Skip to main content

Preacher Thoughts

Hey, the first season of Preacher's over and I have thoughts.

First off, Preacher was and continues to be one of my favorite graphic novel series of all time. I think I loved it a bit more back then (early 2000s) than I would right now but that's the thing about enjoying art as it's being produced - if it registers with you in the moment it's probably because you're in a unique moment to begin with.

The original Preacher comic was a product and reflection of the 90s in America. It's hard to understand the comic in any other way. The hyper-literate media references, the profane but somehow sincere working of Judeo-Christian mythology, and the generally hilarious mayhem inflicted on the high and mighty seemed like a pretty good summation of a time period enthralled with Garth Brooks, X-Files, Nine Inch Nails, Clinton sex scandals, and Gingrich's Contract on America. This was right before cell phones started sprouting in every one's hands and computers were for nerds.

I think I'm going to have to write a follow-up article where I go deep on the differences and similarities between the show and source material but for now I will say, I liked this show. Not all of it and certainly not all of the time. The show veered constantly between messy distractions that didn't advance the story much and gloriously weird spectacles that didn't advance the story much. Essentially the entire first season of this show took place in between the first and final pages of the first issue of the original comic. I find that to be a curiously uplifting realization.

The important thing is that when all was said and done, Preacher wound up right where I wanted it - three awesomely flawed individuals sitting together in a bad-ass car right before they set off on one of the all-time great road trips.

***

I guess this wouldn't be a bad moment to point out that Preacher was one of my influences in writing "Agent Shield and Spaceman." I love how Garth Ennis used his basic set-up to spin out a great web of anarchic mythology and damaged heroes. In my own clumsy fashion, that's a piece of my aspiration here. For your enjoyment, I offer the next chapter of the story.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reading Response to "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

Reader Response to “A Good Man is Hard to Find” Morgan Crooks I once heard Flannery O’Connor’s work introduced as a project to describe a world denied God’s grace. This critic of O’Connor’s work meant the Christian idea that a person’s misdeeds, mistakes, and sins could be sponged away by the power of Jesus’ sacrifice at Crucifixion. The setting of her stories often seem to be monstrous distortions of the real world. These are stories where con men steal prosthetic limbs, hired labor abandons mute brides in rest stops, and bizarre, often disastrous advice is imparted.  O’Connor herself said of this reputation for writing ‘grotesque’ stories that ‘anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.’ This is both a witty observation and a piece of advice while reading O’Connor’s work. These are stories about pain and lies and ugliness. The brutality that ha...
1 comment
Read more

Death's End by Liu Cixin

Having recently finished the last book in Liu Cixin's instant classic "The Remembrance of Earth's Past" series, Death's End, I can only report a feeling of total amazement and awe. There is so much about this novel that blew my mind, that offered different and better ways of viewing the universe. This novel did what I wish more novels would, serve up a new universe entire, evoking beauty and horror, nobility and disgust, in a timeless monument to unfettered speculation.  Obviously, in discussing the events of the last of a trilogy books, spoilers are to be expected. I am, however, going to try to avoid discussing much beyond the first 100 pages of the third novel. I read the translation of this novel, as ushered into being by the amazing talent of Ken Liu. Ken has written of a certain prickliness when it comes to translating work. He makes an effort not to anglicize the source material, not smudging away the occasional difficulties in bringing Cixin...
Post a Comment
Read more

With the title World War Z

Early on in the mostly disappointing zombie epidemic thriller World War Z, UN Investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) hides out in a Newark apartment, trying to convince a family living there to flee with him from the hordes of sprinting, chomping maniacs infesting the city. The phrase he uses, drawing from years of experience in the world's troubled war-zones is "movement is life." Ultimately he's unsuccessful, the family barricades their door behind him and they join the ever-swelling ranks of the undead. As far as a guiding philosophy goes for a pop-action thriller like World War Z, 'movement is life,' isn't bad. And for the first half of the movie or so, it follows its own advice. Similar to other recent zombie movies (Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead) the warning signs of what the rest of the movie will bring are subtle and buried until all hell is ready to break through. The television mentions 'martial law,' Philadelphia traffic snarl...
Post a Comment
Read more