When I received all of these graphic novels, it was in response to my thinking aloud over a period of time as to how I have so little grounding in especially the history and high points of the comics universe, despite knowing pretty well what’s going on in any given movie. So, I got some old stuff as well as some landmark entries. It could be that the Preacher series is such a landmark, but it could also be that my fascist friend was simply tickled at the idea of a violent theological epic playing out in my home state.

Whatever the case, Gone to Texas, the first volume in the Preacher series, is an excellent book. A Romeo and Juliet story on a slightly larger scale than Verona results in a small town preacher with a murky past given power that is on the same cosmological scale as God’s own, or so it seems for now. Together with his ex-girlfriend and an Irish fellow with an aversion to tanning, he starts on a quest to find God and ascertain why He has abandoned His creation to the forces that have affected him so drastically, and which most recently have unleashed an unstoppable killer to end him for good.

The story is by turns horrific and hilarious, amoral and yet with an unshakeable sense of justice that nevertheless allows for the unlikelily absurd. And best of all, there’s no question as to whether you want to know what’s going to happen next from issue to issue, and frankly from page to page. After the trouble I had following the Dark Knight, I was pleased at the skill that must have gone into making each page chapter-like in its self-containedness. Not to mention that the art is pretty traditionally interpreted as well. Which it should be, because it allows the gruesomeness to be viscerally felt instead of disguised by the stylistic art that’s present in so many other graphic novels I’ve read.

I only have two of these, and I think there are nine in the series. Unless something goes drastically wrong with the second volume, I’m going to have to buy the rest of these and see how it turns out.