YMMV / Preacher

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Is Jesse Custer broadly in the right for most of the series, but with a few flaws, or is he initially a macho, judgmental asshole who learns to be more forgiving and empathetic over the course of the run?
  • Arseface's friend Pube's sister Catherine and her unloading on Arseface after his failed suicide: Is she genuinely angry at Arseface at having mutilated himself in his suicide attempt? Or is she really upset at her dead brother because he killed himself, and that threw her family into turmoil? Did Arseface surviving the attempt just make him the dumping ground for her ire?
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Crosses the Line Twice: More like it crosses the line six times and is still looking for the next line to cross, with no sign of stopping.
  Came the day that T.C. fucked the chicken.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Odin is one of the few completely straight examples of this trope on the entire comic—though at first he seems like a regular Smug Snake, it soon becomes obvious that he has many severe mental problems, especially since he often has sex with a grotesque statue made out of meat, and eventually he completely loses touch with reality and turns into a rambling lunatic. Even compared to other lunatics, Odin's "lunacy" is most unusual and manifests in various ways.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Arseface; he's an extremely minor character who's still reached Memetic Mutation status.
• Genius Bonus:
  • When Arseface first sings a song, his dialogue is presented without translation, but if you're already familiar with the song, you can puzzle out that he's singing Oasis' "Wonderwall."
  • One of the Adephi describes God's plan to give humanity free will, which sparked a bloody civil war in heaven, as His "Great Leap Forward." This is the same name that Mao Zedong gave to his disastrous social and economic program that caused tens of millions of deaths in China.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Cassidy's loving tribute to New York City is capped by a city skyline focusing on the World Trade Center, which would be destroyed only a few years after publishing.
• Magnificent Bastard: Jesse Custer was a disillusioned priest until being made host to Genesis and granted the Word of God. Learning God had fled heaven fearing Genesis' power, Jesse sets out to find answers, hunting for the creator while punishing evil across the world. A cunning former criminal, Jesse uses trickery to stop the Saint of Killers, God's new nigh-unstoppable hitman and quickly surmises God's selfish motives, devoting himself to stopping Him. Making a deal with the Saint, Jesse allows himself to be killed, separating Genesis from himself and luring God back to His throne in Heaven, where the Saint kills the entire heavenly host before shooting God dead, freeing the world from His tyranny.
• Moral Event Horizon: The Saint crossed it when he Shot A Hostage. While he had done his fair share of evil while in the Civil War, it was all to soldiers and equally evil mofos. When he shot an innocent, he marked his soul for hell.
• Nightmare Fuel: Angelville and it's inhabitants. Jesse's childhood. Starr's Start of Darkness.
• Squick: Odin Quincannon's meat shed. And his meat wife.
• Tear Jerker: Arseface's life before the series begins, as chronicled in his spin-off origin story. After surviving his attempted suicide and getting a tongue lashing from his dead friend's sister about how selfish he and his friend were being, he completely misinterprets her message and decides to be the doormat to his abusive and unloving father.
  • The couple of hope spots he receives before the attempt just add to it. First, he manages to apologize to Laurel, the girl he likes, for ogling her at class, and it seems like they're about to hit it off... before his friend Pube shows up and promptly ruins his chances. Then, after another vicious beating from his father, he decides to take charge of his life and move away from his abusive home to live with Pube (going so far as to throw his porn mags in the trash when he sets out). There, he meets Pube's sister Catherine, who's pretty much the first character in the story who's friendly to him and doesn't treat him like garbage. But then his father shows up and drags him back for another beating, with Catherine being powerless to help him.
  • When Cassidy first tells Tulip he's in love with her, they argue because she knows how much Cassidy has come to mean to Jesse and that it will destroy their friendship. He finally says he'll go away and leave the two of them alone, to Jesse's deep disappointment but Tulip's secret relief. But just as Tulip and Jesse are driving away, Cassidy catches up to them and says he'll go with them after all. Jesse's elated and welcomes him back, but when we see Tulip, the heartbreak is written all over her face, because she knows how badly this will end.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: You would think Genesis, the source of Jesse's powers and whose conception started the whole story, would be a key player for the finale. Nope. All he does is die when Jesse is shot by The Grail and then God makes sure he stays dead after reviving Custer.
• Ugly Cute: Arseface may be horribly disfigured, but his innocence, Nice Guy demeanour, and big, friendly eyes go a long way to making him one of the comic's more endearing characters.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The comic is very much a snapshot of the 1990s.
  • Jesse is constantly railing against "politically correct" language and culture, which was a buzzword of the 1990s. However, this could also count as Values Resonance given political correctness's resurgence in The New '10s, and the similar backlash against it.
  • Arseface tried to kill himself over Kurt Cobain's suicide.
  • The Twin Towers feature prominently in Cassidy's ode to New York City.
  • Jesse chews out a Frenchman for testing out atomic bombs. France's last atomic test was in 1996.
  • The turn of the millennium is a plot point, and Cassidy states that he's "as old as the century."
  • On a meta note, in the letters sections of each issue, Garth Ennis offered his original scripts to fans who wrote in a letter identifying a quote or reference. Sometimes a quote would go unidentified for a whole issue. If readers had access to the Internet, they could simply look up the answer.
  • Jesse's story to Cassidy of seeing a Bill Hicks show a "couple of months" before Hicks's death means that Jesse stumbled into one of Hicks's last shows, which could've been no later than December of 1993; Hicks stopped touring in early 1994.
• Values Dissonance:
  • When Arseface attempts suicide, his friend's sister Catherine gives him a massive harangue about how selfish and hurtful he's being to everyone else by trying to kill himself. She's presented as being in the right, and her speech inspires Arseface to change his ways. In a modern context, a person bitching out a suicide victim for being selfish reads far differently, and the scene becomes impossibly uncomfortable - especially since everything leading up to that scene makes it feel like Arseface was right when he writes "Nobody cared".
  • What's more, Catherine herself first saw Arseface when he had a black eye, which he let her know was courtesy of his father - and then shortly afterwards his father himself showed up to literally drag him away by his hair, with her being horrified upon learning that Arseface's abusive father and the town sheriff are one and the same person. She got more than a sufficient glimpse at Arseface's hellish home life - yet the story doesn't portray her as having done anything at all to help him (like, say, contacting social services) before she confronts him at the hospital. Not only does it make her look neglectful, it also makes her haranguing look more like deflecting blame from her own neglect.
• The Woobie:
  • Arseface - his father is an abusive Jerkass and most of his peers aren't much better. Then he is horribly disfigured by a botched suicide attempt and it goes downhill from there...
  • Sally, the homeless woman Jesse encounters who tells him Cassidy's history.
  • Starr is a villainous example. He Used to Be a Sweet Kid, then a pack of bullies decided to blind him/gouge out his eye by cutting a star into his face, something that also (somehow) left him bald. Then, in the course of the series, he gets raped by a Depraved Homosexual, finds himself unable to be sexually aroused by women anymore and has to resort to being anally penetrated by whores wearing strap-on dildos to get pleasure, gets a scar cut across the top of his head that makes him look like a giant walking penis, gets his genitals bitten off by a dog...
  • His poor assistant, Hoover, was just a shy, decent man who was working for the wrong people.
  • Despite both being subconsciously manipulated into the forbidden affair, the mother of Genesis still sought out her partner so they could run away together and raise their unborn child as a family, only to be met with cold rejection and a cruel fate in return.

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