Comics Bulletin logo
Search
  • Columns
    Random
    • Dave Cockrum’s FUTURIANS RETURN. So?

      Julia Walchuk
      July 2, 2014
      Columns, Comics Bulletin Soapbox
    Recent
    • Revisiting the Witchblade/Fathom/Tomb Raider Crossover

      Daniel Gehen
      February 8, 2021
    • The Full Run: Usagi Yojimbo – The Wanderer’s Road Part 2

      Daniel Gehen
      December 4, 2020
    • The Full Run: Usagi Yojimbo – The Wanderer’s Road Part 1

      Daniel Gehen
      October 30, 2020
    • What Looks Good
    • Comics Bulletin Soapbox
    • The Full Run
    • Leading Question
    • Top 10
    • The Long-Form
    • Jumping On
    • Comics in Color
    • Slouches Towards Comics
  • Big Two
    Random
    • 3.0

      Review: Black Panther #1: Silver Age Style in a Modern Package

      Julia Walchuk
      April 6, 2016
      Big Two, Big Two Reviews, Marvel Comics
    Recent
    • 3.0

      Review: X-MEN LEGENDS #1 Delivers A Dose of Nostalgia

      Daniel Gehen
      February 22, 2021
    • 4.5

      DCeased: Dead Planet #7 Presents a Hopeful Future (Review)

      Daniel Gehen
      January 22, 2021
    • Retro Review: Detective Comics #826 Remains a Holiday Classic

      Daniel Gehen
      December 3, 2020
    • DC Comics
    • Big Two Reviews
    • Marvel Comics
  • Indie
    Random
    • 4.5

      Review: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #100

      Julia Walchuk
      December 20, 2019
      IDW, Reviews
    Recent
    • 4.0

      Review: Beast Wars #2 another chance to change the past

      Stephen Cook
      March 3, 2021
    • 4.5

      Review: THE LAST RONIN #2 Hurts So Good

      Daniel Gehen
      February 19, 2021
    • TIME BEFORE TIME—A HIGH STAKES TIME TRAVEL SCIENCE FICTION SERIES SET TO LAUNCH THIS MAY

      Daniel Gehen
      February 19, 2021
    • Reviews
    • Archie Comics
    • Boom! Studios
    • Dark Horse
    • IDW
    • Image
    • Oni Press
    • Valiant
  • Reviews
    Random
    • 4.0

      Singles Going Steady 2/3/2014: Escalation is Unavoidable

      Julia Walchuk
      February 4, 2014
      Reviews, Singles Going Steady
    Recent
    • 3.0

      Review: X-MEN LEGENDS #1 Delivers A Dose of Nostalgia

      Daniel Gehen
      February 22, 2021
    • 4.5

      Review: THE LAST RONIN #2 Hurts So Good

      Daniel Gehen
      February 19, 2021
    • 2.3

      Review: SAVAGE #1 Needs Taming

      Daniel Gehen
      February 16, 2021
    • Singles Going Steady
    • Slugfest
    • Manga
      • Reviews
    • Small Press
      • Reviews
      • ICYMI
      • Tiny Pages Made of Ashes
  • Interviews
    Random
    • Video Interview: Del Hewitt Jr

      Julia Walchuk
      October 5, 2014
      Interviews, Kickstarter Spotlight, Video Interview
    Recent
    • Interview: Jon Davis-Hunt Talks SHADOWMAN

      Daniel Gehen
      June 8, 2020
    • Interview: Becky Cloonan talks DARK AGNES and Her Personal Influences

      Mike Nickells
      March 4, 2020
    • Simon Roy

      Interview: Simon Roy on His Inspirations and Collaborations on PROTECTOR

      Mike Nickells
      January 29, 2020
    • Audio Interview
    • Video Interview
  • Classic Comics
    Random
    • Steve Gerber's Son of Satan Pt. 2: The Battle for the Soul

      Julia Walchuk
      April 1, 2016
      Classic Comics, Classic Comics Cavalcade
    Recent
    • Countdown to the King: Marvel’s Godzilla

      Daniel Gehen
      May 29, 2019
    • Honoring A Legend: Fantagraphics To Resurrect Tomi Ungerer Classics

      Daniel Gehen
      February 15, 2019
    • Reliving the Craziest Decade in Comics History: An interview with Jason Sacks

      Mark Stack
      January 2, 2019
    • Classic Comics Cavalcade
    • Classic Interviews
  • News
    Random
    • Coffin Bound #1 Receives Second Printing For Late August

      Julia Walchuk
      August 5, 2019
      Image, News, Press Release
    Recent
    • TIME BEFORE TIME—A HIGH STAKES TIME TRAVEL SCIENCE FICTION SERIES SET TO LAUNCH THIS MAY

      Daniel Gehen
      February 19, 2021
    • Image Comics and TMP Announces SPAWN’S UNIVERSE

      Daniel Gehen
      February 18, 2021
    • SAVAGE DRAGON IS A FORCE TO BE RECKONED WITH THIS MAY

      Daniel Gehen
      February 17, 2021
    • Press Release
    • Kickstarter Spotlight
  • Books
    Random
    • 'Will Eisner: Champion of the Graphic Novel' is a Great Tribute to the Master Cartoonist

      Julia Walchuk
      May 23, 2017
      Books, Classic Comics, Classic Comics Cavalcade
    Recent
    • Collecting Profile: Disney Frozen

      CB Staff
      November 22, 2019
    • Collecting Profile: NFL Superpro

      CB Staff
      August 31, 2019
    • “THE BEST OF WITZEND” is a Wonderful Celebration of Artistic Freedom

      Daniel Gehen
      September 15, 2018
    • Review: ‘Machete Squad’ is a Disappointing Afghan Memoir

      Jason Sacks
      July 31, 2018
    • Review: ‘Out of Nothing’ is the Antidote to Our Sick Times

      Jason Sacks
      July 23, 2018
    • Review: ‘Bizarre Romance’ Shows Rough Edges in the Early Days of a New Marriage

      Jason Sacks
      July 10, 2018
What's New
  • Review: Beast Wars #2 another chance to change the past
  • Collecting Profile: Blue Beetle
  • Review: X-MEN LEGENDS #1 Delivers A Dose of Nostalgia
  • Collecting Profile: Kraven the Hunter
  • Review: THE LAST RONIN #2 Hurts So Good
  • TIME BEFORE TIME—A HIGH STAKES TIME TRAVEL SCIENCE FICTION SERIES SET TO LAUNCH THIS MAY
  • RSS Feed
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Google+
  • Contact Us
  • Write for us!
  • Visit Video Game Break!
Home
Columns
The Long-Form

Preacher Volume Six: War in the Sun

Julia Walchuk
March 23, 2016
The Long-Form

So. Preacher.

I feel like I’m repeating what everyone else has said about Preacher so far in this review series, but wow. I have mixed feelings about this book.

Like many others, when I first read Preacher about a year and a half ago, I was enthralled and amazed and shocked and confused and all kinds of emotions. I read it at a time when I had first really begun delving into the comic book world. I’d grown up casually reading comics, but after reading Saga I dove into the world of comics headfirst armed with a library card and an intense passion for the medium.

Along came Preacher. It was more violent than anything I had ever read, more blasphemous, more depraved, and I was loving it. Reading it made me feel rebellious. I felt like I was part of something, joining with so many others who had gone on this wild literary ride. Though I started to question how much I loved the story in the last few volumes, I still declared my excitement about the series as a whole on the regular.

But mannnnnnnnnn was this second read rough.

Here we have a series that, supposedly, centers around a guy looking for God so that he can force God to explain why he has abandoned heaven and caused pain for so many people. But when I think back on the series, this is not at all what even comes to mind. I know the story does come back to this is the last couple volumes, but the back of Volume 6 talks all about Jesse trying to find God, and then barely touches on it in the trade itself. There are just so many things going on in Preacher, it loses sight of where it was going when it began.

That being said, I love the first issue of War in the Sun. The Grail has always been one of my favorite parts of the Preacher universe. In a unique twist on a common theme of religious entities influencing politics, The Grail has been actively militarized and involved in bringing about the end of the world since the death of Christ. There are no long lost texts or defunct societies that must be rediscovered and revived, The Grail has just been chugging along, doing its thing for centuries. The conspiracy runs deep as The Grail brings political leaders and important figures from around the world under its control through favors and connections.

The most intriguing part of this story is Herr Starr’s character development. When War in the Sun starts out, it seems to be jumping into a sympathetic origin story of a misunderstood villain. In the first few pages, set in the past, Herr Starr’s military deployment successfully defuses a hostage situation on an airplane. When the smoke clears, all the hostages are alive, but one little girl who was hit by a stray bullet. While the important looking inspector guy (not entirely sure what his rank is, but he’s wearing a trench coat and smoking a cigarette so probably pretty high up there) tells everyone that it’s a miracle more people weren’t killed and one death is nothing compared to the allowance of twelve they had for the night, Herr Starr holds the girl’s disfigured corpse and says, “This is not the way the world should be.”

herr starr 1

What a moment, right? Herr Starr is showing his soft side. Maybe he hasn’t always been such a terrible person. Maybe the woes of the world have hardened and twisted him over the years. His fellow soldier, Brendel, certainly thinks so, offering Herr Starr a place in The Grail and letting him in on the grand conspiracy that is leading to the apocalypse. We get more insight into Starr’s past when he speaks with the Allfather of The Grail. The Allfather recounts a moment in Starr’s childhood when bullies held him down and cut a star into his face. “A star for Starr.” At first this too seems like a tale of a sad, misunderstood boy, driven to violence by horrible circumstances. The bullies targeted Starr because he was quiet and kept to himself. Starr was five at the time. He had done no wrong and this bothered them. After the children cut Starr, causing him to lose sight in one eye and be permanently scarred. After this, Starr spent the next five years killing off each of the bullies, making the deaths look like accidents, which is certainly a little disturbing, but again this story is told within the context of the Starr we’ve seen crying over a dead girl’s body.

Herr Starr 2

This perception drastically shifts when Herr Starr is in the car talking to Brendel and explaining his plans to thwart The Grail’s scheme. Herr Starr does not agree with the person The Grail has chosen to make their messiah and he worries that the Allfather is no longer making rational decisions for The Grail’s cause. He plans to kill the Allfather and the child that has been chosen to be the Grail’s savior, to which Brendel replies, “Have you forgotten the little girl? . . . I watched you that night, gazing at her shattered face. That’s why I invited you to join The Grail. I thought you’d want to build a world where little girls would never have to die again.”

Herr Star’s response to this changes everything we had previously thought about his character in this issue. He says, “Then we were seeing different things that night. I was looking at the face of chaos. A reminder that the world lacks order, that uncertainty can reach out and smash us at any time. So long as that continues to be true, fixating on a single death is pointless. I am at war. I have been all my life. And I would kill a million little girls to win.”

herr starr 3

Take a minute to let that sink in.

Now go back and think about Herr Starr’s conversation with the Allfather. So what I had read as Herr Starr being a sad boy acting out in the face of tragedy, was actually just Herr Starr being a sociopathic murderer. Herr Starr is not a sympathetic villain. Herr Starr does not have a soft little caramely center. Herr Starr is cold and calculating and terrible. I love that I was so ready to give Herr Starr a pass and accept that he was complicated and tormented soul, but Preacher was like NOPE! Wrong. You knew he was terrible, Julia. He is a really really awful person. Honestly, who cares what his past is. He’s really awful. And we almost got you to forgive him. But nope. Don’t do that.

Speaking of terrible people, we then move on to the next issue, when Cassidy makes an appearance. Ugh, Cassidy. I was so okay with him for so much of this series and then in the fifth book, he made me so upset. And then he just continued to make me more and more upset. And now that I’ve read the whole series on gone back to reread this book, the sight of Cassidy makes me immediately queasy. Basically, if a girl isn’t into you, don’t try to force her to be into you and ESPECIALLY don’t use her depression over the death of the love of her love and her consequent spiral into drug abuse and lethargy as a reason to move in sexually. I just. Ugh. He’s so upsetting and disturbing.

Cassidy 1

The entire rest of this book after the first issue is a giant clusterfudge disaster, much like the entire second half of this series. Jesse goes to take peyote so that he can be closer to Genesis, but he never actually ends up taking peyote in this book. (Remember that whole thing I mentioned about how the God storyline seems to get forgotten about in the rest of this mess? This is Exhibit A.) His hallucinogenic pursuits are derailed because Herr Starr decides to use Jesse to lure the Saint of Killers out into the desert, where Herr Starr is prepared with tanks and guns and planes and helicopters and a small section of the army. Of course, the Saint of Killers just barrels through them all and kills everything, so Herr Starr panics, calls in a favor with the president, and drops a nuke on the Saint of Killers. Yup. That happens.

Saint of Killers

And then! As if things couldn’t get any more ridiculous, Herr Starr falls out of a plane while he’s trying to get away (?) and somehow survives (??) and then wakes up in a cave with his leg has been eaten off by three cannibalistic siblings (???). And THEN! Jesse also falls out of a plane, but is saved from falling by Cassidy. He then uses the voice of Genesis to command Cassidy to let go of him so that only one of them has to die and not both of them. I know Preacher is all about being ridiculous and over the top, but what in the heavens is even happening in this book, it’s so all over the place and so crazy, but that certainly isn’t even the most concerning part.

Jesse

The thing about this book that really leaves a dirty, gritty, slimy feeling crawling all over my skin is the Cassidy thing I mentioned earlier. After Jesse falls out of the plane and everyone thinks he’s dead, Cassidy and Tulip start traveling together. Tulip is heavily sedating herself with pills and alcohol. For a short while, Cassidy keeps his distance, but soon enough he swoops in to the position of Tulip’s lover and it is so non-consensual and terrible. This book is filled with destruction and death and people being terrible people, but all of it is so over the top that it doesn’t really sink in. Cassidy’s manipulation of Tulip is so real that it stands out as the most egregious act in the whole Preacher series.

Cassidy 2

The ending of this book also makes me incredibly angry. Jesse has recovered from his fall in the desert and is on the hunt to find Tulip and Cassidy. When he finally finds them again, he sees them through a diner window. Just as he’s walking up, he sees Cassidy lean in and kiss Tulip and he immediately falls down on the sidewalk in shock. And then he just LEAVES!! (Well, technically he doesn’t leave in this book, it ends with him lying on the sidewalk. He leaves in the beginning of the next one, but I know that’s what happens next and it makes me very upset.) He should have gone in and fought for her. He knows Cassidy. He know he’s scummy. He knows that everyone thought he was dead. What did he expect? I can’t imagine a real person would walk away from that situation and let the two most important people in his life continue to think that he was dead. It’s infuriating.

There was one little bright spot in all of the mess that was War in the Sun. The Fuck You Astronaut. After Jesse falls out of the plane into the desert, he forgets everything that happens until a month later when he wakes up in the home of Johnny Lee Wombat. Johnny tells Jesse about how when he was growing up he always dreamed of being an astronaut, but was then kicked out of the space program for faking the information on his application. Since he left the program, Johnny has been working on a project in the desert. For ten years he blew holes into the desert floor until he spelled out the words ‘fuck you’ in giant letters that could be seen from space. That guy is a gem in the terrible sea of violence and cruelty that is this book.

Fuck You Astronaut

I’m so bummed with how I felt when rereading Preacher. For the first 60 pages, I was so excited to once again be reading about The Grail and all the ridiculousness surrounding Herr Starr. But then everything turned to chaos, gratuitous violence, terrible people, and disgustingness for the sake of disgustingness. I don’t understand why Arseface is still a story line that is happening in this series and I wish Garth Ennis would cool it with the inbred family portrayals. Thank goodness for the Fuck You Astronaut.

Garth EnnisPreacherSteve Dillon

Share On:
Tweet
JLA: “New World Order” Gives Us the Best Justice League
Civil War Crimes: Civil War #1

About The Author

Julia Walchuk
Current Event Editor

Related Posts

  • Humble Bundle Releases Garth Ennis Comics Bundle

    Jason Jeffords Jr.
    July 11, 2019
  • Singles Going Steady 8/26/17: Feeling the AfterShock

    Jason Sacks
    August 26, 2017

3 Responses

  1. Call Me Carlos the Dwarf March 23, 2016

    Two things:

    A) Cassidy’s the bad guy of the story, just as much as God, or Starr, he examines the toxicity of traditional masculinity. The visceral horror of what Cassidy does to Tulip is exactly what Ennis is going for.
    B) Jesse doesn’t know Cassidy’s scummy, because Tulip never told him Cassidy made a pass at her. He just thinks of Cassidy as his best friend, whom he loves.

    When Jesse leaves, he views it as “letting Tulip move on,” not “abandoning her to the motherfucker who’s drugging and raping her.” That’s exactly why Cassidy is so fucking evil.

    • Kyle Garret March 25, 2016

      First off: thank you for reading all of these!

      I still can’t buy into the idea that Ennis is trying to attack traditional masculinity, if for no other reason than Jesse is full of it and is never proven wrong. The series goes to great lengths to make it clear that Cassidy is a one off, not a true example of a real man the way that Jesse is.

      And, honestly, the humor is so juvenile and often homophobic that it undermines the idea that Ennis is trying to undercut the very thing that he’s feeding.

      • Call Me Carlos the Dwarf March 25, 2016

        I just love Preacher, haha (although it took me a couple years to read the second trade, after how absolutely awful that NYC serial killer arc was).

        I’ll take any chance to talk about it that I can get (luckily, a couple of people in the AV Club’s comic comment section are reading it for the first time right now, so I’ll have plenty of opportunities in the near future).

        I just think that the Sheriff, the Saint of Killers, Jody, Herr Starr and Cassidy are all archetypal examples of the American conception of masculinity. The Lawman. The Tortured Avenger of his dead family, the Southern Badass who takes no shit from anyone, the Man who makes The Hard Choices so others don’t have to, the Bro…and Ennis comprehensively shows each one of them to be absolutely terrible people.

        What saves Jesse, what makes him different, is that he loves Tulip, and he’ll love her ’til the goddamn stars go out.

        His conversation with the horse about Tulip and Amy at the end of that flashback issue tells us all we need to know about who Jesse is. When he starts crying and asks Tulip to come with him in the final issue, that tells us what Ennis thinks manhood should be about.

        It’s not about being a badass, or tough, or not giving a fuck. It’s about having a Word, and loving someone enough to try to stop your “macho bullshit” from “getting in the way.”

        That’s the beauty Garth Ennis hides underneath the gore and dick jokes.

Support Us!

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Friends of the Site

  • SOLRAD
  • Your Chicken Enemy
  • Psycho Drive-In
  • Women Write About Comics
  • The Beat
  • Loser City
RSSTwitterFacebookgoogleplusinstagramtumblr

Comics Bulletin is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for website owners to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com, audible.com, and any other website that may be affiliated with Amazon Service LLC Associates Program. As an Amazon Associate, Comics Bulletin earns from qualifying purchases.

All content on this site (c) 2018 The Respective Copyright Holders