Hitman (comics)

AUTHOR: Ennis, Garth

ARTIST: John McCrea (illustrator); Garry Leach (inker); Carla Feeny (colorist); Pat Prentice (letterer); Willie Schubert (letterer)

PUBLISHER: DC Comics

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1996-2001

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1997-2001

Publication History

One of many characters created for DC’s Bloodlines crossover (in which parasitic aliens inadvertently create a number of superpowered beings), Tommy Monaghan first appeared in The Demon Annual, issue 2 (1993), written by Garth Ennis and drawn by John McCrea. He appeared in a few story lines in The Demon (first published in 1972) and became a popular member of the supporting cast. Nearly a year after The Demon was canceled, DC launched Hitman in early 1996.

Ennis wrote the entire run (comprising sixty issues, an annual, a crossover with the character Lobo, and an issue tying into the “DC One Million” crossover event), and McCrea was the primary artist, pencilling all but two issues and handling inking duties until issue 21.

Firmly rooted in the DC Universe, Hitman was largely set in Gotham City and included appearances by Batman, the Joker, Catwoman, and other local characters. As the series continued and the body count grew, crossovers became less frequent, as the underworld and crime plotlines were often at odds with traditional superhero storytelling (although superpowered villains appeared throughout the series). Similarly, although Monaghan has powers, he rarely used them later in the series, as the side effects of his powers and the distraction they often created during gunfights made them impractical. Although the series had an enthusiastic following, sales were, in Ennis’s words, “nothing special,” and the creators were given time to wrap up the series. Hitman finished its run with its sixtieth issue, in June, 2001.

Plot

Hitman tells the story of Monaghan, who first appears in The Demon as a freelance hit man about to kill a mobster. Before he can do so, however, an alien named Glonth attacks and kills the mobster. When the creature turns its attention to Monaghan, it attacks and feeds on his spinal fluid, causing Monaghan to develop X-ray vision and minor telepathic powers. After a failed attempt on his life, Monaghan launches an attack at a mob wake, where he and Etrigan the Demon both fight Glonth. Later appearances in The Demon include the “Hell’s Hitman” story line, in which Etrigan hires Monaghan to kill the Archfiend of Hell, Asteroth, and his warriors (and which establishes his reluctance to ever shoot police officers), and “Suffer the Children,” in which Etrigan’s alter-ego, Jason Blood, tries to get Monaghan to kill Etrigan himself.

Monaghan’s own series launched with the three-part “A Rage in Arkham.” Monaghan decides that he will be the only hit man dealing exclusively with superpowered beings, although the inevitable attacks by regular mobsters give him plenty of nonpowered folks to shoot. After killing off plenty of both, he finds himself on a mission to kill the Joker, which goes well until his target is revealed to be an extradimensional entity known as the Mawzir, who is attempting to recruit Monaghan for the demonic Arkanonne, the Lord of the Guns. In addition to introducing most of the core cast, the story contains one of the book’s more memorable (and infamous) scenes, in which Monaghan vomits on Batman, and reintroduces most of Monaghan’s supporting cast, including best friend Pat, father figure Sean Noonan, buffoonish Hacken, fellow hit man Ringo, and police officer Tiegel.

The “10,000 Bullets” story line introduces Natt, Monaghan’s best friend from his days fighting in Iraq. Moe Dubelz, the grotesque surviving mobster from The Demon Annual, issue 2, hires professional hit man Johnny Navarone to kill Monaghan. After Monaghan and Natt fight a horde of ninjas and a deranged, drug-stealing “hero” named Nightfist, Johnny ambushes and almost kills Monaghan. While the two are recuperating, Johnny tortures and kills Monaghan’s best friend Pat, leading to a rampage by Monaghan and Natt that leaves Johnny, Moe, and Nightfist dead.

A number of lighter story lines follow, although they are still filled with shootouts and dead bodies. “The Final Night” crossover “The Night the Lights Went Out in Gotham” features the gang telling short tales about their past. “Local Heroes” introduces Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent Truman, who wants to recruit Monaghan; features an appearance by Green Lantern Kyle Raynor; and results in the corrupt police captain Burns finally getting her comeuppance. “Zombie Night at the Gotham Aquarium” pulls the gang into a twisted fight against zombie penguins, seals, and other creatures and leads to Hacken losing his hand.

The six-part “Ace of Killers” story ties up a number of loose ends from Ennis and McRea’s run on The Demon and from earlier issues of Hitman. The Mawzir tricks Catwoman into stealing the Ace of Winchesters, an old gun capable of killing demons. Monaghan, Natt, and Tiegel get drawn into the resulting conflict, and join Catwoman and Jason Blood in the fight. Catwoman blinds Mawzir with her claws, allowing Monaghan to use the Ace of Winchesters to destroy Mawzir and leave Etrigan in charge of Hell. This story introduces the group of humorous washout heroes known as Section Eight and also strands comic-relief demon Baytor on Earth, where he eventually gets a job at Noonan’s bar.

After a pair of one-shots featuring guest artist Steve Pugh, the next major story line is “Who Dares Wins.” The Special Air Service (SAS), aware of the fact that Natt and Monaghan accidentally ambushed and killed a group of them in Iraq, wants revenge. Given approval to hunt Natt and Monaghan by the U.S. Marine Corps, a team of agents nearly kills them before getting caught up inadvertently in yet another mob war. The resulting war leads to the death of the entire SAS team, and the midstory kidnapping of Noonan reinforces his importance to Monaghan. In the follow-up story line, “Tommy’s Heroes,” Monaghan and Natt train mercenaries and lead a rebellion in Africa while the gang heat in Gotham cools down.

Issue 34, “Of Thee I Sing,” the Eisner Award winner for Best Single Issue in 1999, features a conversation between Monaghan and Superman, the one hero the former always looked up to. Superman meets Monaghan on a rooftop but has no idea of what he does for a living. They start talking, and Superman reveals his disappointment in his inability to save an astronaut and to live up the ideals for which he stands. Monaghan reassures Superman that the hero stands for the hope of the American Dream for everyone, and Superman flies away reassured even as Monaghan gets ready to kill a drug kingpin.

The two-part “Katie” introduces (and kills off) Monaghan’s half sister Frances and reveals that Monaghan’s birth father was a violent man named Tom Dawson who killed Monaghan’s prostitute mother, Kate. Monaghan kills his father in revenge for the murders of Kate and Frances. This is followed by a vampire battle in “Dead Man’s Land,” a crossover with the Batman “No Man’s Land” story arc in which Gotham is ravaged by an earthquake.

“For Tomorrow” focuses on hit man Ringo, who finds himself hunted in revenge for one of his killings. Ringo and Monaghan both get kidnapped by the villainous Waterman, and although they fight their way free, the resulting battle kills Ringo. Monaghan kills both the Waterman and his employer in revenge. After a battle against some displaced dinosaurs, the next story line, “The Old Dog,” has yet another mob attack, leaving Noonan dead. A touching epilogue to this story shows that of the entire crew, only Hacken and Baytor will be alive in fifty years. Sure enough, in the next story line, “Superguy,” the slaughter of most of Section 8 occurs, with drunken leader Sixpack sacrificing himself to save the planet from a group of demons.

The final story line, “Closing Time,” ties up various loose ends. When Maggie, a woman Monaghan met during “Dead Man’s Land,” reveals her knowledge of secret CIA experiments, Agent Truman returns in an attempt to kill Monaghan. His protégé, Agent McAlister, turns against him, but the small crew of heroes is not nearly enough to overcome everything Truman has to throw at them. Both Monaghan and Natt have extended flashback sequences, revealing their childhoods and their paths to crime. In the final battle, as the heroes rescue Maggie and run for McAllister’s helicopter, Natt is shot and begs Monaghan not to let him be captured for Truman’s experiments. Monaghan runs from the helicopter and dies in a blaze of glory, taking out Truman in the process. As he and Natt lay dying, they discuss Monaghan’s dream in which the entire cast is reunited in a gunless world at Noonan’s bar.

Volumes

•Hitman: A Rage in Arkham (1997). Collects issues 1-3; Demon Annual, issue 2; and Batman Chronicles, issue 4. Contains Monaghan’s earliest adventures, one of which includes a confrontation with an entity he believes to be the Joker.

•Hitman: 10,000 Bullets (1998). Collects issues 4-8. Featuring Natt’s first appearance. A reprint of this volume in 2010 also includes Hitman Annual, issue 1, featuring Monaghan and Natt in a Texas gunfight.

•Hitman: Local Heroes (1999). Collects issues 9-14. The original 1999 printing also collects the Hitman Annual, but the 2010 reprint omits it.

•Hitman: Ace of Killers (2000). Collects issues 15-22, featuring the return of assorted characters from The Demon and the evolution of Monaghan’s relationship with Tiegel.

•Hitman: Who Dares Wins (2001). Collects issues 23-28, featuring the battle against the rogue SAS agents.

Characters

•Tommy Monaghan, the protagonist, is a Mafia hit man with a strong moral code. He is always willing to kill criminals, but he will not shoot a police officer or anyone he believes to be innocent. He is loyal to his friends, to the point of being willing to die for them. He is of Irish descent and was raised in an orphanage; he does not discover the identity of his parents until he is an adult. He is a former Marine, but he generally does not maintain many ties to his military past.

•Natt Walls, a.k.a Natt the Hat, is Monaghan’s best friend and also a former Marine. A former gangbanger in Detroit, he flees his hometown for Gotham when members of his old gang suspect him of turning on them. Although rather overweight (something Monaghan often gives him grief about), he can hold his own in physical combat; he is also an excellent shot. His nickname comes from the fact that he always wears colorful headpieces.

•Deborah Tiegel is Monaghan’s primary love interest for the majority of the series. A tough African American police officer, she is one of the few honest cops in her department. She finds herself kicked off the force temporarily when she will not go along with her fellow officers’ shenanigans. She lives with her mother and her grandfather. Although she loves Monaghan, she is conflicted about his profession, and they eventually break up when Monaghan comes to the conclusion that he will drag her down with him.

•Sean Noonan owns Noonan’s bar and is a former hit man himself. Long retired, he raised Monaghan along with his biological nephew, Pat. He is a father figure to both of them. Like Monaghan and Natt, he is a former Marine, having served during the Korean War (1950-1953). He won his bar in a poker game, and it has become a popular hangout for criminals.

•Ringo Chen is Monaghan’s rival for the title of best hit man in Gotham. A former soldier in China, he was imprisoned and tortured when he refused to shoot innocent civilians; he eventually escaped to the United States. He started working as a hit man for his cousin but soon began freelancing. He believes that he met the embodiment of Death while on a hit and that he will meet Death again when he is about to die.

•Hacken is generally the comic relief, a big dumb guy who talks like a criminal but comes across as generally too incompetent to accomplish anything. He unnecessarily loses his hand while fighting zombies at an aquarium, and the others generally refuse to bring him on jobs (going so far as to knock him out to prevent him from going on the final suicide mission).

•Agent Truman is the primary antagonist during the “Local Heroes” and “Closing Time” story lines. A CIA operative who despises metahumans, he attempts to manipulate the police and Green Lantern against Monaghan. Amoral and sociopathic, he later attempts to re-create the process that created the Bloodline heroes, experimenting on unwilling subjects and turning them into monsters.

•Kathryn McAllister is a former CIA agent and Monaghan’s primary love interest during the final arc of the series. Underneath her cynical exterior, she has a sense of ethics and feels obligated to fight against Truman’s project.

Artistic Style

Keeping pace with a mix of humor, action, and character moments in Hitman, McCrea shifts styles as necessary. For action sequences, he edges into the grotesque, showing half-melted faces, rotting flesh, and blood splattering as people got shot. He rarely uses detailed backgrounds during these sequences, instead highlighting (often in half-page spreads or larger panels) the ever-growing body count. He also relies heavily on onomatopoetic sound effects for everything from gunfire to windows shattering. In spite of the massive amount of on-panel carnage, he keeps the occasional character death off-screen, relying on sound effects and visual cues such as shell casings. Both Navarone and his son, Marc, die off-panel this way.

McCrea also uses goofiness, particularly during scenes set at a local burger restaurant, in which burgers are literally as big as the heads of the characters. Similarly, his depictions of demons such as Baytor (who was almost all mouth and often had a cigar somehow sitting in his maw), are silly without undermining the storytelling.

McCrea also uses some subtle touches. Issue 39, the first issue of the Ringo-centric “For Tomorrow” arc, starts with a full-page shot of Ringo shooting a man that is almost identical to the opening panel of issue 1, featuring Monaghan in the same pose, nicely setting the tone for the story line. During more sedate moments, or when working with DC Universe characters such as Superman, Batman, and Green Lantern, McCrea shifts to a more traditional superhero style, keeping the characters looking more like the DC house style than the more cartoony action style he normally employed.

Themes

The primary theme of Hitman is that murder begets murder. Although Monaghan and his crew attempt to live by a moral code, death comes back to haunt characters throughout (literally in Ringo’s case). Many of the antagonists, from Dubelz to Richard Harcourt in “A Better Tomorrow” and Marc Navarone in the final story line, are seeking revenge for the deaths of family members, a cycle that costs all of them their lives. Likewise, the only member of the regulars at Noonan’s bar to survive the series is the almost childlike Hacken, as the cycle of violence claims the lives of everyone else (even those, such as Sixpack and Monaghan’s sister Frances, who are merely caught in its wake). This can certainly be contrasted with Gotham’s most famous resident, Batman, who will not kill his antagonists under any circumstances and who seems to thrive in Gotham.

Family, for good or for ill, is the other major recurring theme. Monaghan’s biological father was a horrible man, but most of the supporting characters have strong ties. Tiegel lives with her loving grandfather and mother; Sean raises his nephew Pat and takes care of him; and Natt will not curse because of a promise to his dying mother. Even those who do not have a biological family form familial units built around loyalty and trust. Monaghan’s own crew is very much his family, so much so that when Sean dies, his tombstone reads, “beloved father.” Furthermore, Monaghan, at the end, is given the chance for freedom, but he chooses to die with his best friend, who is clearly his brother in spirit, if not biologically.

On a metafictional level, Hitman is an homage to Hong Kong action movies. Ringo is named after director Ringo Lam, and his primary arc, “A Better Tomorrow,” shares its name with a classic film by John Woo. Almost every issue is peppered with firefights that border on ludicrous, with thousands of bullets flying around, unbelievable action sequences, copious amounts of gore, and honor-driven killings that constantly escalate. This is almost exactly like many of the Hong Kong classics, including films such as Hard Boiled (1992), The Killer (1989), and Full Contact (1992).

Impact

Hitman often bridged the gap between the DC Universe’s superhero line and adult titles published by DC’s Vertigo imprint. Although the series lacked the nudity and adult language of the Vertigo books, the high gore factor, incredible body count, and multiple postcoital seminude scenes were certainly beyond what most DC Universe books showed at the time. Although Hitman certainly cannot take sole credit for the increasing popularity of crime comics, it helped pave the way for Ennis’s run on Marvel’s The Punisher (which began in 1995), which revived interest in Marvel’s most notorious crime character and likely helped create an atmosphere in which other crime comics, such as 100 Bullets (1999-2009), could thrive.

Further Reading

Ennis, Garth, and Darrick Robertson. The Boys (2006- ).

Ennis, Garth, et al. The Punisher (2004-2009).

Waid, Mark, and Peter Krause. Irredeemable (2009- ).

Bibliography

Booker, M. Keith. Encyclopedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2010.

Fagan, Bryan D., and Jody Condit Fagan. Comic Book Collections for Libraries. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Libraries Unlimited, 2011.

Wolk, Douglas. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2007.