It’s interesting reading Preacher through the modern lens of gender politics.  Ennis has always done his piss-takes on masculinity and featured some singularly strong female characters, but he’s been equally prone to glorify some of those same alpha-male traits and somewhat pigeon-hole those females into what I would say is a simplified view of what ‘strong’ can mean.  To his credit, he seems aware of this imbalance, and has tried to address it at various points.  The story will trump digging in for revelations, generally, but at his best moments, the writer is capable of entering the reader into the conversation, and still making it all feel woven into his plotting.

Preacher was/is Ennis at his best.  It has ups and downs, it can be juvenile and dated, but the larger movements encompass all of his themes at a point in his writing career when he was confident enough to be both straight-forward and indulgent without preaching (womp) or writing too directly for his fans.  Maybe its the story that broke him, as it earned him many of those fans, but he still pops up here and there with some really fascinating and relevant stuff.

Volume 1 of Preacher laid the plot-groundwork, but went a little overboard trying to strut its stuff and so sacrificed some characterization for the sake of Cool Ideas and eye-grabbing crassness.  It had no patience.  But that can be the nature of first arcs.  It introduced some big myth-building stuff via Garth’s take on heaven, and the Saint of Killers, but it equally just felt like teenage scribbles pasted atop cowboys, bitching about religion, and sassy dames.

Volume 2 feels like Ennis pausing – not on the momentum, just the full-aggression-ahead style of the plotting – to make sure these are  the characters, and the story, he wants to write.  Some of the writing is still juvenile, still sexist, still a little black and white.  But Best Intentions are here, and our superhuman leads become a tad more human.

There’s the sudden descent into dread of our introduction to Jesse’s family in the Angelville arc – which gives us the skinny on Jesse and Tulip’s relationship past as well – the diversion into the perversions of ‘Sexual Investigators’ (still have no clue exactly what that entails, which makes it one of Garth’s more ingenious gross-out gags) Bob and Freddy and the anything-goes orgy of Marquis de Sade, and then most engagingly – as it opens up the scope and grounds our villains into the Earthly realm – the appearance of The Grail, protectors of Jesus’ sacred bloodline.  Everyone’s got a line on Jesse for one reason or another while he stays focused on kicking the ass of whomever recently pissed him off, resulting in one of the classic and most natural ‘just missed him’ set of criss-crossing plotlines that slickly leads into a forthcoming Grail confrontation.

Again, I don’t want to gloss over the disparaging use of the term ‘faggot’ as a ‘you’re not manly’ putdown, or the way Jesse and Tulip interact like in every male comic writer’s dream relationships (We fuck a lot!  I get to be the man but she’s really strong-willed and then we fuck!), or how Ennis shrugs at certain kinks but then others – not that I disagree with what he’s condemning – are worthy of immediate death.  But: The plotting of these arcs, which just gives us so much more humanity and points of interest to deal with, already nudges these as superior to what came before, and then there are those moments – Cass questioning whether or not Jesse would thump another man just for making a pass at him; the sudden slam of gender roles questioning dropping on to Jesse and Tulip’s fucks-a-alot honeymoon – that are those conversational elements I mentioned, Garth exploring, I think, his own motivations along with his characters.  It’s not exactly perfect but it feels pretty real, and is how Preacher, in its better arcs, managed to develop some of the most endearing characters of all comicdom.

Dillon remains consistent as ever.  I never noticed how he used an Ezquerra-esque jaggedly-inked paneling for this book, and it works really well to sell the gritty Western vibe.  He also remains the best at juggling his big, weighty characters with Ennis’ wordiness, filling up the panels without foregoing a sense of focus or motion.  Certainly letterer Clem Robins gets a huge amount of credit on that as well.

There are two colorists here – Matt Hollingsworth and Pamela Rambo.  I’m not positive how they worked, whether together or separate, but I liked the look of the art in this trade a tad more than the first trade, as it felt slightly looser; finer.  Can’t say if that was down to the colors or Dillon just evolving on the book, but it’s noted.

No, it’s not perfect.  But the imperfection feels inherent, part of the world and characters Ennis was developing.  If the first arc felt a little forced to you, the gross-out gags and cowboy talk don’t disappear here, but you might find yourself won over by the way Garth slowly opens things up, and starts to turn it into a think-piece over yelling obscenities at his reader.