing. The line is modest on the surface, but it’s a boundary marker: stop reading these books as interchangeable doses of Ennis; read them as different machines built for different kinds of catharsis.