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.

Salvation takes place almost entirely in the eponymous town in East Texas. After finding his way back to Cassidy and Tulip only to find them in one another's arms, Jesse wanders into Salvation and runs into one of his childhood friends, the one-eyed victim of inbreeding named Lorie. She's a troubled careerist who lives with an older woman who goes by the conspicuous name of Jodie, one of Grandma L'Angelle's monstrous helpers. Before long, Jesse finds himself taking over for the casually corrupt sheriff of Salvation and discovering that Jodie is in fact his mother, suffering from decades of memory loss after her narrow escape from death.

In discussing Preacher with a friend, we've often talked about how Ennis and Dillon fall into a cycle of one-upping themselves where their villains are concerned. The series started with racist cops and escalated to vile hedonists and serial killers. When Allfather D'Aronique come into the picture it seemed like nothing more vile was even possible. Then Ennis and Dillon created Odin Quincannon. He's like a miniature Ross Perot who makes up for his lack in height with pure malevolence and impotent hatred. Quincannon has turned Salvation into his own personal Sodom and Gomorrah, letting the bussed-in workers at his meat processing plant run rampant in the simple but good town. Jesse brings war on Odin and his ridiculous followers, who include a Nazi fetishist lawyer named Ms. Oatlash.

This is where Preacher really begins to fall apart. Before Salvation the villains were outrageous but meaningful. They represented the excesses and horrors of various wings of the establishment, drawing sickening parallels between the immoral fringes of modern decadence and the (literally) bloated heads of the religious elite. But Odin Quincannon and his supporters aren't exactly edgy or full of commentary. He allies himself with Nazis and a KKK cell, and he gets his jollies by having sex with a giant mannequin made of meat. In its best moments Preacher is a meaningful satire of the corruption of the so-called moral majority, but when it falls back on empty juvenalia it feels like a pointless shock piece.