By Garth Ennis

I’ve been looking forward to the tv show “Preacher” for a while before it premiered last month on AMC. I’d never read the comic book, but I think Dominic Cooper is extremely handsome and just needs to be in more shows and movies in general.

The first episode was a fun, over-the-top mishmash of a western, gritty noir, religious horror, and violent comic book action, all of which are things I like. Dominic Cooper, playing the titular preacher Jesse Custer, was as attractive as expected. Ruth Negga plays Jesse’s ex-girlfriend Tulip, and is so witty and lovely that she steals every scene she’s in. The plot was fairly disjointed, but that’s not terribly unusual for a pilot episode, and the second episode had smoother pacing as well more Tulip, which will always be a good thing.

For people unfamiliar with the basic premise, Jesse Custer is a preacher in a small Texas town with a dwindling faith and congregation. In the middle of a lackluster sermon, he gets struck by a supernatural entity, which bestows on him the Voice of God, allowing him to command absolute obedience. Any person’s use of this power is clearly problematic, and sets Jesse up as a pretty classic anti-hero. Rebecca pointed out that this is the precise power abused by the terrifying villain Kilgrave in “Jessica Jones.”

Anyway, I was enjoying the show enough that I decided to go back and read the comic books, written by Garth Ennis. Now, I’m a big fan of Ennis, who wrote Hitman, one of my favorite comic series, which I’ll need to review some other time, but I have not been impressed with the Preacher comic series. In the written series, Jesse is not only an anti-hero, but just an all-around dick. He has a really annoying stereotypical masculinity that is a real pain in the ass to read about. To complement this, Tulip is a whiny pushover who I have trouble even understanding, let alone empathizing.

I was complaining about this to the coworker who had lent me his Preacher comics to read, and he had an interesting theory about it. He said that he figured that Ennis was satirizing Texas good-ole-boy culture. The only problem with that is that Northern-Irish Ennis has no idea what he’s talking about. While Texas misogyny can be a real problem, it is also a lot more nuanced that Ennis shows here. But I don’t want to get bogged down in a dissertation on gender roles in Texas culture, and anyway Rebecca can speak to this much better than I can, having lived in Texas for twice as long.

The tv show also gets Texas culture wrong, though not quite as offensively, and I’m willing to overlook it in favor of the improvements in both Jesse and Tulip. However, by the fourth episode, the plot is floundering a little, and I wish they’d pick up comic’s pacing at the very least.

—Anna