Preacher Vol. 4: Ancient History

I was made aware that there is a character in the Preacher series called The Saint of Killers. He gets sent to Hell and is offered the role of the Angel of Death, God's own destructive instrument. He accepts, and has the previous angel's sword made into two divine Colts. The first thing he does is cap the Devil. Sounds awesome, right?

You can read his full back-story here. It's pretty messed up stuff. The universe he lives in is depressing. It's a perverted take on our relationship with God and suffering.

I recently discovered that the entire illustrated back-story of the Saint of Killers is contained in Preacher Vol. 4, so I added the book to my Amazon wish list. The covers were awesome, and I remembered liking what I'd seen of Steve Dillon's artwork in the regular Preacher series (and later on The Punisher). Should have been a sure-thing, but I had the chance to check it out at a Borders before buying it, and unfortunately it's not very good. The artwork is not by Dillon, is just kind of ugly, and (you know me) if they can't be bothered to research and draw a proper pistol, forget it. (You can download a .pdf of the first four pages at this link.)

Well, at least the covers are cool. Here they are, for your viewing pleasure.




I apologize for the poor quality of two of the .jpgs. I got them from Fabry's website, and for some reason he has them all displayed low-quality.

He scales the pistols a bit larger than he should in that last piece, but they're still accurate in every other way. And, honestly, if you were going to exaggerate something for a painting and subject like this, that's the way to go. So maybe it was intentional.