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 When trends outside a comic pass, the ideas in the comic become outdated.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.

Midway through Alamo, the last compilation of Preacher comics, it becomes apparent that Garth Ennis was aware of the waning quality and relevancy of his flagship series. Arseface, who changed from a commentary on the disaffection of modern teens into a parody of the rock star arc, rolls into Salvation, TX and finds the town transformed into a postmodern fairytale. All that was wrong with the town is now right, even down to the presence of Odin Quincannon's angelic brother. It's an intentionally cheap segment that seems designed to poke fun at all of the marginally less cheap elements of the original Salvation story. It's the closest thing to an apology for past wrongs we'll ever get in the series.

Really, it just feels like Ennis ran out of ideas. His main character's gimmick, the Voice of God, all but disappeared from the story, swept under the rug because it hovered between breaking the plot and drawing attention away from the cowboy aesthetics the comics latched onto more as the series progressed. When the final battle comes, despite all the calculated blasphemy and intricate alternative histories of Heaven and Hell, the whole thing comes down to a disappointingly traditional concept of Christian sacrifice. I wanted our hero, whose initials are J.C., to win through some means other than giving his life for the greater good. Not that it matters, because Jesse comes back to life anyway, gets the girl and literally rides off into the sunset on a horse.

Maybe it's just because I read preacher ten years after its final issue was published, but I wasn't shocked at all that it ends with the death of God Himself. I suppose it had to end that way, seeing as Preacher has its formula. Throughout the entire series, there are only two kinds of men. There are those who are one kind of badass or another, and those who die. Since God is depicted as a coward, He has no choice but to end up with a magical bullet between His eyes. I suppose it was too much to ask for more nuance in a comic that devotes more ink to dismemberment than to dialogue.

Preacher is an interesting comic series that is best taken in its early incarnations as an artifact of a very brief era in Western culture. It's a grunge comic, an isolated bit of ephemera from the mid-1990's. There's very little about it that's deep and its shock value has been tempered by years of more truly disquieting content, both in fiction and in the real world.