The latest season of Preacher airs tonight, and if this season is as good as the last two, I’ll be eagerly watching. The show is fantastic, and along with the Punisher series on Netflix, has drawn attention back to the fantastic work that Garth Ennis did in comics during his heyday in the mid-90s to the mid-2000s. While his work with Preacher, The Punisher and Hellblazer was masterful, and deserve the attention, I want to take a look at what I feel is Ennis’ best work, one of the best runs on comics of the modern era, and one of my dear favorites, DC Comics’ Hitman.

I grew up with comics in the 90s, so a lot of what other comic fans may dismiss as embarrassing relics of the Dark Age of Comics, I have a lot of affection for, and feel too many comic fans rush to toss out some real gems with admittedly a fair amount of trash. While these gems range from Lobo to the Peter David run of Aquaman, few shine brighter or have proven as memorable as Hitman.

Hitman began the way most new 90s comic book characters did – as part of a god-awful crossover comic that has since been more or less forgotten, along with almost everything and everyone it introduced. In this case, the crossover was called Bloodlines, which featured an alien invasion that gave a whole bunch of people superpowers, in an attempt to add some new blood to the DC Universe. They were almost all terrible – and in ways that I really want to come back and talk about someday – and almost all cancelled and forgotten in under a year. All but one, an Irish-American hired gun named Tommy Monaghan who gained X-ray vision, mild telepathy and deformed black eyes from this crossover. Where the other heroes floundered, Tommy took off, and after a few successful guest appearances, starred in his own comic, Hitman.

What followed was 60 plus issues of one of the most memorable runs in modern comics, with Hitman featuring graphic violence and utterly gripping storytelling, and alternating in tone between being brilliantly bleak and darkly comic. Hitman would usually follow story arcs that took Tommy and his crew from hunting zombies in the Gotham Aquarium, fleeing for their lives from an SAS revenge squad, serving as mercenaries in Africa, or even just struggling to make ends meet back in Gotham.

A major part of the appeal of Hitman, more so than action scenes seemingly adapted from John Woo and John Carpenter movies, is the black humor infused into the series by Garth Ennis, who strikes a better balance between violence and comedy in Hitman than in his later works. This is often best on display during the various DC crossovers which Hitman was a part of, and almost always to take the piss out of them.

Hitman #8, which took place during The Final Night crossover, when a giant alien ate the sun, has Tommy and his mates hole up in the local bar, waiting to see if the Justice League will save the day (again), resigning themselves to the end of the world if they fail this time, and deciding to get shitfaced drunk either way. The gang takes the occasion to swap stories about their closest encounters with death, some funny, some chilling, all memorable. In what could have been another throwaway issue from another forgotten crossover, Hitman delivers a humanizing look at its cast, and a fatalistic peek at how average joes might cope with a world constantly in danger of ending.

Hitman was also capable of incredible sincerity – in a series that took the piss out of folks ranging from Batman to Green Lantern, the most memorable guest appearance comes from Superman. The issue, Hitman #34, has Tommy and Superman chatting on a roof top about heroism, dealing with failure, and the American Dream. In a series that often mocked superheroes, from Ennis, an author known for doing much the same, it’s telling that the issue reads as one of the best Superman stories of the past 30 years, and serves as a love letter to the Man of Steel. It even won the Eisner Award to that effect.

Tommy Monaghan himself makes for a great character, and his ups and downs form one of the big charms of Hitman. In spite of his superpowers – or perhaps because of their limited use and applications – Tommy relies mostly on his wits and skill with a gun to take town his targets, which range from mob bosses to supervillains to vampires.

In an era filled with dozens of antiheroes, Tommy is one of the best, because of how human he is, and how he is trying to be something more, sometimes he wins, and a lot of times, he loses. He struggles to pay his bills, he has relationship problems with his on-and-off girlfriend. While he has rules – he only takes hits on criminals or villains – he’s a contract killer, and even given the chance to walk away, he admits its the one job he’s ever been good at. In the man’s own words:

“I ain’t a hero. I’m just this guy shoots creeps for a livin’ and blows the money on booze an’ gamblin’. Some day I’m gonna get shot twice in the head when I’m least expectin’ it, an’ then they’re gonna throw my ass in a ditch. An’ you know what? So long as I did right by my buddies an’ I never turned into a total dirtbag — I won’t care.”

It also helps that Hitman takes the time to flesh out it’s setting and supporting cast to an impressive degree, one many comics today could learn from. Noonan’s Sleazy Bar is as fleshed out a setting as the Batcave or the Daily Planet, and it’s denizens make for quite the cast of scoundrels. Natt the Hat, Tommy’s best friend and former Gulf War squadmate. Ringo Chen, another fellow hitman that wouldn’t be out of place in any classic Chow Yun Fat movie. Hacken, the dopey comic relief. Sean Noonan, Tommy’s adopted father, Korean War vet and one of the rare hitman who can say he lived to retirement. It’s remarkable how much each of them is humanized over the course of the series, and Hitman gets more mileage out of the gang playing poker together, or Tommy and Natt arguing over action movies than most comics get out of splash pages.

You’ve also got Section 8, one of the most colorful super teams in all of comics, whose membership includes the likes of Sixpack, whose power is alcoholism, Bueno Excellente, a perverted middle-aged Mexican man wearing nothing but a trench-coat, and the Dogwelder, who as the name implies, welds dogs to people.

Of course, that lively setting and endearing supporting cast comes at a price: in an era where most 90s comics played very fast and loose with death and resurrection, in Hitman, scars and wounds linger, and the dead stayed dead, permanently. The impact is telling – every bullet counts in Hitman, wounds take issues to heal, and every death, be they for minor characters we’ve only just met, or for main characters who have been there since the beginning, they always hit hard and cut deep. Death is easy and life is cheap in comic books, but I’ve never forgotten the fates of various characters in Hitman.

That really mattered when Hitman‘s last story arc, “Closing Time” began. I dare not spoil anything, but this final act is, in my opinion, one of the best finales I’ve ever seen from a comic book series.

Though there are lots of gems from the so-called Dark Ages of Comics, few of them are as memorable and transcendent as Hitman, a true diamond of the dark age of comics. Like a lot of work from Garth Ennis’ heyday, Hitman seems on the verge of getting attention once again – Section 8 had a miniseries a few years back, Hacken showed up in Superman recently, and there is even rumors of adapting a Hitman TV series, as was done with Preacher and The Punisher.

Hitman should be required reading for any comic book fan, and I cannot urge those interested to read it from first issue to last. Hitman, Tommy Monaghan and the boys at Noonan’s deserve to be revered in the DC Comics pantheon, and are proof that even if they are all such little men, they can leave one hell of a legacy.