4 out of 5

Revisiting Preacher as a comic book and not as (as it is / was for many, including me) ones first exposure to “mature” books, as well as Ennis’ charmingly adolescent mash-up of rants, hefty moral quandaries, and perversion, inevitably exposes the series’ flaws.  It loses the bristling lustre of comic reading innocence: You see it in scope of where it came from and where the medium went.  You see that its essentially a lot of delaying tactics prior to a big showdown; you see the quite obvious setups for archetypically Ennis characters to fail, quote some brotherhood bullshit, then fail again; you see the series-as-mouthpiece filler in place of moving the plot along, inciting (maybe – again speaking from personal experience) sighs of “get on with it” whenever a page turn reveals wall to wall talking heads and war flashbacks.

That all being said, Preacher still has some great and thrilling moments, and the issues contained in volume 6 capture a nice chunk of those.  All of the above hiccups are here, but the overall focus of a pending Custer / Saint / Grail showdown gives the issues a wonderful momentum, thanks to a deft setup in which each party is somewhat unaware of the other until the ultimate moment of clusterfuckery.  The direct aftermath has some of the series’ greatest and most heartbreaking moments – Jesse’s “death;” Cassidy’s test of “faith;” Starr’s degrading “heroics” – but also starts to have the vague taint of repetition, driven home by the tension-killing followup arc, collected in the next trade.

But we’re not there yet.  War in the Sun trots off into the landscape, but prior to that, it’s 200+ pages of mostly tightly-scripted full-steam-ahead antics.