Is there a better writer in the American comic book landscape than Garth Ennis? I mean, sure, there is Brian K. Vaughan, the whiz behind so many of the top selling and best read graphic novels (Y The Last Man, Ex Machina, Saga, etc), but does anyone really come close to matching Ennis' dialogue? If you would take the best that David Mamet has to offer, and then infuse it with the most pop-cultural array of wise-cracking random Tarantinian writing, you would get something close to Ennis, but just not quite good enough. That is how original and raw his writing really is.
Preacher Volume 1: Gone to Texas is a wild, blood soaked, revisionist religious allegory of a tale, taking place in a world where even God has given up on the world he's created. Enter Jesse Custer, a reformed sinner turned preacher of a small Texas town, whose mission - after he's possessed by some sort of deity - is to find God and make him face the humankind he's so carelessly abandoned, in the hope of explaining his actions to all of his children the world over. Custer is accompanied by Tulip, former girlfriend that he himself abandoned some five years ago, and Cassidy, a wise-cracking Irish vampire, who is as evil-loathing of a vampire as I've ever seen in any form of literature, TV or film.
Chasing Custer and his friends is The Saint of Killers, an invincible Terminator-like bounty hunter who decimates everyone in his path. He's so ruthless and cold blooded that he makes No Country for Old Men's Anton Chigurh look like a Pacific airline's flight attendant. Like hell unleashed, Saint of Killers is Satan's wrath, a punishment on two legs whose bullets tear flesh and limbs of his victims, but who is completely resistant to any gunfire or assault himself. In Gone to Texas, Ennis turns him into a fallen angel none of us would ever dare dream of running across.
Steve Dillon and Glenn Fabry serve as illustrators on the Preacher serial, and although their artwork may not be as convincing or terrifying as some of the comics that followed it (Wytches, Nailbiter, Severed, etc), it is nonetheless effective when capturing ruthless violence and hopeless fates of most of the supporting cast of characters, whose world is doomed from the opening page, without much hope for a better future. Thank "God" that Ennis' standard of writing is so high that not even mediocre artwork can bring his vision down, because in the comic book world of today, he's The Preacher among Preachers.
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