By Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s Preacher is one of the best comic books of the 90s. Hard-hitting, hard-drinking, and just plain hardcore, Preacher is an over-the-top, ultra-violent riff on westerns in which a preacher named Jesse Custer gets possessed by a supernatural force. Now one of the most powerful beings in the universe, Jesse tries to find God and hold Him accountable for abandoning creation and generally allowing the world to get so royally f**ked up.
Joining Jess for the ride are his ex-girlfriend Tulip and an Irish vampire named Cassidy. There’s more to Preacher than that (e.g., secret societies, holy bloodlines, cannibals, Bill Hicks, love letters to New York), but that’s the gist.
Seth Rogen is one of the co-producers adapting Preacher for AMC, which recently released this trailer for the show:
Watching the trailer, I didn’t get any of the vibe that I got from the comic at all. While part of it is the look of the three leads being a little off when compared to Dillon’s art, most of this is due to the lack of supernatural content. From this snippet alone, the show looks really insular and realistic(-ish), though all the imagery may be from the first episode or so rather than the entire season. How they’ll be able to translate the sheer grandiose lunacy of Ennis/Dillon’s vision on a reasonable budget is anyone’s guess.
Maybe the biggest concern is how extreme the show will get. The violence in the Preacher comic is at times sadistic/brutal and while at other times cartoonishly over-the-top. I mean, it proudly goes to 11. While there’s a lot that can be done on AMC (as seen on The Walking Dead and Breaking Bad), I have a feeling that they’ll have no choice but to tone the violence down just as much as the scope of the vision.
And this doesn’t even touch on how the public–particularly the religious right, who have such startling persecution complexes–will receive all of the subversive stuff about Christianity.
Preacher will debut on AMC next year, and its first season will run for 10 episodes.
What do you think of the trailer?
[via /Film]