Preacher Vol. 1: Gone to Texas

Oh, PREACHER. Where have you been all my life?

This is my second time reading the first volume of the series, a sort of catch-me-up since I got the rest now. Rather than the official collection, I've been reading the original releases (editor columns and all) and oh man, what a pleasure this is.

The story is wonderful enough, but the letters are just golden. From the "send in your favorite curse word" to the "Arseface lookalike contest" this stuff is plain fantastic. I can't wait to read the rest of this run, and quickly hunt down everything else Ennis and Dillon have done.

The first volume of Preacher contains all the elements that make this series great. The trinity of Jesse Custer, Tulip, and Cassidy; insanely graphic, almost cartoon but still too too real violence; an awesomely vulgar sense of humor; angels; devils; God (or the lack thereof); the Saint of Killers; and John Wayne. Somehow, all that mixed together makes perfect sense. Oh, and Aresface, let's not forget him. Garth Ennis writes some very real characters and puts them in increasingly bizarre situations to see how they react. Steve Dillon's artwork is perfect for the story; the man knows how to draw him some gunshot injuries, let me tell you. At any rate, this series is of course not for the easily offended, but it is wicked good fun for the show more rest of us. show less

I'm assuming Mr. Ennis wrote this while he was in a asylum? Yea, yea I know I'm a little late to this party but usually supernatural horror isn't my thing. It IS my wife's thing so I got it "for her" as a gift, and as long as she already had it, I decided to read it (please don't compare me to Homer buying Marge a bowling ball with HIS name on it - I hate bowling).

So I'm definitely hooked but I do have to say this feels pretty dated by now. It bears the stench of the 90's. For me that's okay because I was 26 when it came out, just curious if younger kids will have a problem with it. Also I'm not really a fan of Fabry's artistic style. I get it that they wanted a kind of rough, dirty, style to complement the rough dirty happenings in the show more book but I tend to like the smoother, shinier comic styles or the totally painted stuff.

I'm giving it 4 stars because I loved Cassidy and the originality of the story. Also liked Officer Tool a lot and some of the dialogue was hilarious.

I'm wondering whatever happened to the sheriff's deformed son? If he comes back don't tell me. They named him Arseface so I think he's coming back for revenge. show less

Si existen los límites de la decencia, Preacher se asegura de destruirlos a conciencia. No queda títere con cabeza: violencia, vísceras, palabrotas, amoralidad, sexo y cosas de esas que no son aptas para todos los públicos.

En este primer tomo se nos cuentan muchas cosas: un ser omnipotente escapa de su prisión custodiada por ángeles e invade el cuerpo de un predicador de laxa virtud llamado Jesse Custer, que recibe el poder de LA VOZ: todo el mundo hace lo que él diga y ya está. Dios decide dejar el tema de gobernar los cielos al mismo tiempo, y a Jesse como que no le parece muy bien. Con la ayuda de una ex-novia que por el motivo que sea trabaja como asesina a sueldo y un vampiro cuyos modales dejan bastante que desear, piensa show more plantarle cara al Altísimo y encontrar respuestas.

Es en esa búsqueda de Dios cuando cruzan sus caminos con un periodista que es amigo de Cassidy, el vampiro, y que está especializado en cosas escabrosas, hasta el punto de ser asesino en serie porque ser noticia es más fácil que encontrarlas. Tienen un escarceo, y la palma.

Es recomendable para gente que no busca sofisticación ni melindres de esos. Aquí lo que hay es una falta de decoro absoluta, y el guión es íntegramente one-liners épicos de películas de acción que no voy a reproducir porque apenas hay alguna viñeta que no diga un taco. Hay humor, terror, tiros, asesinos que no se detienen nunca, gente con el rostro cortado, sesos y uno que tiene la cara como un culo. Diversión de principio a fin. show less

N.B. This is a comment on the entire series. Generalized story spoilers follow.

The more I read of this series, the more I found hard to enjoy. Ennis' writing style carries a lot of frustration with it, and a lot of it is born of the series' time. It ain't as timeless as the classics of similar length (e.g., Sandman), and part of why is Ennis spent too much of the '90s channeling the voice of a million other snarky 20-somethings channeling the voice of Bill Hicks. (Update: The series even ends with a Bill Hicks quote about the themes this series wished it covered....)

[N.B. This review includes images, and was revised and formatted for my site, dendrobibliography -- located here.]

By the 'Dixie Fried' arc, it's pretty clear all 3 of our show more heroes are dumb, self-obsessed assholes with really confused morals. That arc and vol. 4 ('Ancient History'), a collection of spin-off stories, were the ones to really break it for me. Earlier, the occasional anti-feminist, anti-PC rant shared between our heroes felt like jokes poking light-hearted fun at all sides--but that feeling completely vanished in Vol. 5. This series shifts between light-hearted lampooning of all sides to didactic moralizing so frequently that you can't really keep up with whether Jesse's latest speech is genuine or farcical in its condescension. In the 'Dixie Fried' arc, Ennis moves to make Tulip a strong female character by taking that phrase too literally, having her pick up a gun and drop a lot of F-bombs and repeat how she doesn't need coddling on far too many pages and for far too much of the dang story...only to break down over and over again because she can't live without a strong man telling her what to do. Eck. (Having finished the series, my final opinion is that Ennis was just naive and ignorant of feminism (which may itself simply be a product of the time), and his message, while hopefully feminist, is ultimately condescending and gross.)

By vol. 5, Cassidy loses all personality and just obsesses over Tulip like a lovesick puppy for literally years of this comic's run. All the while she drags both him and herself through the dirt, creating some godawful melodramatic dialogue and action. With literally a single line from Cassidy, the direction of the story swerves wildly away from Jesse's powers and God--an interesting, if barely-developed angle that never feels legitimate for this very reason (& that its commentary on religion reads like the musings of a grumpy teen...)--towards the shallowest sort of melodrama about a couple shitty people driven only by blind, unbelievable love and really stupid views on friendship and honor that were clearly filtered through small-town Texas stereotypes.

Jesse Custer also turns into the grossest sort of Mary Sue, frequently stopping to look into the reader's eyes and twinkle out these obnoxious, didactic, stupid speeches about how the world really works (Bill Willingham, yeah? or, see Bill Hicks again)--which no one ever questions, because even when a character like Jesse Custer does wrong, he's still doing so with a good heart who wants nothing better than to save ugly or 'dumb' people, or--of course--sexy babes who fawn over how perfect he is.

Well...it seems it's too easy to fall into a ramble when thinking about Preacher's wealth of flaws. Aside from these issues (& the many unsaid), the series is still fun, and I was so swept up that it only took me a couple weeks to read the whole series. It's just too bad the negative crap completely eclipsed what was so enjoyable after the third collection.

Series rundown:
1. Gone to Texas - 6/10
2. Until the End of the World - 8/10
3. Proud Americans - 7/10
4. Ancient History - 5/10 *
5. Dixie Fried - 4/10
6. War in the Sun - 5/10
7. Salvation - 6/10
8. All Hell's A-Coming - 4/10
9. Alamo - 5/10

* Vol. 4 is a collection of specials not connected to the main plot. The 'Saint of Killers' 4-part miniseries was actually quite a good imitation of the western myth, and the last thing I really enjoyed from the Preacher series; it's just that the subsequent one-shot specials included alongside it and in later volumes are never worth anyone's time, never add anything to the narrative world that hadn't been said before, and sometimes even detract from established character development or plot (see most notably: 'Tall in the Saddle'). show less

Accidentally possessed by a supernatural creature, ex-preacher Jesse teams up with his former girlfriend and an Irish vampire to journey across the US in order to find, quite literally, the God who has abandoned Heaven. I have to say, I was somewhat baffled by this in the beginning, but very soon begun to love it, mainly because, despite the blood and gore and violence, Jesse is inherently a very moral character (albeit with slightly iffy ethics) and he has a lot to say without getting preachy (no pun intended). It's very clever without getting pretentious and also extremely funny - the characters are really carrying their weight in that sense. Looking forward to continuing the series.

While I'm not a fan, there's a lot of stuff I like about "Preacher". There are some memorable characters, a pretty good premise, usually quite good dialogue. There's a lot of stuff I don't like. I find the amount of violence and degradations to be juvenile -- too extreme for much entertainment value (after a while it's just unpleasant), and too frequent for emotional or shock value (it quickly becomes self-parodical). The approach to the supernatural forces is shallow -- too big in scope and form to work as parody, too mundane and simplistic to work as cool or awe-inspiring.

Thankfully, this review is just for the first volume, and here, most of what makes me less thrilled by the series as a whole is less present. Though, sure, there's show more the Jesse-Tulip relationship, which in this first volume feels very... icky. The only female character in the whole book keeps saying she's not interested in the protagonist (who has a backstory of having abandoned her without explanation), and yet we're somehow supposed to (with her) be reluctantly charmed at his insistance she wants to sleep with him. On the trade-off, though, there's Jesse's relationship with Cassidy, which is easy, believable and very endearing. I also find the (on paper rather filler) serial killer plot in the second arc to be very well done, with a great red herring and a creepy resolution. The Saint of Killers is still cool and scary, having yet to become a character so Mary Sue'd that his very existence just irritates me, several supporting characters are memorable (the stoic, redneck sheriff and the unlucky detective in particular stood out to me), and -- romantic ickyness aside -- the three core characters have an immediate and fun dynamic to them that sucks me into the story quite well. It's also early enough in the plot that the angelic interactions are more interesting than disappointing to me, so the fantasy aspect is still working in its favour -- even though when the otherwise quite consistently clever Jesse never seems to bother to think through how to get the most of his uses of his Word of God power, that is another minor nuiscance rubbing me the wrong way over and over.

(Feel free to skip this paragraph unless you want to know more about my thoughts on the violence in particular: Because, I should note about that, I quite love Ennis' "Punisher" run, which might on the face of it be said to have all the same problems with the extreme violence portrayals. The difference is, there (to my subjective experience) it's gratifying violence. Horrible people are almost exclusively the victims of it -- as ensuring that is literally the premise of the Punisher character -- so it's not just constantly happening to everyone, everywhere, good, bad and everything between. To me, it's neither very interesting, upsetting or funny seeing a villain be gruesomely molested when three other characters have been through similar experiences in the last fifty pages, which is how I sometimes feel it goes when reading "Preacher".)

I originally read "Preacher" well over a decade ago, borrowing volumes 2 and onwards from a friend. I reread this now to see what I thought of it this long after, if my impressions would hold. All in all, they did. There's a lot in here to like. There's also a lot I don't, and (the awesomely horrific grandma aside) I'm pretty sure I remember feeling all of those issues getting a lot worse moving forward. So while I'll keep volume 1 in the collection, and maybe even revisit it again in another decade or so, I don't think I'll ever buy the rest of the run. Someone else's cup of tea. show less