preacher

Every now and then YouTube disappoints me. Today is one of those days. I was looking for a Guinness ad – one of my favourite TV adverts ever – that makes great use of that song from South Pacific, “I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair”, a feminist quip and surreal imagery. There’s fish in there – Dave McKean would’ve liked it.

Why did I want to blog on a Guinness ad anyway? I’ve been re-watching the final cut of Bladerunner, this time with the commentary track. (Ridley Scott commentaries are sometimes interesting but often frustrating; the guy is a great craftsman, but he doesn’t really have much to say that is very interesting, intelligent or enlightening, and he comes across as somewhat arrogant. And the Thelma & Louise commentary is one of the worst I’ve ever forced myself to sit through.) Watching ’80s Rutger Hauer on screen, quite logically I thought of the Guinness ads he did a few years later (ah, the glorious days of Sky Channel), and from that I moved on to a Rutger-less, more fishy ad.

However, since I didn’t find that one, here’s one of the Hauerian adverts – short and sweet, at a point where the pretentiousness had already turned to irony. Enjoy! (And tomorrow I might post something on Buffy or on a comic series I liked rather more than Preacher.)

Don’t you just hate it when you get started on a series, and you like it? Quite a bit, even if there are things about it that you’re not quite sure about? So you get the next in the series, and the next – and they’re still good, but not quite as good? And by the time you’re on episode/book/season 6 out of a total of 8, you realise that the series is actually not very good any more, in fact, it pisses you off – but you’re so far into it, you want to know how it ends? Of course you could just find out from Wikipedia, but it wouldn’t be the same. So you get the last one or two parts of the series and hate yourself for it when you read them.

It looks like this is pretty much what is happening with me and Preacher, the comic by Garth Ennis. I enjoyed the first one or two books quite a bit; yes, there was a deeply adolescent streak about the humour, but I liked the ambivalence of the plot and characters, and I liked the mythical/religious background. I liked that it asked many of the right questions.

But then, as the series went on, it dropped much of the ambivalence, became more interested in cheap shots, facile ultra-brutality, trying to shock those that are easily shocked, and trying way too hard at that. Book by book, the characters became less interesting, the morality more cloying and more reactionary. This was one Preacher who was getting decidedly self-righteous.

And now I’ve got the first eight books – of nine, that is. Of course I’m going to get the ninth book, but not primarily because I need to know how it all ends.

Nope. I’m making sure that I’ve got all nine… so then I can sell it better on eBay. At the very least, I can get some of my money back. Yee-hah!

P.S.: In case this entry bored you, feast your eyes and ears on this: