Preacher: Gone to Texas

Preacher Vol 1 Gone to Texas (1996) Garth Ennis

First, a disclaimer. I’m squeamish. In fact, I will walk out of the room during particularly violent scenes in movies, and haven’t watched a horror movie since I was in high school. (Why? Because graphic violence gives me really unpleasant dreams.) Thing is, it all depends upon how the violence is presented as to whether it bothers me or not. Although I had to turn away a couple times, I didn’t really have a lot of problems with Snatch. Sin City bothered me quite a bit. For the end of The Last Samurai and Braveheart I just got up and left the room. Fight Club bothered me in places, but I still liked it. So it’s hard to tell what is going to bother me, and what isn’t.

I’d picked up and put down Preacher multiple times. The story as described sounded fascinating, and right up my alley, but I just wasn’t sure. So I finally just got the first volume and decided to see how I felt about it.

What I decided is that the story was interesting, but overall I didn’t care for it. It was a little too graphic, and in many places squicked me out. Which is too bad because I really liked the story: a preacher goes in search of God, who has abandoned the world. That is just right up there in story lines that I am really going to like. Unfortunately, the art was just too gruesome for me to enjoy the story.

And I have one really big nit to pick. Two characters are sitting in a car (in the front seats) and the bad guy drives a large knife into the hand of the second character, nailing the hand to the dashboard. The problem here is that in several of the pictures, it looks like the bad guy drove the knife across the bones. I’m sorry, but there is not enough space in a car for someone to gain enough momentum to drive a knife through the bones of the hand and then several inches into the dash.

No way. It’d be hard enough to drive a big knife that far into the dashboard anyway, but doing it after having to go through the metacarpals. No way.

The story completely lost me there. Completely and totally lost me.

That was bad. Although I have to say that I did have several interesting discussions about the difficulty of driving a knife through someone’s hand, and then the difficulty of gaining sufficient momentum to drive a large knife into the dashboard of a car. (As I said, only certain things bother me. That wasn’t one of them.)

So, it was an interesting story, but unless Michael picks them up, I probably won’t be finishing the rest of the story. Unless someone tells me that the rest of the books in the series are different.
Rating: 6/10

• Browse the archives:
  
• For Camelot’s Honor » »
• « « Wizard’s First Rule