Preacher: Dixie Fried

Of all the characters in Preacher, Cassidy is the most confounding. He has every reason to be the wisest, most knowledgeable person in the story, yet he's often clueless, if not a downright liability. Perhaps its the fact that there's only one thing that can kill him, or maybe it's that he just stopped learning after that vampire in the woods bit him. As he's depicted in Dixie Fried, the fifth trade paperback volume of the collected Preacher series, it's clear that Garth Ennis wants us to re-examin the sympathy the protagonists, and by extension us readers, have had for him in the past.

Dixie Fried opens with "Blood and Whiskey", the fourth one-shot spin-off comic of the series. On its own, it's a send-up of all the maudlin vampire stories that became so popular after Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire hit shelves. The moody, romantic and overly poetic bloodsucker trend saw a major uptick after Interview was adapted for the screen in the early 90's, so the crass, beer-swilling monster that is Prosinias Cassidy is a way for Ennis to thumb his nose at another brand of wankery. "Blood and Whiskey" finds Cassidy, appropriately enough, in New Orleans where he stumbles across the one and only other vampire he ever met. The pallid Eccarius is a walking cliche. He wears anachronistic clothing, speaks in absurdly flowery language and indulges a local group of immature goth kids who want nothing more than to be vampires themselves. When Cassidy rolls into town, he wastes no time in re-educating Eccarius the only way he knows how: lots of booze and violence.

The big twist is that Eccarius isn't just some clueless pretender. He's actually a delusional mass murderer who has drained hundreds of people to death. Cassidy leaves him out in the sun, but it's clear that our favorite Irish rogue has a long history of getting involved with the wrong kinds of people. This cluelessness screws him over and over. It's only through luck or charity that he manages to survive.

So, it only makes sense that Cassidy would drunkenly confess his love for Tulip just as he and the gang reunite. It's just another instance of self-sabotage coming from a character who looks increasingly like a shifty drunk instead of a loyal friend. Cassidy's heart is in the right place, even if his head is in a constant, boozy haze. When he recommends going down to New Orleans to call on the help of an old voodoo-practicing associate for Jesse's sake, it's only a matter of time before everything goes wrong.

One graveyard ritual and an inept gun fight later, a bunch of those same goth kids from ten years prior lay dead and Cassidy has made one more enemy. In the wake of all his mistakes, it's possible that Cassidy has actually just fallen out of favor with God. That, or he's just not smart enough to know how to be good.