Tagged: Dominic Cooper

Marc Alan Fishman: “God, Where Are You Anyway?”

Preacher-TV-Series-Cassidy-Joseph-Gilgun

Prior to it appearing on AMC (home of Meth!), I’d never been indoctrinated into the seminal comic book series Preacher. I long knew of its quality – nary a person within the geek-menagerie of every comic shop I’d lived in was without someone constantly droning on the merits of the Garth Ennis road-trip-opus. But much like many series of my middle-youth (Transmetropolitan, Fables, Sandman, etc.) I was far too much of a commercial whore to appreciate the boundary stretching sequential fiction that didn’t plaster its protagonists in capes and cowls. Luckily, I grew up.

We live in a gilded age of comic-to-mainstream-media. Even just listing the current crop of comic-based bounty choking our airspace right now could be an article unto itself. That Seth Rogan and his production team would tackle a show as complex as Preacher due to their love of the source meant good things. And let’s be honest: AMC rarely puts out less-than-stellar work. With a cast anchored by the formerly young Howard Stark – Dominic Cooper – and a commitment to not barrel into the world of Preacher without care produced a well-paced epic dramedy that soon moved from DVR fodder to appointment TV in my house.

For those not in-the-know, Preacher concerns itself with one Jesse Custer. Jesse is a bad man trying to make good. He’s joined by his long-standing love (and ball-busting, rocket launcher building, frozen vegetable cooking) Tulip, and the Irish vampire Cassidy. In the comic, we’re immediately in media res with the odd trio as they take to road trip to find (and pummel?) the Lord almighty. Instant hook, no? Well then what balls Rogen had with his team to spend the entirety of the recently completed first season to take a step back to do a bit of world building.

Most other critics (and my good friends throughout the social media spheres) felt that this choice – with a Southern-slow-as-molasses plot – was a yawn that lasted for plenty of episodes before the pace quickened. In my mind, this deliberate plodding helped create what many decent-but-not-great TV shows have been lacking as of late: an original tone. Look only to stalwart standbys like Arrow, or Agents of SHIELD for one-note (but still very entertaining) story telling. Here, Preacher professes to build the town of Annville, Texas one sad life story at a time. And we’re better for having to been made to soak it all in before the season finale.

Spoiler Alert. Turn back now, in case you’re shy.

By the time Jessie, Tulip, and Cassidy take off on their mission to find God (insert Blues Brothers reference here), Annville is a crater of ashes – a searing cloud of fart fumes and death. To have started out the series on this explosion would have been a lurid choice. By making us live in the town first, Preacher sets us up for so much more pain in the pending future seasons. That the town itself ignited amidst a miles-wide pandemic of sin merely served as the icing on a deliciously sadistic cake.

And all of this is beset by methodical and memorable characterization and astounding plot beats. Obviously owing the debt to the comics crew for the source material to draw upon, Preacher was a bold experiment in the boundaries of shows directed towards the semi-masses. Unlike the immediately engrossing Breaking Bad, here Preacher introduces the insane concept of Genesis straight away. While it would take us several episodes to get the full explanation, knowing that I can now tell a curious stranger about the show where the spawn of an angel and demon inhabits a criminal man of God, granting him the angelic/demonic power to bend a persons will to his words? Well, you don’t run across that much on TV. Join that to the notion that vampires are real, Heaven’s angels are inept hitmen, and God has gone missing? That all adds up to a striking series that I will egregiously wait for enthusiastically watch when the second season comes a’callin’.

All this and I haven’t even touched on Arseface.

Preacher gives me faith that our beloved comics will continue to permeate the masses in the best ways possible. So long as those responsible are beholden to the original creators? We can all say a little prayer that this golden era never ends.

Martha Thomases: The Preacher Feature

Preacher

A little over twenty years ago, Vertigo began to publish the Preacher series by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon. It was my job to promote it to mainstream (i.e. non-comic book trade) media. I was already a huge fan of Garth’s run on Hellblazer and almost got a blurb for it from Sting until the corporate types told me that wasn’t allowed.

I loved every issue of Preacher. It was funny and scary and emotional and philosophical and brilliant. It simultaneously evoked John Ford westerns and Harvey Kurtzman slapstick. It had a character named Arseface, for crying out loud. I did some of my best work promoting that book, because I believed I was bringing happiness to millions.

Needless to say, I was thrilled to find out there was going to be a television show based on the comics (or “graphic novels” as it says in the opening credits). Unlike many, I wasn’t worried about the involvement of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg because I loved This Is the End, both because it promised the right tone for Preacher and because it’s so damn funny.

I wanted to refresh my memory of the comics and reread the whole run in my collection of trade paperbacks. Alas, I can’t find them, so I went into the television show only slightly better prepared than a Preacher virgin.

Preacher is about Jesse Custer, a minister with a shady past who is suddenly able to compel people to do whatever he tells them to do. He lives in the small town in Texas where he grew up, perhaps hiding, perhaps trying to find himself. There are people (or beings who look like people) trying to find him and take away his special abilities.

The show begins before the comic book stories do, and seem to take major liberties with the plot. I don’t really care. Comic books are not television series, and can’t be precisely reproduced. And more than twenty years have passed since the comic began. A character like Tulip, who is pretty much just a love interest in the comic, is a fully fleshed out character in the television show, with her own problems and passions and sense of herself. More than a few critics think she’s the most compelling character, at least in the four episodes that have aired as of this writing.

A lot of these critics have compared the television show to a Coen Brothers movie, and I understand that. There are a lot of terrific faces in this series, faces that aren’t symmetrical or conventionally beautiful. The cinematography gives the exterior shots a golden glow that can be warm or bleak, and the interior shots can be exalted or claustrophobic or in-between.

Here’s what I remember most about the series: Steve Dillon would draw page after page of the three main characters (Jesse, the titular preacher, Cassidy, the vampire, and Tulip, the girl), and even though that’s supposed to be the most boring thing one can do in comics, I was mesmerized. A lot of that was Garth’s writing, but it was also the way Steve could convey so much information in a facial expression. There are actors that do this, at least for me (Claire Danes, Denzel Washington, Bette Davis), but very few artists in any medium.

The show doesn’t look exactly like Dillon’s art, but it feels like Dillon’s art, just like the Hughes Brothers’ movie From Hell felt like Eddie Campbell’s art without actually looking like his line work. Similarly, Dominic Cooper and Joe Gilgun feel like Custer and Cassidy without actually looking like them. Ruth Negga isn’t cute and blonde like the Tulip in the comics but, as noted above, she’s way better.

Garth and Steve both have their names on the television series as executive producers, and I hope this means the checks clear. I also hope I keep enjoying the vibe the show shares with the series. In the meantime, I’m having way more fun with this than the last few seasons of The Walking Dead.

Mike Gold: Time Flies When You’re Saving The World

Last week we comics fans were treated to a nice treat that, had other circumstances prevailed, would have been the big buzz in our donut shop. Instead, events mandated – properly – that we turn our attention to the Charlie Hebdo matter. That situation remains unresolved and part of a much bigger and even more disquieting picture, but if we can’t stop to smell the flowers we will surely go insane. That’s why I’m going to talk about Marvel’s Agent Carter this week.

The mini-series – it runs eight episodes, and the first two ran last week – goes a long way towards answering the question “Hey, why won’t Marvel Studios pay more attention to the female characters?” It doesn’t answer the question “Hey, why won’t Marvel Studios do a Black Widow movie?” but I suspect if the executives at Marvel understand what they’re doing on Agent Carter, there well might be.

So, what’s going on in Agent Carter that’s so special? I think the two-hour debut did more to educate people as to the inequities in the workplace than any other single event in perhaps three decades. If things are going to change, illumination through entertainment is an important part of the mix.

Seeing as the series is set in the mid-1940s post-war period – after all, it is a sequel to the first real Captain America movie – it’s all too easy to look at it and say “well, yeah, but that was 1946.” This is true, but as George Santayana said, “when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

(Actually, Santayana said a lot of interesting things, my favorite being “Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.” Check him out at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Santayana.)

Okay, back to 1946. That was a time when nobody gave a second thought about women being paid a lot less then men. That’s because nobody gave a second thought about women being given much responsibility – Santayana, I suspect, probably thought we should have remembered how women held our nation together during the world war that just ended. That was a time when newspapers carried separate want ad listings: “Help Wanted – Men,” for laborers and executives, and “Help Wanted – Women,” for secretaries, maids and cooks. This was a practice that continued until some time in the 1970s; the possibility that such segregation was illegal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act wasn’t even discussed until 1965. Women were fired for getting married, and society looked down upon those women who chose a career over pounding out babies every year or so.

Agent Carter is set squarely in this environment. Peggy Carter, as last seen in Marvel media, is an extremely competent field agent to say the least, but despite her wartime record she is relegated to secretarial duties at S.H.I.E.L.D’s precursor organization, the Strategic Scientific Reserve. In order to save the day and to fulfill her commitment to Howard Stark (let’s hear it for Marvel continuity!) she starts out by hiding her activities and condescending to the men who order her to do the filing.

Despite this, Agent Carter is not a political screed. It is a solid action show set in the well-defined Marvel Cinematic Universe, complete with time-appropriate established characters such as a comparatively young Edwin Jarvis and a typically burly Dum-Dum Dugan (let’s hear it again for Marvel continuity!), and the actors whose characters appeared in the movies reprise their roles here, including Dominic Cooper as the senior Stark. Marvel’s evil corporate empire, Roxxon, plays a prominent role in this series.

Agent Carter is a very stylish, fast-acting and clever series built around the strengths of its star, Hayley Atwell. We’ll be seeing a lot of her in the future, in the second Avengers movie and in future episodes of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Crom knows where else. But I really hope that Disney/Marvel/ABC (different floors of the same company) has the budget and the audience to take this program to a weekly series.

And then do that Black Widow movie.

 

The Point Radio: AGENT CARTER Slides Into The Marvel Universe

All eyes are on Marvel this week with the debut of AGENT CARTER, and our first full look at The Marvel Universe post CAP and pre AVENGERS. Series star Hayley Atwell talks about her feelings on playing what has become a key part of the mythos. Then, we sit down with the cast of TNT’s THE LIBRARIANS who give a lot of solid reasons why if you aren’t watching, you might just be missing something good here.

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