Time of the Preacher

This is the reason modern comics have a bad reputation.  A series is frequently lauded: for example a Washington Post review hailed it as "Just about the best thing to come along since comics started finding their way into books."  It's a comic book series ostensibly written for adults; theoretically cutting edge and thoughtful.  And in the end, the best thing about it is that it is mediocre, and the worst things about it--well read on.

Garth Ennis wrote and Steve Dillon illustrated Preacher.  It is packaged as 9 trade paperbacks; it was a comic book run of 66 issues (plus specials).  The story--full of spoilers, so if you plan to read this thing, skip reading this review, but then when you find the whole thing tiresome, don't say I didn't warn you--Our hero Jesse Custer (and in case you miss it, somewhere toward the end one of the characters explicitly notes that you should look at our hero's initials), had a bad upbringing with some psychotic religious types and becomes a Preacher at his grandmother's insistence (after his grandmother had his mom and dad killed, by the way).  The psychotic family's hired help taught our Hero how to fight, which comes in handy since he can best an entire private army in hand-to-hand combat when needed.  One day, the offspring of an illicit union of an angel and a demon (said offspring is named Genesis (seriously)) enters our Hero's soul giving our Hero the ability to tell people to do anything and they have to do it--an ability which our Hero decides he should only use when the author can turn it to some attempt at comedy when people interpret the command literally or when the plot hits such a big wall that there is no way else out--fortunately, Jesse decides to abstain from using it when people are trying to kill him, enabling him to beat his would-be assassins to a pulp with his bare hands,.  He finds out God has abdicated His throne because God is afraid of Genesis (yeah, God is afraid because Genesis is more powerful than God or something like that).  So Jesse decides to hunt down God and have it out with Him because Jesse doesn't like the way the world is.  Jesse teams up with his ex-girlfriend, who can shoot a gun with more accuracy than anyone else on the planet--which also comes in handy--and an Irish vampire named Cassidy.  (Are you still with me?  It gets worse.)  Now finding God is a bit tricky because...well it isn't clear why God is so good at hiding somewhere on Earth where a being more powerful that God Himself can't find Him.  So, in order to have something happen, our trio of heroes runs into, in no particular order, The Saint of  Killers (a dead guy who can kill everything in sight and cannot be killed himself--he dresses like a cowboy); the ghost of John Wayne (who periodically shows up to talk to Jesse for no apparent reason); the Grail (a secret organization preserving the bloodline of Christ and organizing Armageddon but now run by degenerates because of centuries of inbreeding); Starr (a mean guy who eventually takes over the Grail and wants to kill Jesse, and whose purpose seems to be to enable the reader to laugh as he gradually becomes more and more mutilated over time); Jesse's grandmother and the hired help (mean, nasty people); an assortment of people involved in illicit sexual practices (whose purpose is never really clear); a mean guy and his Nazi lawyer (female) who run a meat packing plant outside the town of Salvation (seriously) who terrorize the town until, for no apparent reason, Jesse decides to clean up the town--oh, and Jesse meets his mom in Salvation because you see, she wasn't killed after all; a group of people who want to become vampires; a guy who blew off half his face trying to imitate Kurt Cobain, whose dad is a mean police officer who kills himself after running into our Heroes, and so the guy with half a face decides to get revenge and kill Jesse, but doesn't and then he becomes a rock star, but his manager steals all his money and destroys his career, so the guy with half a face moves to Salvation and marries the one-eyed sister of Jesse's childhood friend (who also had one eye--you see, they were both the product of generations of inbreeding); and so on (and on and on).  Cassidy turns out to not be such a nice guy--he is a vampire, but we were supposed to think he was a nice vampire, but instead he is a not-so-nice vampire.  Jesse never does meet God to talk to him, but he arranges his own death, so God will feel free to go back to Heaven (because when Jesse dies, Genesis dies, it would seem), but when God gets back to Heaven before He can sit on his Throne and become All Powerful again, the Saint of Killers is waiting for him and kills Him.  God does resurrect Jesse first because Cassidy asked God to do so.  So, Jesse and his ex-girlfriend ride off into the sunset together, Cassidy becomes nice, Starr is dead, the guy with half-a face is married; God is dead, and the Saint of Killers is sitting on the Throne of Heaven, having killed everyone else who is there. I think that is meant to be a happy ending.

The plot is the best thing about the series.

Taken as a whole, it isn't horribly bad.  I think there was some potential in there somewhere for a decent story, but it would have needed a writer and illustrator who were more, well, mature.  And, that gets to the fundamental problem with Preacher--is is a comic book for adults in a world where adults are stuck in permanent adolescence.  And that is why comic books get such a bad reputation--things like this become Exhibit A for the inherent immaturity of the whole medium.  When people praise such works as this as highly sophisticated and thought-provoking, it really ruins the reputation of the comic books which actually are such things.

A better version of the same sort of story can be found here, by the way.