The big difference between Preacher the television show and Preacher the comic is that on the television show, the protagonist doesn’t walk with God.
Admittedly, that isn’t the only change. The television series, which launched in 2016, kept the characters and some of the conceptual elements from Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s comics series, but everything else in the first season is swapped around. The second season, which launches on AMC on Sunday, June 25th, is the point where it becomes clear that the setting isn’t what distinguishes the television show from its source material. The real dividing line is preacher Jesse Custer.
Broadly speaking, the 1990s Vertigo comic Preacher was a road trip adventure. The first season of AMC’s version, though, is set in a small, quirky Texas town — think Northern Exposure with a lot more blood, or Twin Peaks with more tastelessness. Jesse (Dominic Cooper) has abandoned his life of crime and violence to preach indifferently at a tiny church in his hometown. Out of the blue (more or less literally), he’s possessed by a creature known as Genesis, which gives him the power to make people do whatever he says.
Genesis possessed a number of other religious leaders (including, in one of the series’s best offscreen gags, Scientologist Tom Cruise) before it got to Jesse. But all the others, Cruise included, blew up in a shower of flesh and bloody bits. Jesse, for unknown reasons, remains unexploded, and he sets out to use his power for what he considers good, with mixed results. He helps some folks with their marital problems, and gets a comatose girl to open her eyes. But on the other hand, with a careless word, he makes one of his parishioners cut out his own heart, turns another into a mass murderer, and sends a third to hell. So on balance, he doesn’t have a great batting average.