Preacher
Hollywood scoop: HBO kills Preacher television series.
As it so happens I’m currently in the middle of reading Garth Ennis’s notorious creator-owned comic series Preacher. Or at least I’m at the beginning 1/3 of reading it (just cracked vol. 3). Preacher is about a wayward (yep) preacher in a small Texas town named Jesse Custer who gets possesed by the deity Genisis, spawn of an illicit affair between an angel and demon in heaven. It gives Custer the power of command over any person and compells him, alongside transient Irish vampire Cassidy and ex-girfriend/hitwoman Tulip, to find God and make him answer for abondoning the Kingdom of Heaven once Genisis was born.
The book is a by-the-numbers “slapclap.” It’s one of those books that I tell people I like but not before a thousand caveats. For instance: I don’t like how the thick Texas accents of the characters read on the page, I don’t like the “back when men were men” speechifying by main character Jesse Custer and his vampire buddy Cassidy, and I don’t like the insane grabs for over the top storytelling like having the rogue, one-eyed angel accidently sodomized in an alley in San Francisco.
But I do like the book. Why? It’s big! It’s expansive of imagination and its more juvenile moments are outweighed by its ambition. I’m sold on the trajectory of the story- that ultimately something huge will have to take place, one way or another, for this thing to conclude. And Steve Dillon’s art is very good. It’s too bad it won’t be an HBO show because the series is made for that kind of long serial format. It also distresses me how far HBO has fallen from grace. They can’t get a show going. Where’s F.O.C. by the way? Wait we have to suffer through more Entourage? Slap on you HBO.