PREACHER 483
for God to rid him of Genesis, which will allow God to escape Jesse. In return, both
Jesse and Cassidy survive the ordeal, since Genesis can only be removed upon Jesse’s
death and since Cassidy intends to let the sunlight destroy him in front of Jesse. Cassidy
and God reach this agreement unaware of the deal Jesse has made with the Saint of
Killers to have God killed.
Jesse encounters a host of nemeses on his journey, beginning with his demented
grandmother and her lethal enforcer, Jody, who killed Jesse’s father. Shortly after their
quest begins, Jesse and Tulip are captured by Jody and his sidekick T. C., and taken back
to Angelville, the L’Angelle family’s plantation. Jody kills Tulip in front of Jesse in an
attempt to break his will, which nearly works until God brings her back to life and tells
her to warn Jesse off of his quest. Th ey eventually escape, killing Jody, T. C., and Marie
L’Angelle in the process.
Jesse’s main opponent is Herr Starr, who leads the Grail, bent on bringing about
Armageddon and ruling the world from behind its puppet messiah, a hopelessly inbred
degenerate spawned by years of interbreeding within Christ’s bloodline. Starr refuses to
serve a warped messiah, and focuses on Jesse Custer, with his Word of God, as the most
likely replacement. At the series’ climax, Starr kills Jesse and then dies in a gunfi ght with
Tu l i p.
Jesse also has to deal with the Saint of Killers, set on Jesse’s trail by the angels who let
Genesis escape in the fi rst place. A former Confederate soldier turned bounty hunter,
he is killed while attempting revenge on the bandits responsible for the deaths of his
wife and daughter. Condemned to Hell, he is unable to let go of his hate, and is off ered
the position of Saint of Killers by the Angel of Death, who has grown weary of his
duties. Indestructible and furnished with a pair of Colt revolvers that can kill anything,
the Saint destroys armies in his attempt to kill Jesse. Jesse fi nally convinces him that
God is at fault for his family’s death, and sets the Saint on the deity’s trail instead.
After Starr fi nally manages to kill Jesse, Genesis is set free. No longer having to
deal with Genesis, God returns to heaven to take up his throne, from which he will be
invincible. He arrives to fi nd the Saint of Killers waiting amid a host of dead archangels.
Th e Saint then blows God away, fi nally earning his rest. In the meantime, through
Cassidy’s deal with God, Jesse is brought back to life without Genesis or the Word of
God, and Cassidy, who dies from exposure to sunlight shortly after Jesse is shot, comes
back to life as a human. Th e series ends with Jesse and Tulip’s reunion, while Cassidy
sets about returning to life as a man.
Despite the Nietzschean resonance of God’s death, Preacher is mostly an exami-
nation of American mythology, specifi cally frontier and Western narratives. Preacher
dramatizes Richard Slotkin’s argument that the defi ning American myth is that of the
Anglo-Saxon race revitalizing itself through savage warfare on the frontier. According to
Slotkin, the persistence of this myth accounts for the periodic resurgence of We s t e r n s
in popular culture, while Preacher suggests the extent to which religion is central to
this national-racial myth. Jesse Custer, whose name derives from the near-mythological
Western fi gures of Jesse James and George Armstrong Custer, is the quintessential
