After finishing all of the comics from the past few weeks, and while waiting for this week's new comics to (finally) arrive, I began to follow through on my loose plan to re-read the late-90s Preacher series in anticipation of the recently-announced HBO TV series based on it.
So far I've re-read the first 10 issues, and they're every bit as entertaining as I remembered them. Author Garth Ennis knows how to tell a tale, filled with vulgarity, profanity and over-the-top characters, and still succeed at pulling the reader in to the point where you can't wait to read the next installment. As I go through them, I'm considering each story in terms of its potential for being translatable to television. Certainly, you couldn't do it any sort of justice on network TV, because you'd have to water down the language and violence so extensively as to completely neuter it.
Assuming that HBO allows for an "anything goes" approach, I think the stories Ennis weaves around Reverend Jesse Custer, Cassiday the vampire and Tulip O'Hare, along with the crazies they run into, could be done ala Sin City: just adapt them straight-up, and trust that their appeal will transcend the medium they started life in. The serial killer saga, for example, could be done as a single one-hour episode, or could possibly be spread out over two if you wanted to flesh out the supporting cast a bit more. And Jesse's origin saga, which I'm right in the middle of, has an obvious cliffhanger moment in it (the final scene in # 10) that would be perfect as the bridge between two episodes.
Not that anyone will ask my opinion on how to do the TV show, though. No, sir, that'd just be silly.
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