Ennis, Garth – Preacher Book 9: Alamo
There was one thing that bugged me about this series, right up until the very last issue: how the hell are they going to finish this? Take a great story, ruin the ending, and the story doesn’t seem like it’s that great anymore. I remember going to see L.A. Confidential a few years ago, absolutely loved the whole thing, then had to swallow one of the main characters getting shot in the fucking head and still saving his partner. It ruined the whole thing. Granted, since then I’ve thought that I was too hard on it, that maybe it really wasn’t as bad as all that, maybe there was a way that he could have survived that bullet without totally destroying the credibility of the movie. Preacher was kind of the same way. I felt a bit cheated by the ending. Not quite to the same extent, but cheated nonetheless. I’ll tell why exactly in the spoiler section because, hey, spoilers don’t get much bigger than that, right?
The book tries to wrap up all of the loose ends and does a pretty damned good job of it. Arseface, Starr (or what’s left of him, mentally and physically), Saint of Killers, God, Cassidy, Jesse… they all have something that they desperately want. Are they all going to get it? Are any of them? Would they want it if they could have it? This book was tough as hell to read when it came out. I really envy anybody who just finds it now. When it came out, there was a delay of a couple of months between the last two issues, and if you knew how the second to last issue ended, well, you’d wonder how I was still sane. Couldn’t imagine how they could fix everything then, but they pulled it off. I’ve mentioned this at least twice already, but it bears repeating at the end of this wrap-up: this is one of the better series ever done. I felt like I had gorged on candy at times, maybe because I don’t read anything else at all that’s color regularly (hah! I’m so much more obscure than you! Indie rules!), I don’t know. Listen, I’m going to talk plenty about this in the spoilers section because there are still some things I don’t get. All I have to say about this right now is that I really don’t see how it could have ended any other way, and that’s a pretty big compliment.
If you find out, like me, that Garth Ennis is good, I have a warning for you: it seems to me that he’s only good when he’s paired with Steve Dillon, like he is on Preacher. He’s somewhere between OK and god-awful otherwise. Anyway, if you read all the Preacher stuff and find out that you love it and want more, here’s what else he’s done with Steve Dillon.
Posted on April 23, 2010, in Reviews and tagged Alamo, Garth Ennis, Preacher, Steve Dillon. Bookmark the permalink. Comments Off on Ennis, Garth – Preacher Book 9: Alamo.