Blog Archives

Website

Preacher Book 2: Until the End of the World

Maybe I’m just not cut out for the reviewing business, because more than anything else I want to do this so I can get to Book 3. OK, what was this one about. We finally get the whole story on Jesse and how he became the man that he is, and why he “ran out” on Tulip years ago. We get at least part of the backstory on Tulip, or at least why she was a hired killer when we saw her at the start of the book. And we get to see Starr, who went through more horrible shit in this series than anybody else by far. This seemed to be kind of a haphazardly thrown together collection. Sure, it was a series of issues in a row and it was linear. But the story ended rather abruptly, as opposed to the usual smooth ending that is in most of these books. Still, the first half of the book was fucking incredible. Getting to meet Granma, Jody and T.C. (and getting to see the shit Jesse had to put up with as he was growing up) was more than worth the price of admission, even if the whole thing was kind of a mess.

If I had to criticize anything about Garth Ennis, it would be his tendency to write characters into his stories just so there will be all kinds of crazy shit going on. Or maybe he was using it to let Jesse go on about buzzwords and PC bullshit, I don’t know. But it seems to me that he often throws in characters like Jesus De Sade because he wants to throw in titillating (and completely useless to the story) scenes. Turns out that the story did have a point, but that was mostly because Starr and his crew wandered onto their trail while looking for… someone who did something bad to Starr. Listen, I’m still torn about this reviewing thing, so I’m going to need some feedback on this: should I review everything about these books, thereby ruining at least a few surprises for the people who haven’t read this yet, or should I continue on with my half-assed “summaries” of these stories? Anyway, why second-guess the writer? I would have done things differently I guess, but I didn’t write the story and I don’t work for DC. If he thought that he needed Jesus De Sade in the book, then more power to him. He seems to know what he’s doing most of the time. If you already bought the first book, I won’t need to say anything to convince you to get this one. If you haven’t bought it yet, what are you waiting for? Unless you really hate all things from the big companies with an unreasoning fire, then this book is a fucking blast.