Preacher: All Hell's A-Coming

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.

The one minor divergence from this formula is Amy, the no-nonsense rich girl who befriends a teenage Tulip at boarding school. In All Hell's A-Coming, the next to last trade paperback compilation of Preacher comics, we get Tulip's origin story and much of it revolves around Amy. Tulip's mother died in childbirth and her father more or less raised her like he would a boy, though it should be noted that being a single dad gives him a downright feminist worldview. Predictably, Mr. O'Hare is taken from his daughter too soon thanks to a particularly embarrassing hunting accident. Orphaned and depressed, Tulip is swept into a boarding school surrounded by the children of politicians and captains of industry, still a confrontational tomboy. Amy, a sleazy senator's daughter, ends up being to Tulip what Tulip is to Jesse. She's something to protect, something softer and less tortured that needs to be kept from the excessive ugliness of the world.

The truth is, Amy is a lot more likable than Tulip. She's less likely to fall apart and she's not self-destructive. For all Tulip's kick-assery, she's not exactly a strong character. She can't handle being alone and she falls in and out of substance abuse when life gets hard. Amy, on the other hand, is respectably strong but much more stable. She's the only reliable port in the many storms of Jesse and Tulip's life together. Moreover, Amy's lack of a man may make her lonely but it doesn't destroy her ability to define herself.

All Hell's A-Coming spends a lot of time making Cassidy out to be a monster beneath his romantic exterior, but it also does what feels like an unintentional hatchet job on Tulip. Especially in the one-off prequel issue "Dot The I's and Cross The T's", Amy comes off as the woman with whom Jesse should have ended up. She'll never be as much of a soldier as Tulip, but in the evil-inviting-evil world of Preacher, that increasingly seems like a bad thing.