I loved this series as a teenager, although I didn’t start reading it until it was close to the end of its run. My father often took me to the comic store as a kid, but I was until a certain age only allowed to browse through old issues of DC and Marvel titles, the ones originally priced, as indicated on their covers, at 35 or 40 cents, and kept in protective coverings in a separate part of the store from the new releases; my parents justified this to me at the time with the sophistry that new comics were ‘crazy’, and that the writers had ‘run out of ideas.’ I guess I must have been twelve or thirteen before I developed the chutzpah to take one of the individual issues of Preacher up to the counter.
The story follows a Texas preacher, Jesse Custer, whose mind is invaded by an entity that is half angel and half demon (I hate when that happens, personally); the entity informs him that god has abandoned his responsibilities in heaven and now walks the earth. Jesse, his girlfriend Tulip, and an Irish vampire named Cassidy decide to search for god, to confront him and make him answer for the misery of the world he’s made. There is also a villain named Herr Starr, who- I can’t quite remember- is the leader or highest ranking member of some secretive cult of some sort, and I think he wants to use Jesse as his own messiah, a figurehead, for…well, it’s hard to remember now, but surely for some nefarious purpose or other. Preacher will soon apparently be adapted into a TV show, and most likely not a good one, but I’ll at least watch the first episode. I haven’t read it in years, and I think there are elements of the story that would now make me cringe, but I feel confident in the memory that Ennis is a great writer of dialogue, of confrontational moments, and that the series is frequently both dramatic and hilarious. Preacher is very cinematic, influenced by the morality and simple plot construction of Clint Eastwood, John Wayne and John Woo; it’s almost all dialogue and action, no thought bubbles or narrative boxes or notes to the reader like “see Amazing Spider-Man #335- ed.” The artwork helps with that too; it takes us to the deep rural south, early twentieth century New York, revolutionary Ireland, New Orleans, Monument Valley, and finally, San Antonio and the Alamo.
Like Dickens and Tolstoy in centuries past, Ennis (and the majority of comic book writers, I guess) was writing this as he went along, which means that he couldn’t go back and fix or change something in a previously released issue, if he needed to. I have no idea how far ahead he and Dillon were, but I do remember that the monthly issue was never late (I also remember there were certain comics at the time that got a lot of hype but would routinely be months late; people eventually lost interest); nevertheless, some of the early issues of the series seem improvisational. This collection is where the series started to hit its stride, in my opinion. The next story, collected as War in the Sun, in which Herr Starr detonates a nuclear bomb in Monument Valley (I never claimed the story was plausible), is also great. But I think that this collection in particular, in which Jesse, Tulip and Cassidy go to New Orleans in search of a practitioner of voodoo who may be able to help Jesse locate god, is where Ennis started to realize what a complex and interesting character he had in Cassidy, Jesse’s alcoholic, jealous, pathetic, loyal friend. It also moves beyond the, well, comic-book violence of many of the earlier installments, and focuses instead on one specific act of violence, and all of its horrible ramifications.
Ennis was always confident enough in his sense of story to digress freely about whatever he wanted. This is also the collection in which Jesse relates to Cassidy, while they walk around the French Quarter, having wandered into a bar where the late comedian Bill Hicks happened to be performing; and they just talk about Bill Hicks for about five pages.
Years after I read this I lived and worked in New Orleans, post-Katrina; but most of the downtown area was undamaged, and I could still remember the images from this comic.