Tommy Monaghan isn't your typical anti-hero. Sure, he shoots up the bad guys just like the Punisher (who Ennis would go on to write for, unsurprisingly) but his speciality is super-villians. Odd considering that some (including Batman) see Monaghan as a super-villian himself. He was granted X-ray vision and telepathy when he was bitten by a giant alien space vampire parasite (no, I'm not making that up).
Although, Ennis is creative when it comes to explaining things like how the protagonist got his powers, that's not what makes Hitman so fresh. Ennis writes Tommy as a very real person with hopes, dreams and even doubts. We see him trying to court a lovely new neighbor that he has recently met, we see him dreaming of retiring and moving to Manhatten. We sympathize with him.
Another strong factor is that the book never takes itself too seriously. Besides his zany origin story, Tommy only refers to himself as "the Hitman" twice and one of the times he's mocked for it. There's also one of my favorite Batman scenes where Batman punches Tommy in the stomach, forcing Tommy to vomit on Batman's shoes. There's a single panel where Batman just stares at Tommy in shock and disgust. It's brilliant.
The book itself doesn't just collect the first arc of the Hitman series, it also includes the introduction of Hitman (which came from The Demon Annual #2) and his first meeting with Batman (from The Batman Chronicles #4). It was very nice of DC to put together the apocraphyal readings so that we could better understand the character without having to hunt down these two obscure books on our own.
McCrea's art is solid throughout the book, but he never seems to hit his stride until Hitman gets his own series. While I mean no disrespect to McCrea's work from the other two books, it's just not as solid as the art from the ongoing series.
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