PREACHER. The whole goddamned thing pardner.

The Saint of Killers

Preacher: The Complete Series (1995-2000): written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by Steve Dillon, Carlos Ezquerra, Richard Case, Steve Pugh, John McCrea, and Peter Snejberg; covers by Glenn Fabry; available in ten volumes, six volumes, or three Absolute editions as well as in the original comics:

Ah, Preacher. Irish-born comics writer Garth Ennis and artist Steve Dillon, with whom Ennis forged many a fine John Constantine Hellblazer story prior to Preacher's debut in 1995, gave the world a comic-book series that combined splatterpunk, Westerns, dark fantasy, low comedy, satire, social commentary, and a lot of speeches. It's super. 

And 20 years after it first appeared, Preacher still has the ability to shock and amaze. It's one of a handful of truly great, epic-length fantasy comic book narratives.

There's really no point to giving too much away about the narrative. That narrative's ability to go roaring off in various unexpected directions is one of the charms of Preacher (and perhaps the occasional frustration). The world of Preacher is a nightmarish, bloody, tragic one. 

And Dillon, along with the occasional guest artist for the Preacher mini-series and one-shots that explain things outside the main narrative, renders all the horror and grace in his clear and elegant and straightforward art. It's the right take for this sort of thing: Preacher is as straightforward and straight-shooting as its titular hero Jesse Custer.

And it's one of the marks of Ennis' ability to take the piss out of himself that late in the narrative Jesse's one true love mocks the fact that he shares his initials with Jesus Christ.

But anyway, pardner...

Jesse Custer is a conflicted preacher in the small, crappy Texas town of Annville when thing begin. Something happens to give him the power to compel anyone to do anything with the power of his voice. And when he learns the truth about God, he sets out to find God.

For God has abandoned his Throne in Heaven, apparently because He fears Jesse's newly created power. And He fears Jesse's mission: to bring God to justice for all the pains and horrors God has inflicted on his Creation.

With Jesse will be the love of his life, sharp-shooting Tulip O'Hare, whom Jesse abandoned to become a preacher five years earlier to save her life from an imminent threat. But she doesn't know that when she runs into him again, so she starts off right pissed at him.

With Jesse will also be a roguish sidekick and newly met best friend, Cassidy the nearly century-old Irish vampire. Cassidy has the strength of 50 and an addictive personality to match -- not to blood, which he's not all that happy about needing, but to whiskey and beer and cigarettes and hard drugs. He comes along because Custer gives him a new sense of purpose and a chance to be a Good Guy for once. Or does her? Well, therein lies one of the threaded plots of Preacher.

Against Jesse are the hosts of Heaven and Hell. More dangerously on Earth, there is the most powerful secret organization on Earth: the Grail, dedicated to preserving the bloodline of Christ (whose death on the cross was faked) and orchestrating a global apocalypse that will put it in charge with Christ's descendant as the world's leader. Controlled and managed entirely by the Grail, of course.

Leading the Grail forces against Jesse and company will be Herr Starr, a German-born, power-mad grotesque. And there will be other grotesques arrayed against Jesse, though it's their spiritual grotesquery that's the problem. There will be innocent grotesques and heroic grotesques as well. 

Chief among the lovable grotesques will be the young man Cassidy dubs Arseface, who has a permanently disfigured face from the plastic surgery that came after his unsuccessful suicide attempt on the day Kurt Cobain died to inspire he and his more ultimately more successfully suicidal friend to kill themselves.

And there's the mysterious Saint of Killers, a seven-foot-tall cowboy whose guns bring death to anyone and anything in the universe, and whose story is a tragic one of redemption undone and Hell unleashed. Will he be Jesse's enemy or ally in the search for God and answers?

The 70+ issues of Preacher travel America, with a brief foray to France. For the most part it's the American South, and Texas in particular. Ennis has noted that he wanted to write a modern Western with some elements of the Westerns of Clint Eastwood, but with a hero who's as much John Wayne as Eastwood. All of this wrapped up in supernatural horrors, natural horrors, human horrors, and the occasional moment of Grace, too.

Are there flaws? Sure. But when the story ends, one wants more even as one is satisfied at a good story, well-told. So far, the AMC TV adaptation of Preacher seems to have thrown away everything from the comic except the names of the characters in search of its own lesser vision. But the comic is the real stuff. Highly recommended.

Prequels, Sequels, and Adaptations

War Against Crime! Volume 2: Issues 6-11: written by Al Feldstein, William Gaines, and others; illustrated by Johnny Craig, Graham Ingels, and others (1949-1950; collected 2001): Beginning in 1950, EC's New Directions comic-book line would represent a brief high point in American comic books. But it didn't spring full-blown from the forehead of publisher William Gaines. A couple of years of experimentation preceded it as Gaines acclimated to the comic-book business and the talents began to assemble at EC.

War Against Crime! ran for eleven issues. It fed off the post-WWII crime comics boom. But by the end of the run collected here, it was clearly showing the way to the artistic and writerly excellence of the approaching New Directions line. And it didn't really die after 11 issues -- it was retitled The Vault of Horror with issue 12 and became one of EC's great horror comics. The stories and art in this volume aren't up to the standards of the approaching EC books, but they're still well-crafted, occasionally gonzo tales of suspense and horror. Recommended.


The Incal: Orphan of the City Shaft: written by Alexandro Jodorowsky; illustrated by Zoran Janjetov (1988-1991; collected 2001): Part of the prequel series to Alexandro Jodorowsky and Moebius's Incal series of the 1970's, The Incal: Orphan of the City Shaft features sharp, detailed, and often grotesquely imaginative artwork from Zoran Janjetov. Jodorowsky's story is bananas, as one would expect. It's all Euro-Comics-SciFi in the tradition of Heavy Metal/Metal Hurlant, a dystopian adventure story explaining the origins of Incal anti-hero John DiFool.

Weird, occasionally unpleasant, occasionally poetic, visually and narratively imaginative, it's also compulsively readable and extraordinarily dense compared to most American comic books. The whole thing pays homage to Metropolis and The Time Machine with its stratified society, a literalized hierarchy oriented around a vast shaft sinking deep into a planet. But there's a lot more sex, drugs, and fetishes than in either of those estimable forebears. This is the sort of European comic book that the TV series Lexx tried and mostly failed to emulate. Highly recommended.


Just a Pilgrim: Garden of Eden: written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by Carlos Ezquerra (2002): Ennis and Ezquerra's brutal post-apocalyptic Western continues here, as the gun-slinging religious fanatic known only as the Pilgrim encounters a team of scientists attempting to flee the devastated Earth to the stars. Terrible monsters and events abound, and Ennis and Ezquerra flinch neither in the grimy, bloody writing nor the grimy, bloody art. Recommended, but not for the squeamish.




Hypothetical Lizard: written by Alan Moore and Antony Johnston; illustrated by Lorenzo Orente and Sebastian Fiumara (1987 - 2004/2005): Alan Moore's World Fantasy Award-nominated novella from the 1980's gets the graphic treatment from Avatar Press. Antony Johnson preserves much of Moore's prose (the album includes the novella) while doing an able job of turning it into a sequential comics narrative.

The art by Orente and Fiumara is competent, though perhaps somewhat too prosaic (haha) for the fantastic goings-on. The novella appeared in a shared-universe anthology with its roots in the weird, magical cities of writers that include Fritz Leiber, Clark Ashton Smith, Jack Vance, and M. John Harrison. Moore's tale focuses on one tragic relationship in the city of Llaiven, all of it playing out in the weird and sinister brothel known as The House Without Clocks. Recommended.

Death and Armageddon

Judge Dredd: The Complete Casefiles Volume 5: written by John Wagner and Alan Grant; illustrated by Mike McMahon, Carlos Ezquerra, Brian Bolland, Ron Smith, and others (1981-82; collected 2013): The saga of Judge Dredd reaches what may be its artistic peak in this thick volume of stories from the early 1980's. The peculiar mix of action and scabrous social satire that distinguishes the series reachs markedly different heights in two of the arcs collected herein.

First there's the return of Judge Death in the Dark Judges arc. Beautifully illustrated by Brian Bolland, the Dark Judges brings four judges from an alternate Earth to sprawling megalopolis Mega-City One, the city of 150-million people that occupies a swath of North America from the Eastern Great Lakes to New England and southwards down the East Coast.

Previously, Dredd and telepathic Judge Anderson had battled Judge Death. On Judge Death's alternate Earth, human life itself was outlawed because humans are the source of crime. Then he came to Mega-City One and started killing up a storm. Dredd managed to destroy his body, while Judge Anderson used her psychic powers to trap him inside her mind until Dredd could encase both of them in an impregnable sphere of Boing, a sort of super-lucite.

Now Anderson's body lies in state in the Hall of Justice, encased in that Boing. But someone manages to cut the Boing open. Mayhem ensues, and the only slight chance Mega-City One has against not one but four supernaturally powerful Judges lies with the resuscitated Anderson, who's had Death stuck in her mind since being encased in Boing, though Death has now escaped to a more suitable new body.

This arc is a delight both in Bolland's meticulous, razor-sharp art and in the writing by Alan Grant and John Wagner. It's one of the most straightforward Judge Dredd stories ever done -- the satire is muted, and the awfulness of the Dark Judges makes Judge Dredd's often loopily ridiculous fascism seem positively benign by comparison. It's a great Judge Dredd story, and one of the greatest superhero battle stories ever told (though admittedly Dredd is only very loosely a superhero).

Then we turn to one of the longest arcs in Dredd history, one which begins as Block Wars and ends in the 26-episode Armageddon War storyline. It's all an increasingly nightmarish, bleakly comic story very much of its time -- the Cold War, sabre-rattling early 1980's.

Briefly, East-Meg-One, the Soviet Mega-City, strikes MegaCity-One first with nuclear and conventional weapons. Tens of millions of people die. Then the invasion begins. Things get worse. And worse. And worse. And only Judge Dredd can figure out how to 'win' the war.

Carlos Ezquerra's squirmy, often disturbingly visceral art makes a perfect complement to Wagner and Grant's writing here. The story is propulsive. The satire is horrifyingly apt. Dredd's committment to justice had never before racked up such a body count. And it all goes on and on, for hundreds of pages.

Not many popular comic books make their star into a war criminal. But that's Judge Dredd. Even the fairly faithful movie adaptation of a couple years back made the action too straightforward by half. Dredd's only a hero in comparison to the more awful choices surrounding him. He's the action hero as an undisguised fascist. Highly recommended.

Dredd (2012)

Dredd: written by Alex Garland based on the character created by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra; directed by Pete Travis; starring Karl Urban (Judge Dredd), Olivia Thirlby (Judge Anderson), and Lena Headey (Ma-Ma) (2012): This faithful adaptation of the venerable British action-satire comic-book series Judge Dredd would have been a big hit in the early 1980's. It's old-school action, a somewhat low-key day-in-the-life movie in the vein of John Carpenter's Escape from New York and Assault on Precinct 13.

In the post-apocalyptic urban sprawl of MegaCity One (population 800 million), which occupies much of America's East Coast and stands above a countryside devastated by war and pollution (The Cursed Earth), police officers are judges, juries, and executioners if need be. Judge Dredd is the best of them.

With a new drug on the streets and Lena Headey's psychotic crime boss in control of an entire residential block/building, Judge Dredd and trainee Judge Anderson (Olivia Thirlby) walk into a killing zone. And for about 70 minutes, they try to fight their way out of it.

Karl Urban is solid as Dredd, a character who never removes his helmet. Thirlby is also good as the psychic Anderson, who gets some great on-the-job training here as everyone tries to kill the two Judges. The movie does a nice job of capturing the odd action-satire of its original: Dredd is both a Dirty-Harry-style badass and a pointed commentary on Dirty-Harry-style badasses.

It's too bad this bombed, as I'd have liked to see the film-makers' take on the whole Judge Death saga. But at least this helped wash the memory of the horrible, horrible, horrible 1990's Judge Dredd, starring Sylvester Stallone and Rob Schneider, out of my head, though obviously not completely. Easy the Ferg! Recommended.

Just a Pilgrim

Just a Pilgrim: written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by Carlos Ezquerra (2001): Among Garth Ennis's brutal comic-book characters, the protagonist of this one -- known only as 'the Pilgrim' -- is one of the five or six most brutal. Which is saying a lot, given Ennis characters like Saint of Killers, Hitman, and Bill Butcher. Ezquerra, a standout on Judge Dredd for years and occasional collaborator with Ennis on other projects (including the Saint of Killers miniseries, if memory serves), is in fine form here in this bloody post-apocalyptic tale.

In a near-future world in which the Sun suddenly went into its Red Giant phase hundreds of millions of years early, a small group of survivors seek refuge on a trek across the floor of the former Atlantic Ocean. Set upon by pirates led by Castenado, a blind psychic buccaneer with two peg legs and two hook hands, they're rescued and eventually led by the mysterious Pilgrim, who quotes Bible verses and shoots dogs who "have the Devil in them."

However, the Pilgrim's violent efficiency causes most of the people, including the ten-year-old boy whose diary forms the narrative structure, to put their faith in the Pilgrim and God. Castenado won't give up his pursuit. So on a devastated, emptied seafloor filled with dangerous, mutated creatures, the small band will make their way toward a reckoning with Castenado. Along the way, the Pilgrim's origins in the pre-apocalyptic world will be revealed.

Like pretty much all of Ennis's comic-book output, this is NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH. It does have some troubling, fascinating points to make about faith and a reliance on heroes that play out in other, longer Ennis works. The relationship between the Pilgrim and the boy plays with expectations caused by similar relationships in famous Westerns that include Shane, Pale Rider, and True Grit. Are we being set up? Ezquerra really is one of Ennis's perfect collaborators, with an ease and skill at portraying action and the grotesque and the occasionally comic. Followed by at least one sequel. Recommended.

When Super-powers Happen to Terrible People

The Boys Volume 3: Good for the Soul: written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by Darick Robertson (2008): Many terrible things happen and more terrible things are revealed about the superheroes of the world of The Boys. Pretty much all of them are corporate lackeys of Vought-American, a multi-national that's excellent at making money and terrible at making weapons that actually work.

Ennis and Robertson illustrate this with some World War Two references to profit-motivated cock-ups by arms manufacturers on the Allied side, all of which made the companies tons of money and all of which resulted in increased fatalities. Because modern warfare is all about money. The troops are essentially irrelevant except as testing units for the hardware, regardless of whether it's an improvement on the last hardware.

The super-powered Boys, funded by the CIA but running their own deeper game, once again take the piss out of some superheroes while trying to uncover the truth about 9/11 in their universe, where the Brooklyn Bridge and not the World Trade Center Towers was destroyed. A pretty searing portrait of dangerous, profit-motivated incompetence. Recommended.

The Boys Volume 6: The Self-Preservation Society: written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by Darick Robertson, John McCrea, and Carlos Ezquerra (2009-2010): Payback, Ennis's horrifying parody of Marvel's Avengers, comes after The Boys. Stormfront, Payback's thinly veiled version of Thor, is an actual Nazi used by uber-corporation Vought-American to exterminate undesireable ethnics on Third-World land they want to purchase when he's not posing for photo ops and pretending to be a German God of Thunder.

But like pretty much ever other super-powered character in Ennis's bleak vision of the world, he's never been properly trained in hand-to-hand combat because he's simply too powerful to worry about it. That's about to change. Another bracing, barbaric, ultraviolent yawp against the world's violent stupidities. Recommended.

　

John Byrne's Next Men: Scattered Part 2: written and illustrated by John Byrne (2010): Byrne's great 1990's series, once on a 15-year hiatus, draws to a (sorta) close, as one volume remains. The time-travel stuff is complicated but nicely reasoned out; the stakes are high; everything we saw long ago in the first issues moves satisfyingly towards an ending. But you'll need to read everything that came before to understand what comes now. Recommended.