“I got a chance to do somethin’ good here. I can use this damn word I got to find the Lord God and make him do right by us all.”—Jesse Custer
The Preacher and Tulip are on their All American Road trip in the tradition of Kerouac and The Swamp Thing, though in Jesse’s version he aims to find the True Christ that Abandoned the World and Left it to Go to Hell. This leg is the Native American Spiritual one, (sort of), though mainly they are in the southwest for the peyote. Yeah, he’s that kinda ecumenical Preacher!
As his Irish vampire good buddy Cassidy says of him, in the waxing-philosophical-while-drinking section of this hyar Southern gothic volume: “I’ve never met a man like yeh, Jesse. You’re a terrible man for carryin’ the weight of the world on your shoulders.”
Yessir, he’s a good guy, is Custer. And we get to see he and Tulip, with their solid loving relationship, quite a bit in this volume, yay. But we have a foil to help us see Jesse’s goodness, Herr Starr, whose back-story we get to see at the beginning of the volume.
Starr is an angry guy, a “Christian” longing for order and world domination, unemotional. We see him getting involved in a highjacking in 1972, and in 1975, a plan for Armaggedon. Yep. A group of Christians is planning on destroying the planet in preparation for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. “Christ is with us. We have protected his lineage since the Crucifixion. We are the Grail that has preserved the sacred blood of Christ.” They can’t allow the bloodline to be compromised, so they have one remaining brother and sister who they are counting on to produce the New Christ. I know, but you don’t have to watch that happen, whew.
In 1982 Starr finally meets D’Aronique, the Allfather, this profoundly obese Pope-like guy whose son is now born to preserve the Pure Line of Jesus Christ. Starr (think Kenneth Starr, the guy who helped prosecute former President Clinton for the horrors of oral sex and you may get the political side our hero the Preacher is working on) works for D’Aronique for a time. Starr knows this whole scenario is nuts, and he plans to kill Allfather. In fact, Starr kills all sorts of people in his desire to get what he wants. Someone notes:
“So you have become a monster to save the world.”
“If that’s what it takes.” –Starr
Now where have we heard that kind of talk before? Kill the world in order to save it.
Starr also says, “Democracy is for the ancient Greeks.”
Anyway, I am way into this now, in spite of the sometime offensiveness, and sometimes because of it. There are lots of battles in this one involving Starr, Preacher, and the Saint of All Killers, who surprisingly makes peace with Our Preacher, but on the whole the action is pretty standard violent comics fare until Something Horrific has to happen, something comically over the top violent, though luckily it happens to Starr, who gets captured by a couple guys in the desert. X-rated for sex and violence. We have to go infantile in every book of this series, it is part of its DNA, like it or hate it.
I very much liked most of this book until a kind of standard ho hum “Good Old Southern Boys” story gets thrown in for kicks in the last issue of the volume, eh. And that issue and a couple of others were drawn by other artists, eh. Overall, 4.5, I’d say.