Crossed

Football hooligans, possibly. Especially since they seemed to make up the majority of nationalist groups that were running around when it was being published.

I think the logic is pretty simple from an edgy boy standpoint.
>Crosses are a common holy symbol but what if I put them on EVIL characters
There might be more to it but I kind of doubt it.

I thought at first it was trying to make a point about religion giving people an excuse to act out their worst impulses. Not that that necessarily makes sense but Ennis is an edgy atheist type. But probably even that is giving it too much credit for thoughtfulness.

I am sort of an edgy atheist type myself and Ennis even makes me groan sometimes.
Preacher in particular was full of eye roll moments on that subject.

Amazing art really.

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A strong argument for not letting Ennis write anything ever again. It's a little entertaining in a "So bad it's good" way, but that wears off quickly just because it's so repetitive. "Oh no I hope I don't get raped and murdered by the Crossed!" *next issue* "OH GOD I'M BEING RAPED AND MURDERED BY THE CROSSED!". And really, the gore isn't that impressive. It's neither Peter Jackson funny nor is it Mai-Chan's Daily Life shocking. A lot of it just lacks imagination, like Ennis just wrote out the first "Shocking" image that came to mind and didn't try to refine any of it. There is an art form to being edgy and gore-y, done well it takes actual effort.

I know people just think it's edgy for being edgy. And that's true for the sequels and spin-offs. It's an interesting idea, that instead of zombies like the walking dead, it's just regular people being the worst possible version of humanity. I think that was Ennis point. That the crossed haven't really done anything new.
I will say that the group was more interesting than the crossed themselves. I felt bad for most of their deaths, even the old dude. I just wish the sequels would have done the same.

Gonna be real with you Ennis is not clever enough to demonstrate the ideas you present

That's probably true.

>original run
>+100
>Five Bloody Fingers
>The Fatal Englishmen/The Thin Red Line
>Homo Tortor and Homo Superior
>the webcomic
>anything involving Smokey
There, you have all the Crossed series worth a read. The rest is either schlock or downright abysmal. I can't even really blame Ennis for it, the first run of it is downright restrained in comparison to later series in terms of edge, and the idea of "what would happen if 90% of the world population turned into the worst possible version of themselves" is genuinely a kinda cool one, but god if Badlands and Psychopath didn't have some of the worst pages I've ever had to read.

Ennis wrote about 5% of the series. Most of the rest is publisher milking, except for maybe Moore's series, which is a pain in the ass to read due to him trying to represent the changes in the english language after an isolated century.

First run and the si spurrier run was fun.

>which is a pain in the ass to read due to him trying to represent the changes in the english language after an isolated century.
Oh god this. Please, if there are any upcoming writers ITT, I beg you. Do not subject your readers to an altered version of English that you made up yourself. Existing dialects? A-okay. Made up ones? Please reconsider. It adds nothing but questions, punches massive holes in your world-building, and makes the work a chore to read. You are not an entomologist.

Why would humans start to talk like the Crossed? Surely if your whole life is spent running from/surviving something, you would hate every aspect of it, it's speech patterns included. If anything language among normal humans would take on an almost puritanical aspect. After all, if that were the case someone yelling out FUCKSHIT would be a pretty good indicator that there are Crossed in the area.

Joyce's finnigan's wake is a prime example of why made up language is shite.

Some of the stories in badlands are ok. I liked the ones with Smokey, the one with the hippie and the biker and the one with the monster and the parole officer stood out to me.

That's the worst thing about Badlands, really. There's some genuinely entertaining stories, but you never know if you're going to get those or the goreporn crap.

To be fair, Moore isn't too egregious with it in comparison to some other authors. I personally like +100 and Homo Tortor for showing the Crossed in genuinely unique situations and having more opportunity to play around with art than mundane humanity + lol blood and tits. That and the worst part of the comic is the Crossed somehow being an unstoppable force despite being utter retards incapable of any of the "advanced thought" they're said to be capable of other than when plot convenient, and +100 actually makes them seem slightly more threatening.

its entertaining

>writers thinking they are Tolkien or worse try to convey an accent in their diologue
Fucking stop. This isn't clever and your audience is not obliged to put up with this bizarre and never well thought our obstacle.

Honestly only a few stories are even slightly worth reading. I remember feeling incredibly grossed out when the first issue came out. At the same time it does go places people silently agree not to go. I like the idea of pushing the limits as long as its not being forced onto people who don't like it.

I get that people don't like this but to encourage people not to try is some ESL shit.

Great stuff, wish we could get more of the ancient blood people.

Invincible isn't edgy. The fights are gory but the story itself is pretty grounded as far as comics go

this is the only right answer.

Cool story idea ruined by over the top horror and rape.
Like most Ennis things

Any time I hear the name "Ennis" I just sigh and get ready for everyone having a bad time.
I wonder if he's as jaded and cynical as his writing makes him seem.

The absolute prime example of what to expect from Garth Ennis. You can say a lot of his shit is edgy but at least every now and then you'll get something out of it. Whether it's the boys or that one-off he did about the Battle of Crecy, his edginess usually ties into some purpose, be it great or small. Crossed is what happens when you strip any and all of that purpose away and just resolve to write and draw literally nothing but guro/torture porn. it can't even pretend it has any meaning beyond maybe a few stolen notes from literally any other post-apocalyptic work surrounding zombies and similar monsters, except now the zombies can curse, rape, and slap each other with horse cocks. I mean, if you're into that kind of stuff, more power to you. I'm not here to police anyone's tastes so much as express my own, just like any other anonymous cunt on this site. Like anything you want, from Taylor Swift songs, to Friedberg & Seltzer movies, to comics like crossed. It's a free country. Do what you want.

Just know that you're a dumbass with no taste.

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I dunno if "jaded and cynical" is the best way to describe him so much as "thinks he's cool for being jaded and cynical" r maybe "thinks literally anything that's edgy is suddenly realistic." The same can be said of his fans. Every time I hear someone describe The Boys as "realistic," I want to spit in their drink.

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>You are not an entomologist.
I don't think many comic writers are, user.

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This
invincible's shocks at least carry some sort of weight an/or advance the narrative in some way. Any time you see someone get pulverized, it's never for the sake of seeing someone get pulverized. Crossed is just torture porn for edgy teens who jerked off to Hostel and other Eli Roth movies as kids.

I personally don't think Ennis is a bitter person at all, in fact a lot of his work (the good ones at least) focus on deconstruction or the edge playing off of something else. Punisher MAX being a look at vigilantism, The Boys playing Hughie off of Butcher, Preacher and Hitman on the ideas of faith, power and just some genuinely nice character drama, and his fondness for writing for 2000AD and doing independent war comics. Of course all of these series have their ups and downs, in fact my opinion of Garth is that he often goes from shit to great in a single series, and I'd say that's the same with Crossed's first run. It has a good initial premise as far as apocalypse stories go, but then it wanes when the narrative focuses too much on the shock and the schizophrenic tone switching between gritty and grindhouse b movie.

So, when's live action coming out?

Somebody posted the Garth Ennis run on Yea Forums when I first came to this website around 2007-8, and it was one of the first comics I ever read (not counting Asterix). For that, it will always hold a special place in my heart.

I miss those days.

Nice to know there are people that are still not so desensitized to violence.

This and comics like Rawhead Rex make me feel sick to my stomach.

You cannot be mentally healthy to actually enjoy it.

Last I heard, it'll be an Amazon Prime Original by this time next year with a few minor changes to the story. For instance: all the Crossed have been replaced with dignified PoCs and they no longer curse or rape. I'm told there's now a beautiful gay romance arc.

Why does noone treat the actual true threat of the series, the blood and infection being carried by mosquitoes and flies, at all seriously?

The crossed are far too fucking self-destructive to last as a horde threat beyond a few weeks and only due so because writer feint. The real problem is how terrible the vector is, fucking noone should be touching anything without tongs or gloves and no bare skin showing at all.

>That arc of the UK Prime Minister and his staff handling the first days of the outbreak and having to stop infected Russian fighter planes from decimating the US east coast. Then at the end his dumbass assistant gets them all infected and killed
>That arc where a guy betrays the human race and aids an intelligent crossed man into killing normal humans in order to not get killed himself, then at the end he foils him from obtaining nuclear weapons
>That arc with the crossed clowns that killed an entire circus and town before fighting a motorcycle band lead by a coward teenager
>That arc where a serial killer gets infected but goes unaffected because he was already an unhinged psycho to begin with. Then he goes to create the first united settlement of intelligent crossed that send spies into uninfected human populations
>That arc of the trucker guy who ravages through the desert in a big ass 8 wheeler truck with wagons filled with turrets, accompanied by his female henchmen who he regularly fucks in exchange for a place at his truck
>That arc of the comic book nerds who rape an artist into drawing comic books in a world where everyone is dead, until she gets saved by a badass gay couple
>That arc of the tragic mobster who gets infected and then tries to save his cop fiance in a police station but when he arrives there she's already long dead
>That arc of a dad forced to work together against the Crossed with the man who trafficked and then had his daughter, wife, and son killed
True horror kino like this does not belong in this world. Its edgy and gorey but its hella fun, ive become desensitized to all that stuff so it doesnt shock me that much. Once you look past the super edginess its really interesting to read, especially since no one has done zombies so depraved before or since.

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Fucking thank you
I feel like this about the SAW movies.
“Oh, a person screaming for their life is being messily tortured in a sadistic, miserable way. Fun movie!”

weaklings

>That arc of the comic book nerds who rape an artist into drawing comic books in a world where everyone is dead, until she gets saved by a badass gay couple
>implying that arc was any fucking good at all
Crossed has a few good stories but you're kidding yourself if you think that was anything other than self-insert garbage on the writer's part.

not crossed enough

You're appreciating the concepts and ignoring the execution.

man this is actually one of the better Badlands arcs but what the fuck happened to the art quality on this series? back when Jacen Burrows was running the show it was honestly pretty great, but it goes from good (Homo Tortor and +100) to sub-amateur tier constantly and has for ages.

I'm not sure you understand what the term "kino" means.

The problem is, "kino" is most often used by post 2014 tourists for "thing that I like" so it really has no meaning in the first place.

The original 9 issues series was good, it felt like a nice self contained story.

Obligatory

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Was killing those kids the right thing to do?

They're publishing it for the first time in my country, Brazil. I've read the OG run, and everything until mid-badlands and i don't know why the fuck they are bothering to release Family Values and Psychopath, they're an awful follow-up to the original run. It would be better to do Badlands after OG, maybe Wish You Were Here then +100, but for fuck's sake, nobody is gonna buy anything Crossed related after reading Family Values and Psychopath.

was Psychopath the one where the serial killer got infected and it took him seeing the cross rash in the mirror to realize? if so that was actually pretty funny but I'm fairly sure I've resigned the rest of that story to the mental incinerator, it's legitimately among one of the worst comics I've read

In that context it was more like mercy killing

it's a meme comic that's taylor-made for reddit

>lemme chew and lick dead tit flesh stored in a healthy plastic bag for a sexual thrill
>yeah nah no health problems about this habit for months and months
>nobody notices the smell of dead flesh from my mouth
It's such utter schlock.

you've just turned that site into a buzzword for "thing I don't like" and have for years. if it was released three to five years earlier Yea Forums would've been all over this shit, I thought your boogeyman were meant to be squeamish pussies?

Kids apparently had been taught survivor skills (in addition to have eaten human flesh under false pretenses.)
I dunno, I think leaving them to their own devices is still the more moral option if not taking on the burden of responsibility. Their choice to take their own life should still be there's assuming they don't get caught by Crossed.

been a while since I read it, but wasn't one of the points they raised that if they would manage to grow up they would just rob and kill people like their teacher taught them?

Would be hell of hypocrisy if they did raise it. All Crossed survivor protagonists are either handicapped or cunts.

The group in the first volume never preyed on other humans

There's plenty of stinkers and shitty arcs, I'd say only about half to a third are genuinely worth reading, BUT those that are are really pretty damn good. The gore and edge of some of the comics also functions as a pretty effective filter - you can immediately tell who's actually read some of the better arcs and who saw one page of gore and said "nope, I know everything I need to know about this"

Psychopath and all the subsequent arcs with that character are absolute shit

+100 was interesting. Most of it was nauseating.

First one is okay zombie story. Spinoffs vary wildly in quality, worst ones are some of the worst written garbage ever made. The webcomic was alright.

The webcomic ironically had some of the better writing and character arcs of the franchise

Red cross was also a mark on the door on the houses with plague victims inside.

t.17 year old

nah, great lad, had a drink or two with him, even brought me a pint

Crossed, at least the og story was about finding hope in hopelessness

lil bitch, Clive Barker is amazing

a lot of the people who shit on it haven't actually read it, or just dismiss it disingenuously as just gore porn when there's only two or three overly gratuitous moments in the og strip.

While its no means Ennis best work, its clear that its saying more than just being another zombie story.

>finding hope in hopelessness
That's what it was at first, but even then, a lot fo it, like i said, is very standard post-apocalyptic fare. Even that doesn't last long.

nah thats always what it was, read the last page again

or do you mean the stories that came after? Because to be clear i'm just talking about the og strip here

the ones that come after. Like I said, there's at least something to Ennis' edginess at first, but when that runs out of steam, you're just left with garbage.

I mean it has an audience so I can see it’s appeal. It’s just too much for me because it’s mindless edge and a bit too much on the violence for violence sake.

I genuinely liked 'Wish you were here'
but it is mostly just shock and gore and rape

grandma get off the computer

American Guro

A bit boring because the premise has no room to maneuver. Everything's just fucked.

+100 does a pretty good job of showing a functional, somewhat advanced but still crippled society imo. That being said a fair few of the others are just hopelessly bleak, with The Thin Red Line being the only one of the "everything's fucked" ends being able to maintain a satisfying ending and good conclusion to the main character's arc, true to it's namesake at the Battle of Balaclava. Honestly with how much of Scottish culture/history/"feeling" is injected into Ennis' works, I wonder how much time he spends there. Having lived there basically all my life I have to say that Scotland and NI feel like very similar places at least, so there's that.

no, Psychopath was about a group of survivors who find a guy with a broken leg so they take him along. but the guy is the eponymous character and systematically murders everyone. there's one or two later arcs with a girl who survived and was traumatized by him, and the psychopath has a cameo in another story. but I don't think the guy himself ever became a crossed? or if he did I missed that comic

well fuck, guess it's just irredeemable then. the ending with the chick somehow sawing off her arm with BARBED WIRE was just ridiculous when the series originally tried to show how easily even small wounds can kill in an age without modern medicine and full of bloodborne pathogens. I know most horror comics have characters made of hot dogs and tomato passata but this was egregious even by those low standards.

Fun fact mosquitoes don't spread bloodborne illnesses like HIV and hepatitis

If I wanted to read a guro comic I have exhentai for that.

>true threat of the series, the blood and infection being carried by mosquitoes and flies, at all seriously?

Like how we treat AIDS and other blood borne diseases being carried by mosquitoes?

HIV/AIDS isn't transmitted by mosquito bites at all

Yes, that's the point. Blood borne diseases aren't transmitted by bug bites.

That issue about fat culture-researching guy siding with the crossed lead by a chad nigger fireman was pure kino
And the schizo scotsman one was pretty good too but it barely fit the setting

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>>That arc of the comic book nerds who rape an artist into drawing comic books in a world where everyone is dead, until she gets saved by a badass gay couple

That was a fucking awful story arc and you know it.

Glad I wasnt the only one who catched that one.

It's not just blood, it's also spit, shit and essentially any sort of residue that comes off the infected. That's the stuff you need to worry about.

The bugs don't do that either.

I'm arguing it should, the vector is crazy contagious as apparently pissing on items is enough to carry it. Flies settling on crossed corpses and waste should be another threat.

I became desensitized two issues in. Irl violence and gore still gets to me

The violence is cartoonish, the human body has the strength of spaghetti and you see skulls smask and decapitations with one handed blows.

They did have a reference to this. I cant recall the exact details but a kid in Wish You Were Here was infected because he either messed with fish or birds that had been feeding on Crossed. I'm thinking it was birds but shit's clearly a huge hazard. Creative Crossed even once got a guy because he licked an envelope they sabotaged.

>muh crusades
>muh pedo priests
>muh dark ages
The whole anti-religion meme in generally is tired as hell. It's a good way to identify people who stopped mentally developing at 16, with just enough brain cells to figure out that even terrible people like having excuses for their behavior and carpenters can't walk on water, but not enough to realize the chip on their shoulder is retarded. It's on the same cringe shelf as "guess man was the real monster all along lol."

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I mean, yes, but it was the goriest thing i´ve seen in a comic at the time

>You cannot be mentally healthy to actually enjoy it.

I really could never get people like you. We read/watch good horror for its gut-wrenching intensity and also for the macabre and grotesque imagery & black humor. You are basically saying that you need to be mentally ill to enjoy things that are thrilling and fun???

>That arc of the trucker guy who ravages through the desert in a big ass 8 wheeler truck with wagons filled with turrets, accompanied by his female henchmen who he regularly fucks in exchange for a place at his truck
Name or link?

mediafire.com/file/d2spkgw6936bcqh/Annual_2013.cbr/file

Not OP. but you fucking pussies crying about your widdle upswet tummies is more disgusting than anything in these comics. It's a fucking drawing. The shit isn't real.

That's part of why I think Wish You Were Here is the actual peak of Crossed, just little details like that.

I kinda like some of the concepts, but a lot of it is just edge for edge's sake.

People say Psychopath was bad but I didn't have any sort of strong feelings about it. I think the experience of reading Badlands left me jaded, because the flavor of the month thing ended feeling so fucking tiring and it was mostly going nowhere. If anything, I'd say Psychopath is Badlands but in a smaller dose.

Badlands becoming formulaic because you knew every survivor group was fucked, married with the urge to be more and more shocking than the last meant you ended up with all survivors having shocking pasts and no actual personalities to get attached to.
It's telling when the big name for the franchise is arguably Smokey, if not Shakey.

Disgusting edgy garbage. Shock for the sake of shock. There's literally nothing of value in this comic.