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    Grimshaw - Preacher, or the Death of God in Pictures - JCRT 3.2

    Preacher, or the Death of God in Pictures

    Michael Grimshaw
    University of Canterbury

    We philosophise on the end of lots of things, but it is here that they actually come to an end."[1] Jean Baudrillard in his episodic ‘postcard’ treatise on hyperreal America, (the theorist as traveller), posits a vision of the USA as simultaneously both a paradoxical ‘realised utopia’[2] and “the only remaining primitive society”[3], a dystopian utopia, a society best understood from the sacrificial expanse of the desert horizon. Baudrillard’s aphorism on America as the land of ‘last things’ finds pop-culture realisation in the pages of Garth Ennis’ Preacher, a 66-issue, graphic novel. For if Nietzsche proclaimed the Death of God in the 1880s and the ‘Death of God’ theologians debated the merits of this claim; if Time asked the question in 1966, then readers of Preacher comic actually see it happen. God dies. God is shot. God is killed. And you understand why.

    > At its core it stood for a distrust of any kind of authority; a romanticised belief in working-class culture (street credibility); the worth of rebellion for its own sake; and the fetishisation of violence (real or imaginary).[4]

    This nihilistic punk aesthetic is an important undercurrent to Preacher not only in Jesse’s a/theology but also in its critique of Kurt Cobain and the nihilistic music of grunge as sub narrative. For Ennis is saying that to believe in the salvific, redemptive example of suicidal rock stars (whether Sid Vicious or Kurt Cobain) is as self-defeating as those believing in a God who profess love but display indifference. Here Aresface stands in for all damaged humanity, briefly succeeding himself as punk rock celebrity because of his hideous appearance but then just as quickly discarded. Ennis states that the lack of paternal affection is what drives adolescents into the worship of these nihilistic, narcissistic stars. Here the inauthentic punk star is an analogy for the inauthentic God, who likewise feeds off his fans, who often damage themselves in attempting various forms of salvific imitation.

    > The illustrations are not really illustrations of what’s going on. The narration isn’t really describing what’s going on. There is a gap there, and somewhere in that gap is reality.[5]

    To read a comic is therefore to engage in looking beyond what is being presented to the fuller picture behind the panels. This acknowledgement of the artificiality of presentation paradoxically allows the presentation of the fantastical as ‘real’. The other important link is that Preacher is making use of a mythology and history that appears from the viewpoint of late modern post-enlightenment society rather fantastical and ‘artificial’. This has been noted in an interview with Garth Ennis:

    > Of course, being in the comic world allows you to throw in casually, “We have this reanimating serum that can bring fish back to life.” Which would be out of place in a more realistic book. Like in Preacher, there’s a lot of supernatural things going on, but if you accept Christian mythology, that’s the only jump you have to make. In DC you have Christian mythology and radioactive superheroes and space aliens…[6]

    The comic can therefore present what is, in a modernist, secular world, often viewed as unpresentable. Yet in its mixing of genres and mythologies Preacher is perhaps the ultimate form of a postmodern, eclectic, religious sensibility of pastiche. It aims not only to implement such a cosmology upon the world of its readers but also must at some level reflect their eclectic cosmology for it to garner such acclaim both critically and in the realm of consumer appreciation. At this level Preacher acts as an icon for the postmodern GenX religious sensibility - a melange of tradition, pop culture, Gnostic occultism, and the mediaization of our religious sensibility[7]. And while a movie can approximate this experience, only a comic book series can enable a drawn out engagement over a period of five years to create of a sub-world for the reader to engage with and within.

    Notes

    Michael Grimshaw (PhD, University of Otago) is a lecturer in Religious Studies, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. His interest is in the intersections of Christianity, post-Christianity, and contemporary culture. He has published on religion and cinema, travel, country music, sport, philosophy & on ecotheology. He has co-edited an anthology of New Zealand spiritual poetry. His research interests include modernist architecture, technology and imago dei, and New Zealand intellectual history.

    ’ 2002 Michael Grimshaw. All rights reserved.
    Updated 07/28/21.
    http://jcrt.org/archives/03.2/grimshaw/

    1. Jean Baudrillard, America trans. C. Turner (London/New York; Verso 1988/1993)p.98. ↩︎

    2. ibid., p.77. ↩︎

    3. ibid., p.5. ↩︎

    4. Roger Sabin, Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels. A History of Graphic Art (London: Phaidon,1996) p.133. ↩︎

    5. Frank Miller in “Amazing Heroes” July 1986 pp37-8, quoted in R. Sabin, Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels,p.9. ↩︎

    6. Mania in Garth Ennis Interview, April 18, 1997, http://www.fandomshop.com/comics/intrview/garthennis041897.html ↩︎

    7. There have been many recent texts that build upon this current state of Western society (particularly that of America - and by implication the ‘global America’ of the commodified, mediaized world). See Tom Beaudoin, Virtual Faith. The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998); Harold Bloom, The American Religion: the emergence of the post-christian nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992); Douglas Coupland, Life After God (New York: Pocket Books, 1994); Erik Davis, Techgnosis: myth, magic + mysticism in the age of information (New York: Three River Press, 1998); Bruce David Forbes & Jeffrey H. Mahan (eds.), Religion and Popular Culture in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Eric Michael Mazur and Kate McCarthy (eds.), God in the Details. American Religion in Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001); Mark C.Taylor, About religion: economies of faith in virtual culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). ↩︎

    8. DC Comics launched Vertigo as ‘mature comics’ in 1993. ↩︎

    9. A graphic novel is a designation of a form of comic book that addresses more ‘adult themes’ and in a manner analogous to the format of a novel. Preacher, over its 66 issues, varied from a single 30 page comic to 200 page ‘graphic novels’ all of which combined to make up the mammoth Preacher series. ↩︎

    10. Ennis, from Belfast worked previously on the seminal British comic 2000 AD and then, for Vertigo on the very anti-establishment (both religious and political) Hellblazer and was also behind the titles Hitman, Unknown Soldier and The Darkness. In 1991 the publisher Robert Maxwell (under pressure from the UK’s Evangelical Alliance) withdrew from publication an early graphic novel by Ennis called “True Faith”. The Evangelical Alliance was offended by, amongst other things, a description of God as “a blockage in the world’s toilet.” See James Tweed, “True Faith” New Statesman February 15 1991. ↩︎

    11. Preacher 43, November 1998,p.19. ↩︎

    12. God is masculine, closer in form to a Greek God - all flowing hair and beard and rugged musculature. ↩︎

    13. Tulip draws on a pulp culture tradition of sexualized action-women, from Wonder Woman to Charlie’s Angels and Tankgirl on to the virtual heroine of Lara Croft of Tomb Raider. ↩︎

    14. Laurence Rickels in The Vampire Lectures (Minneapolis/London: University of Minneapolis Press 1999), p.2 notes that it is often the alcoholic who is a prime candidate for becoming a vampire. He also notes (p.23) that the suicide is another prime candidate. Here Cassidy escapes from the mass suicide, becomes a vampire and copes with it by becoming an alcoholic. Ennis is prone to twist established lore. ↩︎

    15. Ennis’ take on Southern society is strongly influenced by movies such Deliverance and Southern Comfort where crazed, inbred hillbillies mix twisted fundamentalist Christianity, sexual deviance and extreme violence. ↩︎

    16. The best source available in English is Christopher Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns. Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone (London/New York: I.B. Taurus.1981,1998). Frayling notes the mix of types that underwrote the spaghetti hero as “a mixture of James Bond, Che Guevara, Hercules and Judas” (p. xii). Possible influences for Preacher include the anti-clerical Django films, the bandit-priest of 'A Bullet for the General (1961), the sex-maniac priest of Find a Place to Die (1968) and the bounty-hunting preachers of No Room to Die (1969) and Reverend Colt (1971). Frayling,p.79. ↩︎

    17. G. Ennis, “foreword” in Ancient History, DC Comics 1998, p.2. ↩︎

    18. The use of the term ‘man’ here is deliberate for in science fiction the post-human cyborg is nearly always, seemingly created by a man. ↩︎

    19. Jim Kitses, "Introduction: Postmodernism and the Western’ in J. Kitses and G.Richman ed. The Western Reader, p.16. ↩︎

    20. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation. The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America (New York: Athaneum,1992) p.402. Slotkin states that the frontier myth “…represented the redemption of the American spirit or fortune as something to be achieved by playing through a scenario of separation, temporary regression to a more primitive or “natural” state, and regeneration through violence.” p.12. ↩︎

    21. Georges Bataille, Guilty trans. B. Boone (Venice/San Francisco: The Lapis Press, 1988), p.27. ↩︎

    22. ibid.,p.27. ↩︎

    23. The Saint of Killers returns to his vigilante ways when his family is brutally murdered in his absence. ↩︎

    24. That is, Jesse contains a God-force within him- that which has been ‘poured out’ of the divine (or in this case escaped from heaven). While not the typical kenotic being, Jesse has links to such forms of Christology where Jesus is ‘a God-filled man’ and in many ways has a twisted lineage back to the Arian heresy. ↩︎

    25. M. Baigent, R. Leigh, and H. Lincoln, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (London: Arrow Books, revised edition, 1996). ↩︎

    26. Ibid., p.18. One of my students, Joseph Veale also alerted me to the existence of a narrative drawing on a search for esoteric knowledge that exists as an unmarked site upon the website for the American alt-metal band tool: http://www.toolband.com/. If you scan down the tumourous side bar and click on the large right hind nodule you enter a narrative telling of a Indiana Jones type search conducted in the south of France by the bass player. The audience for comic books and metal music heavily overlap. ↩︎

    27. Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, Holy Blood and Holy Grail, pp.106-107. ↩︎

    28. B. Schaber, " 'Hitler Can’t Keep ‘Em That Long’: the road, the people" in S. Cohan and I. R. Hark ed. The Road Movie Book (London & New York: Routledge,1997), p.20. ↩︎

    29. S. Roberts “Western Meets Eastwood. Genre and Gender on the Road” in Cohan & Hark ed. The Road Movie Book, pp.53-54. ↩︎

    30. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, p.593. ↩︎

    31. Tracing lineage from Tocqueville, Baudrillard states “America is powerful and original; America is violent and abominable. We should not seek to deny either of these aspects, nor reconcile them.” America, p.88. ↩︎

    32. Georges Bataille, Guilty, p.31. ↩︎

    33. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection trans. L. S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p.4. ↩︎

    34. see ibid., p.109. ↩︎

    35. Linda Badley, Film, Horror and the Body Fantastic (Westport,Conn./London, 1995), p.7. ↩︎

    36. A, Loos “Ornament and Crime” in L. Munz & G.Kunstler Adolf Loos: pioneer of modern architecture (London; Thames & Hudson) 1966, pp. 226-231(original essay 1908). Loos’ essay became a theoretical underpinning of the modernist movement, influencing Mies van der Rohe and his famous dictum: ‘Less is more’- perhaps the pre-eminent ‘touchstone’ of modernity. ↩︎

    37. Ryan Gilbey, “Doom Generation: new tales from the dark side” in The Face no.4 May 1997, p.122. ↩︎

    38. Jean Baudrillard, America, p.23. ↩︎

    39. Bret Easton Ellis has written a series of novels (Less than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, The Informers, Glamorama) expressing a puritan outrage at postmodern society and its commodification of existence. Douglas Coupland (generation x, shampoo planet, microserfs, life after God etc) takes a more mannered approach of switching between ironic inertia and utopian celebration. ↩︎