Preacher: Until The End Of The World TPB Review

Reviewer: Jesse Baker
Story Title: All in the Family (Preacher #8-12), Hunters (Preacher #13-16), Miracle Man (Preacher #17)

Written by: Garth Ennis
Penciled by: Steve Dillon
Inked by: NA
Colored by: NA
Lettered by: NA
Cover by Glen Fabry
Editor: NA
Publisher: DC / Vertigo

The second Preacher trade paperback, “Until the End of the World” serves a much preferable entry point into the Preacher series than the first trade, and serves pretty much as a litmus test towards how much of the book’s trademark perversion any potential new reader can handle. It also gives us readers a much better introduction to the cast of characters and their backgrounds. For the new readers, the main characters for Preacher are:

Jesse Custer: Former Minister who merged with Genesis (the offspring of an angel and demon) who can make people do whatever he says via “The Word of God”, a power Custer finds himself having as a result of being used as a hiding place for Genesis. Custer now roams the earth, looking for God and wanting answers as to why God has left Heaven upon learning of Genesis’s birth, and the even bigger question as to why God lets bad things happen to humanity.

Tulip: Custer’s girlfriend. Tulip is the book’s ”normal” character whose love for Custer allows him to keep his humanity in the wake of everything that happens to him.

Cassidy: Cassidy is your typical male scumbag who seems to lower the IQ of any man he hangs out with, and causes them to de-evolve into overly conservative rednecks whose solution to everything is violence and who hate anything that is different from them. He’s also a vampire, which makes for him being able to get involved in rather vicious acts of bloodshed and be used as a veritable punching bag for the bad guys when required.

The Grail and Herr Star: An evil Christianity-themed cabal, formed after the death of Christ, who secretly control the world and who are secretly plotting to bring about Armageddon so that they can unveil the last living ancestor of Christ as the Messiah and publicly take over the planet. Standing in their way is the group’s head of security Herr Star, who seeks to replace the inbred and mentally retarded descendant of Jesus Christ with Jesse Custer and usurp the plan for his own. He is backed by Featherstone, a female Grail member who is madly in love with Star and Hoover, a whiney and incompetent Grail member who ends up getting the sex-crazed Herr Star anally raped within hours of meeting him.

“Until The End of the World” collects two Preacher stories and “Miracle Man”, a single issue story that leads into the next trade paperback “Proud Americans”.

“All in the Family”

Tulip and Custer have been kidnapped by Custer’s evil grandmother and her henchmen. They are determined to force Custer back into the life of a minister that they’ve decided that he must live regardless of whether or not he wants it. And to add insult to injury, they kill Tulip (who is resurrected by God in order to entice Custer into abandoning his quest at the end of the story) in front of him just to see the look on his face when they kill her.

The bulk of the story revolves around the origin of Jesse Custer and the horrific details of his life leading up to his becoming Genesis’s hiding place. We learn how his grandmother had Custer’s father murdered in front of him as a child, how his Mother was dragged out into the woods and left to die, how Custer’s only friend was murdered when he accidentally caught one of the grandmother’s lackeys having sex with a chicken, and how Custer was forced to lie to his friend’s family about what had happened. This story, told within the confines of these five issues stands as some of the most depressing storytelling in a comic book, so depressing and bleak that by the time Custer breaks free from his family’s clutches and kills them, you’d have to be a cold, heartless bastard not to be cheering for Custer when he kills off his grandmother and her minions one by one and is reunited with the resurrected Tulip.

Also we learn in this story of the origin of Custer’s John Wayne hallucinations, which began after he was forced to watch his father be killed. Though Ennis never spells it out for the readers, it’s essentially clear that “John Wayne” is Custer’s father, whose spirit watches over his son in the form of his favorite movie star.

“Hunters”

Murder, drug use, full frontal nudity, homosexual rape, a skinny rich guy named Jesus who is obsessed with having sex with every single animal in a nearby zoo; “Hunters” has it all. Besides introducing readers to the evil hi-jinks of the Grail organization, “Hunters” features the return of Irish Vampire and all around piece of s— Cassidy, who was absent during the “All in the Family” arc.

After reuniting at a local rock concert, Custer and Tulip learn of Cassidy’s recent exploits. It’s revealed that one of Cassidy’s ex-girlfriends robbed a couple of drug dealers but O.D.’d on the heroin she stole. Now Cassidy, who doesn’t want to accept the idea that his ex-girlfriend caused her own death by using the drugs for her personal use, wants revenge on everyone involved in the drug dealers and Custer agrees to help because hanging around with Cassidy has caused him to revert to a primitive, southern “Good Old Boys” mindset, where anyone who does anything in the least bit different is a degenerate who must be beaten to an inch of his life.

Meanwhile Herr Star has started gathering his inner circle to bring in Custer, but things get off to the worse possible start imaginable. Hoover is sent out to hire a prostitute for Star, who needs to have rough and extremely kinky sex with hookers in order to unwind after a busy day of killing and scheming. But when the incompetent Hoover approaches some prostitutes who don’t take kindly to his bumbling inexperience in soliciting them, they direct him to a male prostitute/drug dealer/self-proclaimed “Sex Detective” who, upon being given instructions as to where to meet, proceeds to anally rape the villainous Star against his will, even as Star screams out that he had asked for a female to have sex with him…

Eventually Custer and Cassidy locate the identity of the man who bought the drugs that killed Cassidy’s ex. The buyer is the Jesus De Sade, a millionaire who is known for the anything goes-type orgies that he throws and for his obsession towards having sex with every single animal on the face of the earth. As Custer and his gang prepare the raid the orgy and ruin De Sade’s fun, the Grail track down Custer and prepare to raid the orgy as well and capture him during the party.

“What are all of these people doing?”

“They’re having something called sex Hoover. And apparently they are enjoying it immensely as I myself used to, before a certain moron arranged to have me anally raped.”

“I said I was sorry!!!” (Hoover and Star, in an exchange that sums up best the shock value nature of the Preacher series

Soon enough the orgy turns into a bloodbath as Custer discovers De Sade filming kiddy porn in the basement of his mansion and Tulip gets into a shoot-out with Star and his troops. In the end De Sade is beaten to an inch of his life by Custer, Star has one of his ears shot off by Tulip, and Cassidy is captured by the Grail after he tells them that he’s Custer. As “Hunters” end, Custer rescues Tulip from Star’s henchmen and interrogates them via “The Word” as Star takes Cassidy to the Grail’s mountain headquarters in France.

“Miracle Man”

The final issue of this trade paperback, “Miracle Man” sets the stage for the next trade, “Proud Americans”. As Custer and Tulip decide upon the final fate of Hoover and Featherstone, Cassidy learns about the Grail’s agenda and is repeatedly, and quite gruesomely, shot into a bloody pile of dismembered limbs and torso. The trade paperback ends with the teasing of Star possessing a secret ally who helps him see throw Cassidy’s deception, and Featherstone escaping while Hoover is forced by Custer to the horrific fate of being forced to count EVERY SINGLE grain of sand on a nearby beach.