May 2010

  • Maus: Part One

    By msarko on 5/27/10 1:46am
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    In the modern Jewish community, there is often talk of what will happen when there are no more living Holocaust survivors. Will those stories be lost? Will the world forget the full intensity of pain, degradation and atrocity of that dark period in history? With that very worry in mind, several writers have endeavored to record the stories of survivors so future generations will never forget what happened to the millions who suffered under Nazi oppression during the Second World War. There is at least one great story of the Holocaust in every medium. In film there is Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, in literature there is Elie Wiesel's Night and even in comic books there is Art Spiegelman's Maus.



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  • Preacher: Alamo

    By msarko on 5/20/10 12:51am
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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 When trends outside a comic pass, the ideas in the comic become outdated.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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  • Preacher: All Hell's A-Coming

    By msarko on 5/12/10 9:25pm
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    Throughout the entire Preacher series, I've been conflicted about how Garth Ennis portrays his female characters. Just like there are two kinds of men in Preacher, badasses and cannon fodder, the two kinds of women in the comics are those who want to screw the protagonist and those who are completely abhorrent. Even when Jesse has been out of the picture, like in "Good Old Boys", the nearest Alpha Male serves as his stand-in object of desire. This alone isn't really a problem. After all, the world of Preacher is populated almost exclusively with awful, disgusting people so it only makes sense that women would be quick to jump on the one decent man they ever met. What's really troubling is that none of Ennis's strong, ass-kicking, gun-toting women seem to be able to properly function without their preferred men. Whereas Jesse, Herr Starr and Cassidy all soldier on whether or not they've got their women to support them, characters like Tulip and Featherstone absolutely fall to pieces when they've lost their loves.



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  • Preacher: Salvation

    By msarko on 5/6/10 2:05am
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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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