Grade: A+
Goddamn, I love this book. Sure, it’s sacrilegeous, seemingly controversial on purpose, incendiary, and a little over the top, but there’s just something about this Garth Ennis graphic novel that hooked me from page 1. It’s like the Davinci Code except it has sex, gory violence, mayhem, intrigue, blue streak cussing, real characters with heart, mothafuckin’ Arseface!, oh and it’s not boring as all hell. I don’t know about y’all, but that sounds like a rollickin’ good time to me. If that’s not enough to reel you in, there’s also Steve Dillon’s art work: crazy, colorful, visceral, eye-popping, gritty… I cannot find the words to describe this man’s work without sounding like a creepy fan girl. The combination of Garth Ennis’s tour de force (yes, I did just type that), dark-as-night, yet-true-to-heart storytelling combined with Steve Dillon’s beyond brilliant artwork just puts this series way and above any graphic novel I have read in the last fucking ten years. Yes, I am a Garth Ennis fan girl, but you know what? I’m totally cool with that. I mean, how can you NOT love a book with a character called The Saint of Killers?

Once upon a time, a demon and an angel fell in love (and it wasn’t beautiful and sexy like this). Like couples in love are wont to do, the two of them indulge in a little forbidden sex and the girl demon gets pregnant. The couple is punished and the offspring that resulted from their union is locked away in a vault in heaven never to see the light of day. One day, while the angels are a little busy doing something else—-namely, looking for God who decided he didn’t want to be God anymore, so he quit—-the little baby called Genesis escaped. Can you imagine what the baby of an angel and a demon would be like? Good and evil in one entity, my friend. Genesis, who doesn’t have a body, escapes to Earth and happens to collide with a small-town preacher named Jesse Custer during a mass, immediately merging with his body and decimating the church and every parishioner that just happened to attend church that day. Mostly they’re just there because Jesse had a drunken nervous breakdown in a local bar recently and the gossipmongers want to see if the Reverend Custer will put on a repeat performance. Meanwhile, the angels have discovered that Genesis is gone and totally lose their shit. With God gone, after all, Genesis is potentially the most powerful creature in the universe and the angels want nothing more than to stick him in his cage again. Enter the Saint of Killers, a powerful, gritty, scary-fucker of a man who is Charles Bronson, Chuck Norris, John Wayne, and the Terminator rolled into one. He’s got boots, spurs, is armed to the teeth, has everlasting bullets, and he’s really fucking pissed off because he’s been buried for a jillion years. Oh, and he likes to shoot people. He doesn’t give a shit who you are; if you’re in his way, your ass will be riddled with bullets. Oh, and the angels just contracted him to take down Jesse Custer. Run, Jesse, run.

On the other side of town, a desperate woman named Tulip is about to fuck up her first ever contract-killing job. She’s nervous, shaky, having second thoughts, but she’s also broke as hell so there’s no way she can back out. Naturally, she shoots the guy, but fails to take him down, blasting away his lower jaw instead. The guy she was hired to kill is a local mobster, so he doesn’t have have a shortage of dudes with guns willing to kill for him. The thugs run after Tulip showering her with bullets and Tulip ducks into a truck that she can steal and drive away in. She points her gun at the driver of the truck and tells him to floor it, but before he can even respond, one of the bullets from the bad guys tears into his face. Tulip is convinced she is fucked for sure, but the driver just shakes it off like it’s nothing and gets them the fuck out of there. Her new companion seems to possess the ability to immediately heal his wounds and only wants to drive at night, but Tulip has no time to worry about that because they need to get as far away from the thugs as possible. Their little getaway trip takes them to a shithole town in Texas where they encounter a church that has been blown to bits and not a living soul to be seen. Or so they think. In the middle of it all is a man in a clergy’s uniform, laying on the ground and seemingly dead. Tulip realizes that the man is no other than Jesse Custer, the fucker who ripped her heart out of her chest and left her bleeding on the ground. Jesse wakes up, kisses Tulip, but before Tulip can blow the asshole’s head off, the local cops, the FBI, the goddamn National Guard, and all sorts of law enforcement descend upon them, looking to arrest Jesse who they believe blew up the church and about two hundred people. Tulip and her new friend Cassidy instantly raise their hands in surrender, but Jesse doesn’t move. Instead he says, “Drop the guns, all of you, and let us go.” And the pigs drop their guns robotically and let them get away. You see, the merging of Jesse and Genesis gave Jesse one very important power. It’s the only power he’s got, but it’s all he needs. What is the power, you ask? The Mothafuckin’ Word of God, yo!

Jesse is a very flawed character. He tends to run from his problems and when he can’t run, he drinks. A lot. On top of that, he also has an imaginary friend that he’s had since childhood and that friend is John Wayne. He tell Jesse what to do, advises him, but Jesse doesn’t always obey. If he did, he wouldn’t be in such a mess, living as a drunken loser in Texas, perpetually questioning his faith in God. This is because Jesse never wanted to be a preacher in the first place and only became one because his grandmother forced him… but that’s another story. The existence of Genesis within his body convinces him there is a God and when he realizes through Genesis’s thoughts and memories that God has run away, Jesse feels it is up to him find God and have him answer for all his trespasses against humanity and the world. In this book, Jesse represents any human being who has ever questioned the existence of God or why he “works in mysterious ways.” Jesse almost reminds me of a child who figures out that his parent is, in fact, fallible and imperfect. The beauty of this book is in Jesse’s emotions and feelings. We see his anger, disillusionment, cynicism, fear, desires, hunger, wrath, and they’re all so beautiful. Jesse is one big ball of sexy crazy that you want to have sex with and spray in the face with mace at the same time. And seriously, what is with the gheri curl mullet, Steve Dillon? So not hot. Anyway, imagine what it would be like to possess the power to bend everyone and everything to your will by your words alone and have to struggle with your own conscience and principles every damned day. Imagine having the power to make anyone do whatever you tell them to do (lends a new meaning to “go fuck yourself,” doesn’t it?) and then having to deal with the consequences after they do.

But what makes this novel especially entertaining are the secondary characters and the way they interact with Jesse. There’s Tulip, a tough-as-nails, kickass heroine who has done many, many things she is not exactly proud of in the name of survival. She is a stubbornly independent, whip-smart, and wholly complicated woman who has never learned to count on anyone but herself, but if she could find anyone to take her burden for just a little while, she’d jump on him. She’s a warrior woman, a sexpot, and a scared little girl rolled into one, a veritable mass of contradiction, yet she comes off as the most sympathetic character in the story because she is the heart of it. She is the only one who isn’t wholly ruined by cynicism and a dog-eat-dog world; she wants to believe that everything will still turn out fine. On the other hand, Cassidy, the third of trio, is a happy-go-lucky hedonist. He grew up poor and starving in Ireland, so he has dedicated himself to the pursuit of pleasure, whether it is at the bottom of a whiskey bottle or a line of white powder to be snorted up his nose. He serves as a good foil for Jesse because frankly, the man is a little too somber. He is the comic relief of the trio, the guy who brings the “wacky” and the “shenanigans,” but there is something very dark in Cassidy too. In his desperation to only be pleasured, he will risk his life and those of his friends to achieve it. What makes this trio special is the way they all just click together because they all bring something to the equation: Jesse takes care of the ethics, Tulip brings the heart, and Cassidy brings the sense of humor and fun.

What also makes this novel quite fun to read is the break-neck pace of the story. Just when you think our trio can settle down somewhere and have a pint of beer, they run into some rednecks spoiling for a fight. Or the Saint of Killers wanting to put a cap in their asses. Or the FBI who believes they’re terrorists and wants to put their asses in prison. Oh, and God is still missing. Garth Ennis takes a ridiculous premise and weaves a story around it that’s so terrible and awesome at the same time that it’s like a trainwreck that draws your attention and doesn’t let go. But what’s more fascinating than the gore and the blood spatter and the bullets whizzing over your head is the heart of it. This story just isn’t about a guy who’s out for revenge; he also just happens to be after God, the Almighty, the Savior, the Creator of All Things. Everything in this book is just fucking grand scale huge. It isn’t just about one man questioning his fate; it’s about all of us who’s ever asked what the hell we’re doing in this world. Oh, and have I mentioned the kid who idolized Kurt Cobain so much that he also put a shotgun to his head, only he didn’t die so his face is all puckered up and resembles an anus?

If you’re a huge Quentin Tarantino fan or if you watched Eli Roth’s Hostel a couple of times and laughed your ass off, this bud’s for you. It’s like Chris Moore’s Lamb, mixed with a dash of the Kill Bill movies, a pinch of Al Pacino’s Dog Day Afternoon, and John Carpenter’s Near Dark for flavoring. If you’re a comic book geek like me, you gotta check this out. If you’re a lover of western and romance, there’s something here for you too. Hell, if you’re a theology student, you’ll find a lot of good stuff here. This baby’s for everybody… but not if you’re a wet blanket prude unable to find the funny in the darkest, grimmest, and ugliest of things. It’s irreverent, disgusting, funny as hell (”go fuck yourself,” indeed!), offensive as all get out, sexist, a little racist, and uber-violent, but it’s also sincere, true, and romantic. After all, when it all comes down to it, this book is really all about the love story of Jesse and Tulip. Sure, there are bullets, serial killers, monsters, and all sorts of other nasty stuff, but what makes it different from the other paranormal romances you’ve read lately?

This entry was posted on Monday, December 18th, 2006 at 3:42 pm and is filed under Books, Grade: A, Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Suspense/Horror. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.