Sorry I haven't posted anything a long, long while. School. Just school. That's all I'm gonna say.
If I think
back long enough, I’m pretty sure I can recall a news article on the G4
website—back before G4 was taken over by frat bros.—that the comic Preacher
would be getting a television adaptation. At the time, I didn’t quite get what
the big deal was with Preacher. After having read five out of the nine
collections of Garth Ennis’s magnum opus, I can safely tell you that there will never be an adaptation of Preacher. If there ever is, it would
be a shadow of the original. An empty husk completely devoid of what made the
original so damned great. Now, this is
not for the same reason why Watchman failed as an adaption. Preacher doesn’t
evolve the medium of comic writing into anything revolutionary or extraordinary
like the works of Neil Gaimon or Alan Moore. No, Preacher would not survive the
adaptation process because so many central aspects of it are so blasphemous, so many plot points are so politically incorrect, that there would
be a veritable shitstorm from both
conservatives and liberals alike after the pilot
episode of a proper adaptation hit cable.
I suppose
now is as good a time as any to discuss Preacher’s plot, and oh what a
gloriously ridiculous plot it is. Meet small-town preacher and resident author
avatar Jesse Custer. Upon having a being called Genesis—a mixing of Angel and
Demon—enter his body, giving him the ability to make people do his will just by
speaking with what is referred to as the voice of God. After a chance encounter
with the Saint of Killers, he learns from a reluctant angel some good news and
some bad news. The good news is that God does exist. The bad news is that He quit. Starting to understand now, why an adaptation of Preacher wouldn’t
out well? So now, along with his girlfriend and Cassidy—a vampiric
Irishman—he’s on a quest to hunt down God Himself and make him confess as to
why he just up and quit.
Ladies,
gents and everything inbetween, let me assure you that that description does
not do Preacher justice. Yahtzee, aka
the high king of the internet, once summed up Preacher in a particular scene in
which someone wipes a retard’s ass before shooting said retard in the back of
the head. And while it certainly has that, it also has Nazi Dominatrix
secretaries, our main man Jesse pissing out a burning cross, inbred cycloptic
rednecks, inbred ape-like descendents of Christ (eat that, Da Vinci Code), the Saint of Killers killing the devil himself, a hero cop who likes to be involved with
homoerotic s and m in his spare time, a ruler of a global conspiracy who makes
Fat Bastard look slimming, a redneck who will have sex with literally anything and the owner of Meat plant
whose a proud member of the KKK and who can get a little too intimate with some
of his meat. And let me assure you that there is so, so much more where that came
from. Did I mention Arseface? He’s kinda my favorite.
All of that
is just the tip of this iceberg. The
entire series reads like what would happen if the writers of South Park were
from texas and had a particular script they were afraid to use lest it be too controversial. Preacher is crude, violent, over-the-top and hilarious. And I
seriously doubt they could capture that magic without someone out there getting offended.
