Just Fantastic: <I>Preacher, vol. 1</I>

Just Fantastic: Preacher, vol. 1

Posted on September 9th, 2009 by Steve Mazzeo

Possibly Vertigo’s most popular title, Preacher, written by Garth Ennis, ran for five years (1995-2000), it had 75 issues in total and some of the highest acclaim from pop culture a comic could get. Volume 1 is almost all expositional. While interesting and exciting I found myself actively trying to get through it. However, there is a light at the end of the tunnel because volume 2 is amazing.

Here’s the deal: an angel and a demon have a forbidden love affair that produces an offspring called Genesis. For all intents and purposes Genesis is an incredibly powerful, possibly as powerful as God, morally ambiguous prisoner of Heaven with no individual will. Genesis escapes, accidentally kills an angel, and fuses itself with Jesse Custer, a preacher in a small Texas town. Meanwhile Jesse’s ex-girlfriend, Tulip O’Hare shows up with a vampire, Cassidy, in tow. Technically, I think it was Cassidy’s pick-up truck so I guess Tulip was in tow, but whatever. And we meet the Saint of Killers (that’s actually the charter’s name.

That sounds kinda boring when you consider it is seven issues worth of material, but I assure you it’s relatively interesting. For example, Jesse gets drunk in a bar and starts talking about the confessional. Just accept that those seven comics are the equivalent of the opening 5 to 10 minutes of a movie. Normally, I’m the first one to complain. And I did put Preacher down for six months after reading volume 1. But, now I’m reading volume 2 and completely regret the gap.

My advice is to read this work. It’s likely to become a serious contender for academics in years to come (I’ll write more on that after I finish volume 9). Plow through the first issue and move right into the second.

What separates Preacher from Y the Last Man is contextual tone. Preacher feels more like a comic and Y the Last Man feels more like a science fiction novel that happens to be in the comic medium. If I were reccommending a single title to a literati friend of mine that wanted to expreince a longer graphic novel (bigger than Watchmen or Lost Girls) I would point to Y the Last Man, even though I like it much less than Preacher. Conversely, if someone wanted a comic book expereince, outside standard spandex wearing heroes and villians, Preacher is the answer.

Comic book readers, in my opinion, more than any other group have a profound mental flexiblity: they will accept incredibal amounts of surrealism without question and potentially wait years/decades for the explaination. While Preacher is structured like a traditional story, as opposed to any given Batman title that’s released monthly, it does produce questions a literary read would ignore, especally in volume 1.

The best example of this is Heaven. In Preacher Heaven is a tangible place. If you just thought of Dante you’re way off base. Heaven does not have rules based in reality. Heaven has rules that fit the Vertigo Universe, this title inparticular. What we gather in the first volume is: Angels can have sex, Angels can have sex with demons, God’s power is ultimate but finite because it can be measured on at least a comparison basis, there are beings in Heaven other than Angels and they seem highly beruacratic, Heaven has space craft or some form of structure beyond the pearly gates, Angels can be killed and therefore demons can be killed. Now, let those rules trickle down into the characters. It tells us right off the bat that Jesse can potentially rival God (and therefore the Devil)– interesting. But, it also means that every being we meet for the rest of the series falls somewhere on that scale and as a reader your perspective must shift with that scale from character to character. When Tulip says something she is representing the everyman, but also a power station. Likewise The Saint of Killers is an exception virutually every rule and can kill inhabitants of Heaven. This isn’t just a hightened reality it’s another deminsion.

Some/Many/Most literary readers don’t enjoy science fiction and fantasy because the step from reality to a hightened reality, such as Orwell’s 1984. It’s a much bigger step like sliding into Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash or Phillip K. Dick’s Scanner Darkly. Not making that step results in an adverse reaction within the audeince. Most readers would simply say they don’t like the work without knowing why or they might say something akin to, “I don’t get it.” Conversely, readers/viewers that can make that jump often can’t see things from the other side.

This is why The Matrix is still an important film– it made cyberpunk real to housewives and over-acheiving under-creative AP high school students. They can step through the hoops with Reeves and learn about life in a divergent reality. The Matrix make it easy on a reader/viewer to make extreme jumps. Granted there were some failed jumps first, anyone remember: Johnny Mnemonic, a great short story that was butchered into a crappy movie and ensured we’d never see Burning Chrome on the big screen (Burning Chrome was an even better short story in the same collection by William Gibson).