Comic reviews -- Preacher

One of the first stores I found when I moved to Vancouver was a comic shop just down the street from my apartment. Although a nerd, I've never read much in the way of comics, just an issue of Spiderman occasionally when I was a kid. But when the Watchmen movie came out recently, I was inspired to read the original graphic novel and I really enjoyed it. So it was only a matter of time before I stopped in the neighborhood comic shop and checked out some other things. With the exception of a short-run series of the X-Men's Storm as a kid, everything has been pretty good. Let me tell you a little about what I've been reading.

If you follow my Twitter feed, you've probably seen a few of my tweets regarding Preacher. Put simply and objectively, Preacher kicks ass. In the intro to the third volume, Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller fame has this to say, "...had all the things I love -- tits, fucking, and things blowing up." That doesn't say it all, but gets quite a bit of it.

Preacher follows the adventures of Jesse Custer, a hard-fightin', hard-cussin' man of the cloth; his crack-shot girlfriend Tulip; and, of course, Cassidy, their good buddy who's a 100 year-old vampire from Ireland. Jesse is on a mission to find God, who has apparently taken leave of heaven and is more or less on the run in the mortal world. It even appears like God may be a bit afeared of ol' Jesse since the preacher has been infused with the power of the incredible being, Genesis, the offspring of an angel and a devil. On this mission Jesse, Tulip and Cassidy run into an amazing and memorable cast of characters as they hunt down God to make Him answer for why He made such a fucked up world.

The artwork is colorful and vibrant. It is definitely not sanitized and a number of the scenes will certainly stick in your memory. Preacher is not for the faint of heart. It's brutal and, at times, plain sadistic. You will be shocked. But it is much more than just another push on the envelope. This comic will definitely leave you with things to think about and it's just damn entertaining to boot. I'm in the middle of the series at present (it's about 36 issues in total) so I can't tell you if it all pulls together well in the end. But I am definitely enjoying the ride.

I've got a few of other series that I've been following so expect to see some more posts on comics in the future.