Preacher
Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's 66-issue supernatural western — a Texas preacher fused with a hell-born entity hunts a God who has abandoned creation. Eisner Best Continuing Series 1999, AMC adaptation.
📖 DC Comics / Vertigo • Started 1995
God has left the building. No one knows where he went — only that he hasn’t been home to Heaven in a very long time, and the world he abandoned is a mess of violence, angels, vampires, and Texas-sized bad intentions.
Preacher is the 66-issue supernatural western written by Garth Ennis with art by Steve Dillon, published at DC’s Vertigo imprint from 1995 to 2000. It’s the story of Jesse Custer, a small-town Texas preacher possessed by Genesis — a being born of the impossible union of an angel and a demon — whose fusion grants him the Word of God: the power to make anyone, man or angel or God himself, do exactly what he says. Armed with the Word, his childhood love Tulip O’Hare (an expert shot), and his best friend Cassidy (a centuries-old Irish vampire with appalling taste), Jesse sets out on a road trip across America to find God and hold him accountable for walking out on creation.
The Search for God
What follows is one of the wildest, filthiest, and most tender epics comics has ever published. Ennis swings between raucous comedy, horrifying violence, and genuine romance — the road from Annville, Texas leads through a showdown with the gravely out-of-order Angels of the Lord, the Genesis-cursed congregation of Reverend Odin Quincannon, a chain-smoking, lisping secret agent named Herr Starr, and the legendary Saint of Killers, a gunslinger resurrected with six bullets that can kill anything. The series won the Eisner Award for Best Continuing Series in 1999, an honor documented by Comic-Con International and the Hahn Library awards archive, and it remains the definitive proof of Ennis’s rule that the best stories are the ones with no respect for anything.
From Page to Screen
After a decade of stalled movie development, AMC officially announced a television adaptation in 2014, developed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg with Ennis and Dillon attached as executive producers. The series ran for four seasons from 2016 to 2019, bringing Jesse, Tulip, Cassidy, and the Saint of Killers to a new generation — a fitting afterlife for the book The Beat’s contributors rank among the essential Vertigo canon.
Preacher isn’t for everyone — it’s a book that puts the sacred and the profane in a headlock and refuses to let go. Perfect for fans of road-trip westerns, irreverent religion, and the creator-owned Vertigo era from The Sandman onward. Start at the beginning with Preacher Book One, and don’t miss Ennis’s equally savage superhero satire, The Boys.
