By Zack Quaintance — In reading this week’s Peacemaker - Disturbing The Peace #1 — a one-shot from writer Garth Ennis, artist Garry Brown, colorist Lee Loughridge, and letterer Rob Steen — I was thinking a lot about synergy. And while this is not a review of synergy, the concept does hang heavily over this book, making it almost impossible to evaluate it without discussing it on those grounds. There’s a new Peacemaker TV show on HBO Max, creating quite a bit of buzz, and the first line of the preview text for this comic goes all in on drawing the connection, “The breakout character from The Suicide Squad gets his own tale of peace ahead of the upcoming HBO Max TV show!”

Understandably, one might expect this comic to be a compliment to that show. It is not. At least not on its surface. Aside from the character design and name, this comic has very little in common with the show on first blush. Where the show looks to satirize and sendup hyper violence and superhero over seriousness, the comic indulges fully in it. Ennis has a long career of telling war stories about bad men who go too far, and he does familiar Ennis things in this comic. Peacemaker - Disturbing the Peace #1 ends up being as violent and gritty as a Big 2 comic gets these days. It’s dark at every turn, and if you come into expecting any commonalities with the goofier tone of the show, you’ll likely spend this entire one-shot waiting for a punchline that never drops, a lightening of the mood and material that never comes.

That’s what jumps out at me most within this book, which spans an over-sized 41 pages at a price point of $5.99. Peacemaker - Disturbing the Peace #1 is a clear attempt at synergy on the surface that delivers tonal whiplash when you engage with it in the very ways it has marketed itself. You have to get past all of that to even start engaging with this comic on its own merits. I also took a preconceived notion into this that we might get some dark humor from the team, which is something Ennis certainly has in his arsenal, but if there’s even a single joke in this comic, I straight up missed it.

Past that, the comic melds its creative team well. Garry Brown does gritty sequential artwork as good as anyone, and his lines are colored to dark perfection here by Lee Loughridge. The resulting aesthetic sensibility is a natural fit for Ennis thematic interests, which in this book are essentially looking at the horrors that shape people who set out to indulge in similar horrors in the name of order or helping. You’ve got to be sick to stop the sickos is the refrain, and it’s one we’ve heard before, often. This book conveys it well enough, and it does so with an engaging structure that forces readers to sort of re-evaluate the way they’re processing the main characters compromises as more information about that character comes to light. It essentially dares you to understand and emphasize with Peacemaker, before repeatedly asking you if you’re sure.

The book does this by introducing us to the lead character’s darkness and then tracing it to the atrocities he later commits. It’s all oppressively bleak, and it has an effect of daring the audience to draw a line. What do past horrors justify in the way of future actions executed in the name of protecting others from what has befallen you? It’s a lens in this way for evaluating the majority of vigilante and superhero concepts (another regular Ennis interest), which is also what the Peacemaker show sort of sets out to do in its own way. So while it takes some squinting and a willingness to bypass the marketing tonal whiplash, the beating heart of this comic does have some commonalities with the show — but the route it takes to get there might not be what a lot of readers are looking for when they pick this book up. And, indeed, this comic is just going to feel straight up unpleasant for a lot of folks, which is something to consider even if that choice is part of the point.

Overall: Peacemaker - Disturbing the Peace #1 is a one-shot seemingly aimed at synergy with the buzzy HBO Max TV show, but readers might be in for some tonal whiplash, even if the thematic hearts of the two share quite a bit in common. 7.0/10

REVIEW: Peacemaker - Disturbing the Peace #1 (One-Shot)

Peacemaker - Disturbing the Peace #1 (One-Shot
Writer: Garth Ennis
Artist: Garry Brown
Colorist: Lee Loughridge
Letterer: Rob Steen
Publisher: DC Comics - Black Label
The breakout character from The Suicide Squad gets his own tale of peace ahead of the upcoming HBO Max TV show! Long before joining the Suicide Squad, Christopher Smith, code name Peacemaker, meets with a psychiatrist-a woman dangerously obsessed with his bizarre and violent past. From his tragic childhood to his military service overseas to his multiple missions with Special Forces, Smith has more than his share of skeletons in the closet. But who’s actually analyzing whom? And will this trip down memory lane result in yet more fatalities? Garth Ennis and Garry Brown delve deep into Christopher Smith’s history of violence, and reveal what might bring peace-or not-to the Peacemaker.
Price: $5.99
Order This Comic: Via Amazon, and digitally via comiXology

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.