Bigger Boat Hall Of Fame #3

BIGGER BOAT HALL OF FAME #3

PREACHER

Written by Garth Ennis

Art By Steve Dillon

Covers by Glenn Fabry

The best fiction is that which makes you yearn to be a part of it. You wish the characters were real, or failing that you wish you lived in their world. Preacher, Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's modern western opus, is some of the very best fiction ever produced in any format. It is also the finest comic series ever put to paper. Over the course of 66 issues, it mixes sex, drugs, hellfire and heresy into a bad-ass moonshine of mythic proportions - along the way giving us a menagerie of misfits, grotesques and bastards that has to be seen to be believed. Our hero of the piece is Jesse Custer, a John Wayne lovin' Dotfo (Dude Of The First Order) who, upon receiving mystical powers decides to track down God and take him to task for the shitty world he has bequeathed us.

As an unsuspecting teen, I first stumbled across Preacher in the local library. Proud Americans (the third of the nine collected editions) sat there on the shelf like an unexploded bomb waiting to go off all over my adolescent consciousness. You see at this point I had only a passing familiarity with comics. A few X-Men issues here and there and the Judge Dredd collections also situated in my library had been my only exposure to the medium. As such I was ill prepared for something as rude, raucous and revelatory as Ennis and Dillon's baby. It had not entered mind to this point that comics could be this adult. Not just in the sense of the gore and the T&A - though Ennis' sick mind and Dillon's sicker pencils bring plenty of that to the party - but in terms of the thematic and the ideological. You see I had the misfortune to be raised a Catholic; not the flat out stupidest of the belief systems perhaps, but we must have been pretty near the back of the queue. And having also attended a Catholic primary school I was not accustomed at that point to asking to many questions. Black was black, white was white, heaven was up and hell was down. Preacher was one of my first introductions to the idea of grey area, that maybe everything I had been taught was not necessarily true. While it is not single-handedly responsible for my subsequent agnosticism/humanism it was one of the first things that made me raise my head above the parapet and take a look around.

But I digress. While it does pull no punches in it's take on the big man upstairs there is a lot more to Preacher than bothering the god-botherers. It's just as much about the nature of love, both platonic and romantic. The triangle between our straight-shootin' Texas hero Jesse Custer, feisty sexpot Tulip O' Haire and lovable Irish scumbag Cassidy allows Ennis to make some profound observations on the nature of male and female relationships. The character of Cassidy especially, nails the charming sociopath that we have all let into our lives at one point of the other. Forever turning a blind eye to their transgressions because 'he's such a good guy'. In fact, I befriended one after I had read Preacher about a hundred times and still never saw it coming until it was too late. The relationship between Jesse and Tulip meanwhile, is the kind of breathless all-or-nothing love affair that even the most misanthropic among us still secretly longs for. It never ceases to amuse me that in amongst the torture, sodomy and incest Preacher has the kind of romance that is normally the strict preserve of Mills and Boon and Meg Ryan.

Don't let all the seriousness and smoochy stuff fool you though, Preacher still packs enough fights, farts and boobies to enthrall the 13 year old in all of us. Steve Dillon proved himself to be the master of the sight gag over the series run, providing belly laughs throughout at the expense of head-swine and villain of the piece Herr Starr. To paraphrase Bill Hicks people will sit through and awful lot of philosophy and politics if you give them an occasional dick joke and there's some real crackers here. (It's out of context but my personal favourite includes the line "My cock is in this bitches mouth... And it's not in a good way").

So there you have it then. Violence, laughs, romance and horror all wrapped up in one big heretical package. It is, in short, the Poo. There are nine collections that cover the whole 66 issues and tie-in mini series and you can be damn skippy I don't consider your bookshelf complete without them. Hop to it Hoppy!