You’ve Gotta Keep The Devil Way Down In The Hole: Red Team #1 Review

When it comes to comic books by Garth Ennis, sometimes it feels like a coin toss as to which writer you’re gonna get: the writer with a laser focus on the behaviors and traditions of regimented subcultures, or the writer who’s over the top, balls out nuts. When it comes to Garth Ennis, it seems like it’s either heavily researched war comics, or sci-fi western pilgrims with a rifle and a hard-on for Jesus. Battlefields versus Crossed. Max Punisher or Marvel Knights Punisher.

When Ennis goes serious, he goes serious; his war comics – even the ones where he goes more toward the fucked up, like Stitched, a story about some soldiers stranded in Afghanistan being hunted by zombies – feel like he spent some serious time hanging out with soldiers, learning a lot about tactics, weapons, and their relationships and ways of talking. Now, I’ll grant that I’ve never spent any time around people with a serious military background, but those stories feel like Ennis spent some time with real people who have really done the things that he’s writing about.

Ennis’s latest series, Red Team, similarly feels heavily researched. However, it feels like it was researched by way of some things I have spent a lot of time around… those things being The Shield, The Wire, and Homicide: Life On The Street. In short: Red Team feels more like Ennis’s take on some of the better American cop shows (by way of Dirty Harry’s Magnum Force) than it feels like an authentic police story.

But with that said, I like all those shows. So does Red Team stand up to them?