Tuesday, February 23, 2021

Preacher (comic) - Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon


 After seeing friends talk about the Preacher TV show - which disappointed us so much that we stopped watching after a few episodes - I searched out and finally dug up the graphic novels that we bought back in the day - 25+ years ago - how is that possible? My lovely wife discovered this - one more reason that I'm grateful to have married the coolest chick on the planet - and it became such an important part of our lives that we have a quote from the comic inscribed in our wedding rings! Yes, we are that geeky!

The story, in a nutshell, is that an angel and a demon had a lovechild, a new concept with incredible powers, which escaped heaven and inhabited Jesse Custer, who at the time was a fucked up, drunken preacher in a small town in Texas. This inhabitation causes an explosion killing his entire congregation and drawing the attention of his ex, Tulip, and a wandering vampire, Cassady, and they all team up to search for God, who has abandoned his post (due to Genesis, the lovechild) and left Earth to its own devices! Whew!

As all three are first class fighters, and Jesse now has the "word of God", which means that he can make anyone do anything by simply telling them to, this exploration runs afoul of an incredible cast of characters, from law enforcement to the Saint of Killers to angels to the Grail (a secret group keeping the bloodline of Jesus pure) to Jesse's truly insane family to, eventually, God Almighty, himself.

Dillon's artwork explores the sexy and the bloody, with plenty of intimate exchanges of both types, and an emphasis on grotesque destruction of human beings. Ennis does kinda revel in the gore, but at the same time he explores everyone's motivations, paranoias, friendships, power struggles, family issues (to say the least) and much more, but the bond between Jesse and Tulip was especially strong and while we would obviously never go on a cross country, blood-soaked spree, we could relate to their intimacy.

I've just started getting back into this and while some of the tangents are not as strong as the others, the story writing is still completely compelling, right from the start. As I said, I gave up on the TV series since it bastardized J&T's relationship, so I can't speak on how that turned out later and whether fans of the show could even relate to the comic, but anyone who wants to have a violent, blasphemous good time, the comics have been reissued several times, apparently. Terrific stuff!

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