Preacher: Proud Americans

Let's talk about backstory for a moment. Comic books love backstory and from a writer's perspective, I can understand why. To understand your characters, you've probably already come up with a massive origin story for each of them that is somehow larger than your central plot. If your publisher gives you quotas and deadlines, backstory is a way to fill that downtime between good ideas. The third of the initial three Preacher trade paperback compilations is chock full of backstory. While interesting in their own right, a lot of those segments just aren't as interesting as the main story.

The book opens with Jesse sitting in an airport bar waiting for his plane to France. He finds himself sidled next to a man who served with his father in Vietnam. What proceeds is a comic-long story of some of the darkest days fighting in the jungle. Long story short, John Custer was a hot-headed man's man who got to meet the real John Wayne and establish his bloodline as one that has a serious problem with authority. Really, that's what every story in Proud Americans is about, to one extent or another. The whole book is a screed against corrupt leaders.

The biggest (literally and figuratively) corrupt leader in the book is All-Father D'Aronique, the top dog in the international Grail conspiracy. Ennis and Dillon go out of their way to make him as repulsive as possible. He's grotesquely fat, a glutton and a shameless bulimic, and he has no respect for life whatsoever. The book compares absurd monsters like D'Aronique to the self-serving leaders of the Irish War of Independence and the detached politicians behind the invasion of Vietnam.

At the end of the book, Ennis spends some time revealing Cassidy's origin. He was a naive teenager in Independence-era Ireland who got attacked by a vampire after deserting the battle in Dublin. His long, meandering story boils down to two ideas. First, that political leaders use human lives as expendable resources, and second, that it's also pointless to pontificate on what's best for the world. Poignant, yes, but still something of an unnecessarily long excursion from the actual plot.

What's puzzling is that there's a moment of self-consciousness during Proud Americans's middle backstory segment. When Jesse confronts the fallen angel who fathered Genesis, the angel's poetic description of the events surrounding Genesis is cut short. In this instance, Ennis was right. We didn't need to sit through a long, however pretty, story of something that happened prior to the central plot. Why we needed to watch John Custer get splattered with his friend's insides and Cassidy go through a vampire-tinged immigrant story, I have no idea.

I don't want my frustration with the over-indulgent backstory segments to detract from how enjoyable I found the rest of Proud Americans. If anything, my problem with the bookends is that they take up space that could be filled with more of that central plot. The showdown at Masada is hilarious and intense, especially the scion of the supposed savior bloodline. The line, "Changed it into wine! Humperdido!" is in competition for the funniest in the series.

I'm also looking forward to more Herr Starr. While he began as just another super-smart villain, the reveal of his concern for the fate of humanity gave him a depth that often makes him more interesting than Jesse.