Comicade

By telling his story as both a direct account of the Holocaust and as a personal narrative of a Jewish family in 1980's New York, Art Spiegelman provided an example of how the experience of European Jews during World War II echoed through several generations. Few Jews of my own generation can claim great grandparents as most of them were too old to survive the concentration camps and ghettos of Nazi rule. This erased not just a generation but an entire history from the lives of millions. Unable to trace their lineage back more than one or two generations, post-war Jews were forced to build new identities from what little they had left. For people like Art Spiegelman, what was left was a family reduced to just a handful of people, all of whom bore the scars of genocide. All of Spiegelman's neuroses, all of his sadness and desperation come with the weight of that unfathomable tragedy.

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A lot of Holocaust survivor stories come down to a few good snap decisions and a lot of luck. So many people escaped death at the hands of the Nazis because they just happened to avoid getting caught one night or because they made a friend before the war who was willing to help them when the Gestapo came to town. For Vladek Spiegelman, that was exactly the case. The second half of My Father Bleeds History, the first of two trade paperback compilations of Maus, consists of Vladek watching his family dwindle before his eyes as the antisemitic laws in Poland become more ruthless and the Nazi extermination plan becomes more bald-faced.

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Comic books are a strange medium. They are at once worlds unto themselves and contextually dependent on the time in which they were written. When trends outside a comic pass, the ideas in the comic become outdated. Ultimately, I think that's what happened with Preacher. When Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon put out the first issue of Preacher it was 1995. Their cultural references to grunge music, their flippant jokes about the fledgling Internet and their stunning irreverence of organized religion were all cutting edge. It was the quintessential Gen-X comic, owing as much to Quentin Tarantino as to Stan Lee and Robert Crumb. By the time the 66th and final issue of Preacher hit the shelves it was mid-2000 and everything that made the comic so interesting in the first place was suddenly mainstream. Kevin Smith, who wrote the forward to one of the Preacher trade paperbacks, had since come out with his film Dogma, itself about as snarky and blasphemous as Garth Ennis's comic. Other quasi-religious films like Stigmata and action fare like End of Days also breezed through theaters. All of a sudden, Christian myth was a popular theme. The world around Preacher changed and the comic just couldn't help feeling dated in the fast-moving decade in which it was written.

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In reading the seventh trade paperback compilation of Preacher comics, Salvation, the first thing that comes to mind is Neil Gaiman's 2001 novel American Gods. Garth Ennis's Preacher comics came several years before American Gods but both share a recent cultural tradition of messing with established religious mythology to comment on the modern world. Gaiman's novel attempts to convey a world in which old philosophies and systems of honor have been made obsolete, for better or worse. At its most successful moments it captures a kind of Gen X sadness and sense of disconnection, but I've always found the book a little too in love with its central conceit to really move beyond a pattern of "Go to new place, meet an ironic allusion to an old god, get clue, go to new place" etc. As we approach the last dozen or so comics in the Preacher series, I've noticed a similar tendency toward wheel-spinning. Jesse's adventures through Ennis's over-the-top version of the American South are still amusing, but several years on and the franchise starts to show its wear.

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