What Would Preacher Do? Tactics of Blasphemy in the Strategies of Satire and Parody

Abstract

Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s sixty-six-issue graphic novel series Preacher is blasphemous. Scream it from the rooftops, post it behind a sputtering red Cessna on an aerial advertising banner, and be sure to mention it in your Amazon customer review, as hundreds have (Maxfield 2012). Of course, some of the reviewers hem and haw, admitting a guilty pleasure that, in spite of being Evangelical Christians, devout Methodists, or Roman Catholics, they actually enjoyed reading Preacher, could not put it down. Others cannot resist making a teaching moment of their two-star review, pointing out that, all in all, Preacher is lousy theology. “Ennis and Dillon hold religion in undisguised contempt. Therefore, they don’t realize the questions they raise are centuries old, or that their characters are little more complex than paper dolls. They just hold the characters, and their faith, up to mockery and derision, and think they’ve created a story” (Nenstiel 2021). Even serious scholarship is not immune to righteous indignation: “Here, Ennis’ Northern Irish Protestantism (even if latent) comes to the fore. Ennis expresses himself as an outraged Puritan, implying that it is better to destroy than to allow contamination (whether societal or religious) to continue” (Grimshaw 2010, 153). Now, given that the Entertainment Weekly review blurb on the Amazon page endorses it with “features more blood and blasphemy than any mainstream comic in memory. Cool,” one is hard pressed to avoid the suspicion that a good-sized chunk of the comics reading public just cannot take a joke.