ComicBooker's Full Review: Garth Ennis, Steve Dillon, Matt Hollingsworth - Pr...
It takes nerve to tell The Lord God to start acting like a grownup.
Jesse Custer has that nerve and so does Garth Ennis, the guy who created him.
Garth Ennis displays that nerve in this book and in several that followed, books that almost certainly have something to offend almost everyone.
Together the Preacher books, which some people would call graphic novels, collect 75 issues of the monthly Preacher comic book.
Preacher: Gone to Texas is the first of the books.
It collects the first seven issues of the comic books and it introduces many of the characters who are important in the later books, including the next in the series Preacher: Until the End of the World.
They include a drunk sheriff, his son who disfigures himself horribly when he tries to kill himself like Kurt Cobain, a vampire, the ghost of John Wayne and The Saint of Killers, an undead cowboy who can't be killed.
The series brings these people and many others together as they either work for or against a conspiracy that's been going on for centuries to bring about Armageddon by engineering the miraculous appearance of Jesus Christ's son.
And it all starts in Preacher: Gone to Texas when Jesse Custer's church is obliterated by a being that came into existence when an angel had sex with a demon.
Jesse Custer is a minister in a small town in Texas who is given some of God's power by that supernatural being and who decides it is his mission to track down God and make Him take responsibility for the sad state of the world.
Garth Ennis's story has a lot of harsh language and brutal images and it is not always pleasant.
But it is always compelling and it is often very funny.
One character complains about how horrible his apartment is but then concedes that it could be worse because there are no rats.
Because the rats were eaten by the cockroaches.
The story involves a lot of violence and Steve Dillon's artwork shows a lot of people having parts of their bodies blown off by guns.
If you can make it through the beginning of Jesse Custer's adventure, you'll want to follow him through all of it.
If you can't, you'll probably want to seek absolution for even having tried to read any of it.
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