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| 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.
The Boys Volume 7: The Innocents: written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by Darick Robertson, Russ Braun, and John McCrea (2010): Revelations follow revelations, as Bill Butcher comes to believe Hughie is secretly working for the evil Vought-American corporation because his girlfriend turns out to be a member of premiere superhero group The Seven.
Hughie being Hughie, this is all a coincidence aggravated by Hughie's blithe ignorance of current events and, for that matter, who exactly it is that he and the rest of The Boys are fighting. Hughie's also going to finally find out a different terrible truth about his girlfriend, but only after spending time keeping tabs on Superduper, the only superhero group composed of neither bastards nor poseurs.
That's because, no joke, they're all suffering from major mental health issues which render them benign, loveable, and pretty much harmless. Hughie's relationship with the members of Superduper (a parody of DC's teen supergroup of the 31st century, the Legion of Superheroes) will pay dividends much later in the series. Recommended.
The Boys Volume 10: Butcher, Baker, Candlestickmaker: written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by Darick Robertson (2011): Collection of the six-issue miniseries that finally laid out Boys leader Bill Butcher's tortured personal history. The violence is often overwhelming, as is the tragedy: Butcher is cut from the same mould as Ennis's Saint of Killers in the earlier Preacher series, a violent hardcase redeemed by love and then further damned with the loss of that love. Recommended.
The Boys Volume 11: Over the Hill with the Swords of a Thousand Men: written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by Russ Braun, John McCrea, Keith Burns, and Darick Robertson (2011-2012): The corporate controlled superheroes have decided to take over the world. Well, 65% of them, anyway, while the other 35% lay low and wait to see who wins.
Have Bill Butcher's plans prepared the world to successfully stand against several thousand nigh-invulnerable wankers, or will the vile and vainglorious Homelander soon rule over everything? And which side will corporation Vought-American, which didn't authorize a hostile takeover of the United States by the superheroes it created, come down on as all Hell breaks loose? And will Bill Butcher finally get vengeance upon the Homelander for the rape and subsequent death in (super-powered) childbirth of his wife? And if everything ends here, why is there one more volume to go? Highly recommended.
The Boys Volume 12: The Bloody Doors Off: written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by Garth Ennis, Russ Braun, and Darick Robertson (2012): The six-year, 90-issue, 2000-page odyssey of The Boys ends here, a few months after the blood-soaked superheroic attempt to overthrow the U.S. government. Loveable Scottish Boys member Hughie is still having relationship problems with former superheroine Starlight, more normally referred to as Annie. Vought-American is still up to lots of things, most of them profitable and dreadful. But with armageddon averted, Boys leader Bill Butcher suggests that the Boys take a vacation.
But when a Russian superhero ally of the Boys shows up dead along with a black marketeer, the vacation is cut short. And then the deaths of both supporting and main characters start to mount. Who is tidying up? Was the superhero coup the real threat? Is Hughie capable, mentally and physically, of engaging this newly revealed conspiracy and saving millions or perhaps even billions of lives? Is this Garth Ennis' last superhero comic book? All will be revealed. Highly recommended.
John Constantine: Hellblazer: Tainted Love: written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by Steve Dillon (1993; collected 1998): Writer Garth Ennis made his name at DC with his violent, moody work on DC's horror flagship title John Constantine: Hellblazer prior to creating the popular and influential Preacher series with artist Steve Dillon.
Picking up where the Fear and Loathing storylineleft off, Tainted Love takes John Constantine about as low as he can go, homeless onto the streets of London where old enemies and new come to believe he can finally be finished off.
Constantine is in terrible emotional and physical trauma for much of this collection, in which we discover that his real super power is the ability to fight supernatural evil even while falling-down drunk. Will he pull out of it before the seemingly eternal King of the Vampires or Satan himself finally get their revenge on him? And what's going on with the archangel Gabriel? And how's former lover Kit doing back in Belfast? All will be revealed. Well, some anyway. Highly recommended.
John Constantine: Hellblazer: Fear and Loathing: written by Garth Ennis; illustrated by Steve Dillon (1992-93; collected 1997): Writer Garth Ennis made his name at DC with his violent, moody work on DC's horror flagship title John Constantine: Hellblazer prior to creating the popular and influential Preacher series with artist Steve Dillon.
Ennis is one of those writers who seems to have arrived fully formed, primarily because his early development took place in British comics that weren't readily available in North America in the early 1990's. By 1992, Ennis really was pretty much fully formed -- for good and ill (mostly good), his voice is as distinctive here as it is today.
As only the fourth person to write John Constantine (after co-creator Alan Moore and Rick Veitch in Swamp Thing and, on Constantine's own book, Jamie Delano for the first 40 issues), Ennis quickly put his stamp on the character, upping the violence and writing in a more direct, less poetic style than Moore and Delano. Constantine now seemed more of an aged punk and less of a dandyish mod -- he was straight out of Liverpool.
Ennis' peculiar and fairly rare (at least in the early 1990's) synthesis of ultraviolent splatterpunk with a detailed and increasingly harrowing portrayal of the supernatural still packs a punch in the stories collected in Fear and Loathing. The world is an awful one whether the violence is being perpetrated by monsters human or supernatural -- and even the highest of angels can be a monster in Constantine's world. Constantine works ceaselessly to thwart the plans of Heaven and Hell alike, because both Heaven and Hell seek control over the fragile, fallen human world.
In this collection, Constantine's personal life -- his rewarding relationship with Kit -- comes under fire even as he attempts to stop a British Neo-Nazi group from gaining favour with the archangel Gabriel. Constantine also celebrates his 40th birthday with a party involving most of DC's supernatural characters -- Hellblazer was still nominally part of the mainstream DC universe at this point, despite the fact that thematically this made absolutely no sense.
So we get such supernatural stalwarts as Zatanna, Swamp Thing, and the Phantom Stranger involved in a surprise birthday bash for the 40-year-old Liverpudlian (or Scouser). That issue is one of the few blessedly free of tension, and involves instead some of Ennis's funniest (and earliest) scenes taking the piss out of mainstream superhero characters. But damnation, as always, looms. Highly recommended.
