Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is an extremely difficult review for me to write. I'm an evangelical Christian, and, hard to believe as I'm sure it seems to a lot of people, I still think it's the best (and only) way. Preacher was going to be the enemy for a long time - that strange, pretentious book about a man of the cloth taking on God. And then I read Gone to Texas. And the next day, I read Until the End of the World. And the next day, I read Proud Americans. In case the pattern had escaped you, I had a very hard time putting these down. More to the point, I did not put them down, and have just finished Alamo. Did the book shake my faith? No. It made me think a great deal, and a great deal harder about things that had not previouly occurred to me. Was I offended by it? Sure. Find me someone who wasn't. Did I love every single page? You bet. The book has so much going for it that I probably won't be able to fit it in here - Ennis and Dillon did every single issue - that's NEVER been done before, as far as I know. You can start with Gone to Texas, and finish up at Alamo with a clear understanding of how each of them became better at what they do. It was smart without being pretentious, which put it head and shoulders above most of DC's Vertigo line - anyone can read it, anyone can understand it. Most importantly to me, though, the characters were as real as you or me. Ennis peppers the story with horrific violence and some incredibly disturbed images, but I wouldn't have batted an eyelash if I hadn't known that it was Tulip at gunpoint, or Jesse hanging out of the plane. No matter what the characters go through or do to each other, you still love them - Cassidy is one of the most well-written and complex characters to ever grace the pages of a comic book, and Jesse, in the midst of all the incredibly debauchery, is one of the most moral. For those reasons, I enjoyed the slower stories more; Salvation is at the top of my list, followed closely by All Hell's A-Comin. And let's not forget the humor - there were times when I was laughing so hard I couldn't turn the page. Give it a shot. It's new, it's innovative, and someone thought about it. That alone should be worth the prive of admission. You'll like it, and if you don't like it, you'll read it anyway.