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I think the reason why Preacher ultimately doesn't work is because sometimes Ennis is trying to "say something" and sometimes he isn't...Jesse killing people is mostly portrayed as slapstick (or, if you like, as action movie-style violence, which is more or less the same thing), whereas other scenes present violence in a very realistic, unpleasant fashion, and those characters we're expected to judge harshly -- even though what they've done is no more or no less than what Jesse has done. And I'm not really willing to give Ennis credit for irony, either; one could argue (I guess) that we're seeing everything from Jesse's POV, and so his own violence is seen as morally okay, even glamorized, and the evil deeds of people he doesn't like are seen as purely evil, and Jesse isn't meant to be sympathetic at all and it's all a prescient dissection/satire of the George W. Bush administration, but, y'know...I kinda don't think so. I think Ennis is just trying to have it both ways, and make it sometimes cartoonish and sometimes not, and that's not really playing fair. And yeah, I would agree that beat up the freak/redneck (unless it's *our* redneck)/faggot/weirdo/drug addict (unless you're addicted to a manly pint of Guinness!) did kinda seem to be the underlying moral of the story now and then, and made me cynically suspect it would be Fred Durst's favorite comic, if only he could get through all those big words.
That said, I did like it a lot more when it was new, both because I was more of that mindset myself and because I think the first year just works better than the rest of it. I first began to regard the book somewhat suspiciously with the story arc after Tulip's death/resurrection and Jesse's family (titles totally escape me at this point), where we encounter the villain guy who is gay, so naturally he also molests children, and naturally he's also French...sweet baby Jesus. I mean, can't we get an evil hook-nosed Arab in here to balance things out a little? Not only that, but the later developments with Cassidy had me wondering what the real "darkness" we were uncovering here was supposed to be -- hitting women aside, we already knew he'd shot heroin, and what stuck with me was the very real sense I got that what was really supposed to be shocking was the idea that Cass would blow his drug dealer. The horror! But, uh...since by this point our sympathies are no longer supposed to be with Cass, my feeling was that you had proudly manly Jesse kinda shaking his head over the sickening prospect of someone he'd thought was "like himself" giving a blowjob. (To think...all that time we spent going to bars, maybe he wanted to blow ME! I...I thought I knew him....!)
All squeamishness over any such possible reactionary leanings on Ennis' part aside, though, what was lame about Preacher just on a basic entertainment level after the first year was a mounting decompression that turned two-issue stories into six-issue stories, nine-issue stories, etc. Got old really quick, and there's definitely a crackle to the first two trades that you don't find in the rest of the series. Ennis got tired early on, though Dillon stayed strong throughout, I have to say.
Still...I dunno. Ennis may have bigoted, assholish tendencies that came through in his writing, and the series might have flabbed out (okay -- it did), but the book still made me laugh at least once an issue, and it did do a good enough job of hooking me that I had to read it to the end. There sure as fuck aren't a lot of contemporary comics I can say that about -- including ones written by Ennis! I can't completely dismiss it as reactionary crap, or even as increasingly aimless, padded-out crap...even though I have to agree that it was, at least in places, both of those things. |
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