Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon‘s comic series Preacher was crazy. Not just kinda violent, kinda weird, but full-on crazy. For example, it’s got a character whose failed Kurt Cobain-emulating suicide attempt, leads to a grotesquely mangled face and the nickname “Arseface,” none of which precludes him becoming a pop superstar. It features one antagonist whose sexual proclivities turn towards the nigh-unprintable extreme, and whose body is steadily chipped away over the course of the story.
Oh, and the lead character is a small-town Texas preacher whose best friend is a junkie Irish vampire, and who is possessed of a god-like power called Genesis. That power was born of the coupling between angel and demon, and allows him to command a person to do anything with absolute authority. Like “count all the sand on this beach,” which leads one character to do exactly that. Oh, and the preacher, Jesse, wants to find God and fight him.
As crazy as Preacher gets, however, there’s always a core set of themes, about family, friendship, and the preservation of morality in the face of pretty much the nastiest stuff you can imagine. That core prevents all the nutty stuff from totally overwhelming the storyline. The best parts of Preacher aren’t the big whackadoo situations and setpieces, but the chapters that could come to life as bottle episodes of a TV series.
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