Garth Ennis teams up with his A Walk Through Hell artist Goran Sudzuka and colorist Miroslav Mrva to tell a cheeky, breezy cop vs criminal time travel story in Marjorie Finnegan: Temporal Criminal #1. Ennis uses a simple dual protagonist setup in this first issue. Marjorie uses her time travel tech to steal treasures from the past and generally have a good time using her “Unfucker” to avoid any anomalies or angry fanboys who spend every spare moment watching “Cinema Sins” and bitching and moaning about “plot holes” in the Back to the Future films. She enjoys David Bowie records and has a human head named Tim to do all the tech stuff. On the other hand, there’s Harri, who is your typical time cop and trying to make sure that no one is having fun in the time stream.

Misogynistic dialogue, mysterious guys being creepy to Marjorie, and some cultural insensitivity aside, Marjorie Finnegan is really toned down for an Ennis comic, especially in the violence department. (A lone Viking taking a point blank machine gun shot to the chest aside.) He and Sudzuka lean into the novelty of people having modern weapons in the past and live off Marjorie pumping Rameses’ soldiers full of shotgun shells and another rogue time traveler named Otto protecting some unnamed European coast from Vikings. Goran Sudzuka and Miroslav Mrva’s art is easy to follow with fun touches like shell casings, severed limbs in silhouette, and choreographed dance moves. Everyone is generally having a good time.

Much of the humor in Marjorie Finnegan: Temporal Criminal comes from Garth Ennis poking fun at the seriousness and logic (Or lack of logic) in time travel stories and dropping funny captions for each person that Harri and Marjorie kill with the fate they avoided. It’s a toss up if being perforated by bullets that make you look like a cheese grater, or autoerotic asphyxiation is a worse way to go out. The whole time travel thing is just an opportunity for Sudzuka to draw fun action sequences in interesting locales, or Ennis to indulge his love of history and go into great detail about the burial rituals of Egyptian pharaohs. (But in any time period, David Bowie and cold pizza are always cool.) They can do Doctor Who with more sex and violence and about the same amount of dancing while setting up Marjorie and Harri as the proverbial immovable object and unstoppable force with the final page hinting at the true nature of their conflict in future issues.

He’s already done Preacher, Hitman, a definitive Punisher run, and hopefully he’s rolling in The Boys money so Garth Ennis really has nothing to prove to anyone any more. Marjorie Finnegan: Temporal Criminal #1 is living proof of that and is the comic book equivalent of a fast food meal. But, one of the classier places like Cook Out, In-N-Out, or Skyline Chili thanks to the energy of Goran Sudzuka’s art and the brightness of Miroslav Mrva’s color palette. Marjorie Finnegan is an action-comedy with better shootouts than one-liners and hopefully, future issues find that balance.

Story: Garth Ennis Art: Goran Sudzuka
 Colors: Miroslav Mrva Letters: Rob Steen
Story: 7.0 Art: 7.6 Overall: 7.3 Recommendation: Read

AWA/Upshot provided Graphic Policy with a FREE copy for review

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