My good friend has quite the comic collection and I’ve been reading through his library, bit by bit. Preacher was my next challenge and boy, was it a doozy. It was equal parts vile, disgusting, horrifying and entertaining. Definitely not something that all people appreciate. I’m going to borrow a paragraph from the Goodreads posted review, because I couldn’t say it better myself.
“One of the most celebrated comics titles of the late 1990s, PREACHER is a modern American epic of life, death, love and redemption also packed with sex, booze, blood and bullets – not to mention angels, demons, God, vampires and deviants of all stripes.”
Basically, Jesse Custer is an accidental preacher who gets filled with the unholy offspring of an angel and demon (which allows him to, among other things, command people to bend to his will), and God is afraid of it and has gone on vacation. Meanwhile, a secret religious organization is trying to use Jesse to be the next prophet and his girlfriend, who dabbled in being a murderer for hire is along for the ride. And by ride, I sometimes mean riiiide (heh). And his best friend is Cassidy, a vampire who is there to help…sort of.
Got it? Yeeeeah. Volumes 1-5 take us on a wild journey through the plans of the religious fanatics and backstories of Cassidy and Jesse including a trip home for Jesse to visit his family. And by “family” I mean his grandmother and uncles who make the folks in Deliverance look like cuddly puppies and rainbows.
Oh. And there is a character named “Arseface.” (I’ll just leave that there.) Basically, this story takes the worse things I could think of and makes them much, much worse. Nobody tell my mom I read it, k?
Cannonball Read V 