Preacher:
Preacher, written by Garth Ennis, that brilliantly twisted man, has as one of itīs primary merits and absolute distiction of doing something no other comic book have managed to do in living memory, make me nauseous. No mean feat, I assure you. The image of the Saint of Killers wading through a small army of Grail soldiers, blowing them apart with his impossibly deadly guns, seeing them explode like bags of inflated meat, leaving ragged flesh and spurting veins exposed, made me feel distinctly queasy. Furthermore. seeing all this (and more!)
captured on the pages of a more or less mainstream comic book, well, itīs a bit of a shock.
Naturally, the artist deserves his credit, but none of this had happened without mr. Ennis warped
mind to concive it. But, gore and guts aside, what's the comic about?
It's about one mans search for God, but we are very far from "Moby Dick" here, or perhaps possibly a Moby Dick envisioned by a 20th century Herman Melville on bad acid, influenced by old westerns and roadmovies, but with more guns and badder language. It's basically a blast, and I feel a thrill every time mr. Ennis manages to pull that magic trick to make me feel nauseated again, by simply making everything so wonderously depraved. To make a twenty-something year old male in todays western civilization nauseus by the depiction of graphic violence is quite a feat. But I appear to have lost myself in a de Sadean praise of the violence in the book.
It of course also have it's litterary merits, on the same basis as The Sandman in that it provides wonderfully well sculpted characters and interesting conflicts.
The story is as follows; Jesse Custer is a small town preacher whose church and entire congregation is destroyed during a sermon by glowing ball of light that kills everyone except him. When he wakes up in the ruins he soon discovers that he now has the Voice, that is, the Voice of God, and that he can tell people to do anything, and they will do it. He can tell them to count all the grains of sand on a beach, or to burst into flame, or die, and they will. He decides to find God so that he can ask him a few questions about the world and his new powers. On the road he learns that the power comes from Genesis, the child of an angel and a demon that escaped from heaven and now lives inside him. He also learns that God has been missing from heaven ever since. He's joined in his quest by a former girlfriend turned assassain and an 100-year old irish vampire. But there's lots of people that wants Jesse either dead or under his control. Heaven wants Genesis dead, and that means killing Jesse too, so they send the Saint of Killers after him, a resurrected gunman from the old west now transformed into the angel of death. Then there's the Grail, an organisation led by a man named Starr, that has guarded the descendants of Jesus Christ for 2000 years, and now needs Jesse to provide miracles for them. And Jesses own grandmother, who has her own plans for him.
It's not a book for people with low tolerance of any kind, and I'm sure most people will find something to offend them somewhere. That may in itself be something to recommend it.
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Preacher and all associated characters are TM and Copyright DC Comics. I am making no profit from these pages nor are any copyright infringement intended. So there!