It is probably pointless for me to review this issue. Preacher set the comic world on its' ear and has a rabid following of readers. This is the next to last issue of the series, so anything I say here really won't make any difference one way or the other. Nonetheless, this issue has been awaited so fervantly that it deserves a little space here. I haven't read the comic in several years. I kept up with it for a few years and while it was somewhat of a guilty pleasure, I finally decided that there were too many comics that were more worthy of my time and money. So I went into this issue fairly cold as to the recent plot line.
It didn't really matter, because there is little in the way of plot here at all. The whole issue is simply a blood bath that I'm sure the books fans have been expecting for a long time.
The title character is one Jesse Custer, a Texas minister who was going through something of a crisis of faith when he became bonded with an entity called Genesis. Genesis escaped from captivity in Heaven and it gave Custer the power of "The Word", which is to say, anything he told someone to do, they were forced to do, no matter how repugnant or comical. He is joined on a quest to find God by an ex-girlfriend assassin and a 100 year old vampire. The book took on mythic qualities as the carnage and body count piled up. Ultimately, this was what drove me from the book. Writer Garth Ennis is excellent with characterizations and has a keen sense of the absurd, but he relies too much of elements of shock for my tastes. Anyone easily offended had no business reading Preacher.
So here at long last we get to the end of Preachers final storyline (there will be one more issue of an epilogue to the series). It is pretty much worthless to anyone who hasn't been reading the series regularly. It has no plot twist, or revelations of anykind. It is nothing more than a bloody coda in which everybody dies (well, alright, one character lives, but I don't want to give that away for anyone who hasn't read it and still wants to). I will give Ennis credit for creating believable characters, but here it is impossible to see them as anything more than cyphers with no hope for redemption. Perhaps it is unfair to judge the book based on this final issue. The Preacher trade paperbacks are among DCs best selling books. Unfortunately there is nothing here for anyone but the most bloodthirsty fans. I would really hate to think that the cutting edge of comics for so many people is represented by this.
