Remember the Alamo? About 160 people holed up in an old Spanish mission against a 5,000 man Mexican army, at the dawn of the Republic of Texas[1]? Some people will try to tell you that it was a pointless battle that didn’t accomplish much of anything that couldn’t have been better handled in the field with more even odds, thanks to Santa Anna’s ineptness as a general. These are people who don’t understand the strength of a legend. There’s just something soul-stirring about a hopeless battle whose only purpose is to provide the people down the way with the time they need to change their own battle into one that can win a war. I guess I understand how people can not get that, but I don’t believe it’s possible to not get that and be Texan at the same time.

All of which gives me renewed appreciation for the Preacher series as it reaches it’s ninth volume finale, Alamo. Whatever else can be said about the series, good or bad, Garth Ennis certainly has a handle on the nature of Texas and the kind of man it gives birth to. Jesse Custer and his girlfriend Tulip, their once-friend, Irish vampire Cassidy, the world-dominating Grail Society, the Saint of Killers, and even the Lord God himself all gather in San Antonio for their final, climactic confrontation, and it’s a sure bet that with the power and bloodthirstiness that each party brings to the table, practically anyone could be considered analogous to the doomed band of soldiers holding the Alamo in 1836. Of course, only one of them’s Texan, so I suppose there’s a potential spoiler built right into the thematic success of the concluding volume.

Barring one misstep in the matter of Jesse and Tulip’s relationship which I’ll put down to a matter of taste, I liked the book through and through. And I’ve liked almost every other individual book, some of them very well indeed. But looking at the series as a whole, I’m not so sure. There are a lot of messages buried in it, most of which I think are really good, and true besides. But the one floating at the surface, central to the plot and the driving force behind almost every action taken by every character, is that the world is a bad place and it’s God’s fault. That may be factually true, but whether it is is well to the side of my point. I just feel a little let down by so much great writing and art coming out of the whine-delivered statement of blatant fact: “Life’s not fair!” Luckily, I had no trouble with it up until the end, and then probably only because the ultimate solution was so prosaic and, to me at least, absent of any actual solving of the problem.

Incidentally, Preacher may become an HBO series, starting in 2008. If so, and if you can stand all kinds of bloody violence, you should probably watch it. Whatever else it is, it’s a damn fine story.

[1] At least, the Alamo had not yet fallen when independence was declared. So dawn feels like about the right metaphor from where I’m sitting.