Garth Ennis' silliest, melodramatic, likely poorly researched foray into Japanese culture, starring Midnighter and Apollo as swordsmen from sometime in the feudal era. I'm pretty sure it's a dumb story. And yet I'm wrestling with myself over whether I liked it, given that it was pretty much EVERYTHING I WAS HOPING IT WOULD BE. I guess.

Flowers For the Sun--I saw the title, and cracked a grin.

Actually, I was hoping Apollo would make an appearance as a foreign dignitary of some sort, which would more appropriately be the forbidden romance alluded to in the issue's synopsis, xenophobic society and all. And also, Apollo in 16th century or-whatever fancy European duds, yay. But no, the forbiddenness was still that they were OMG HOMOS, which bystander samurai in the issue express disgust with at every possible opportunity (as to be expected of Ennis). Mind you, I don't mean to insinuate that this happens in his writing so frequently as an outlet for Ennis being homophobic himself, when I really do think he means to point out that it's an uncomfortable subject for people. But of ALL the civilizations to try that with, feudal Japan? And this was, again, commentary mostly by other men of, I'm presuming, the samurai class. As if they'd get all, "Le *gasp*, he beds with other men, that's.. so audacious and unseemly and obscene!"

But that's just my nitpicky .. nitpickiness, and anyway, I'm sure this doesn't make sense to anyone yet.

The story: Japanese!Midnighter, swathed in black and queued, retells the story of his rise to the shogun's favor and of his lover to a group of swordsmen he's invited to a gravesite, amid frequent narration interruptions in the form of, "Ewwww, you like teh mens!" The story entails his sudden awakening to violence, recalling nothing of how he came to be in full yoroi and surrounded by the shogun's men, who he was kicking the everliving shit out of. So the shogun hires him on, as one does. And then a white haired man wearing an outfit I can't begin to make any sense out of, except that it looks vaguely Chinese in influence, shows up and is like, "You don't want to fight me, you want to fuck me," to Japanese!Midnighter (this, of course, is .. ostensiblyJapanese!Apollo) so they live together happily and in high favor of the shogun. They are also both extremely, extremely boring. And one night they're in bed together, in their anachronistic undies (nope, not fundoshi, just speedoes) and then they're attacked by 200 ninja and Apollo totally gets pwned.

So the wrap up is that Midnighter has invited all the swordsmen to Apollo's grave so he can slaughter them all. And then pull their hearts out of their chests and leave them in a squishy juicy pile on Apollo's grave--"flowers" for his lover. I'm not making this up. I also found this very romantic, because I am a big freaking girl. (Hey, I always thought violence was romantic for these two.)

In context, there wasn't much I found to love about this issue, and yet completely removed from the, you know, actual reading of the story itself, this is pretty much what I was hoping Ennis' feudal Japan AU oneshot would be about. Minus the death, but that was pretty much what I assumed would happen too. And there was superficial tugging at my fondness for referring to Apollo with sun imagery and they did cross katanas at one point and it's SO STUPID but I.. like.. that. I don't even know if I'm being sarcastic or not XD

Final word: Worth the purchase? If you're like me, and you LOVES YOU SOME CRACK (which really, Ennis is excellent at), pick it up.

EXTRA POINTS FOR THE PANEL OF APOLLO'S SINGLE EMO TEAR, GLENN FABRY!!!

Sorry about the super crappy doodle--I got an art history midterm to be studying for, like, three hours ago.