Start with Preacher, Vol. 1. Preacher is one continuous story told across sixty-six issues, and the collected edition that matters is the nine numbered Vertigo trade paperbacks: read volume one through volume nine and you have read the whole thing, in order, with nothing missing and nothing repeated.
The order question readers actually run into is not sequence, it is edition. The same run has been collected at least four ways — nine numbered trades, six later Book editions, four Absolute hardcovers, and a Deluxe line — and the specials and one-shots are folded into different places depending on which you buy. Start in one numbering and finish in another and you will either skip an arc or read one twice. Pick the nine-volume trades and stay in them; that is what this path follows, and it is also the cheapest and most widely available option.
What you are getting into
Worth being direct about this before the sequence, because it is the main reason people bounce off the book. A small-town Texas preacher is possessed by an escaped angel-demon hybrid and sets out across America to find God and hold him to account for the state of the world. Around that premise Garth Ennis builds sustained blasphemy, extreme graphic violence, and comedy that is deliberately designed to offend. Some of it, particularly around gender and sexuality, has drawn substantial criticism and reads considerably worse now than it did in the 1990s. That is a description rather than a verdict — plenty of readers who notice it still rate the series highly, and plenty of others put it down in volume two. Two volumes is a fair test either way.
Steve Dillon drew almost the entire run and is properly its co-creator; our catalogue happens to credit him only on the final volume, which is a cataloguing artefact rather than a statement about the work.
Volumes one to three
Preacher, Vol. 1 sets up everything the series does: the road trip, the friendship between Jesse, Tulip and Cassidy, the pursuit, and the blasphemy. Preacher Vol. 2 goes back into Jesse's childhood and the family that produced him, which is the material most readers name as the point the book became more than its premise. Preacher Vol. 3 moves the Grail conspiracy from rumour to plot and introduces the antagonist who carries the rest of the run.
Volumes four to six
Preacher, Vol. 4 is the odd one, collecting standalone specials — origin material for the Saint of Killers and other side characters — rather than advancing the main story. Read it in place anyway. It is genuinely good, it stops the plot dead in a way the series is better for, and it plants things the later volumes call back to.
Preacher, Vol. 5 and Preacher, Vol. 6 are the long middle, where the leads are pulled apart and the satire takes over from the mystery. Herr Starr's escalating humiliations are cumulative and only work in sequence, which is one more argument against skipping ahead.
Volumes seven to nine
Preacher, Vol. 7 is the quietest stretch of the series, and it is where readers most often stall. Push through it rather than jumping forward — it is the trough that makes the last two volumes land. Preacher, Vol. 8 runs straight into Preacher, Vol. 9, and the final volume delivers the confrontation the series was named for.
Stop at volume nine. That is the end of the story. The Book, Absolute and Deluxe lines are the same sixty-six issues renumbered rather than extended, and the later spin-off material published elsewhere is not part of this run.
Nine volumes, one order, one edition. Follow the full path below.
Follow the full ordered path here: Preacher by Garth Ennis Reading Order: Where to Start.
