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Christina’s world(s). Remediating painting as comic
book narrative in Preacher
Nicolas Labarre
To cite this version:
Nicolas Labarre. Christina’s world(s). Remediating painting as comic book narrative in Preacher.
Image & Narrative, 2024. �hal-04983608�
51
Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative
imageandnarrative.be ISSN 1780-678X
n°25/2- 2024
Christina’s world(s). Remediating
painting as comic book narrative
in Preacher
N L
To quote this article: Nicolas Labarre, “Christina’s world(s). Remediating painting as comic book
narrative in Preacher”, Image & Narrative, n°25/2, “Christina’s World in the 21st century”, ed.
Helena Lamouliatte-Schmitt, 2024, p. 51-68.
Image [&] Narrative is a bilingual peer-reviewed e-journal on visual narratology and word and image studies in the broadest sense of
the term.
Image [&] Narrative est une revue en ligne, bilingue, à comité de lecture, traitant de narratologie visuelle et d’études texte/image au
sens large. Image [&] Narrative is part of / fait partie de Open Humanities Press et DOAJ.
Chief Editors / Editrices en chef : Anne Reverseau, Anneleen Masschelein & Hilde Van Gelder.
Thematic Cluster: Christina’s World in the 21st century
Edited by Helena lamouliatte-ScHmitt
Dossier thématique : Christina’s World au XXIe siècle
Dirigé par Helena lamouliatte-ScHmitt
Andrew Wyeth, Christina’s World, 1948. Tempera on gessoed panel. Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, USA.
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Abstract
is article examines the remediation of Christina’s World within DC/Vertigo’s comic
book series Preacher (1995-2000), which integrates a pastiche of the painting as a cover
illustration, reworks its themes into its narrative structure but also presents the painting as
an art object within the storyworld. is text focuses on the intent and eect of this reme-
diation, to reect on gendered representations within the narrative and on gender-coded
cultural hierarchies in the comics and art worlds. e article also investigates the multiple
ways in which Preacher seeks to validate the plurality of readings aorded by Wyeth’s work,
as a form of celebration which sidesteps the distinction between high and low culture.
Résumé
Cet article étudie la remédiation de Christina’s World dans la série de bandes dessinées
Preacher (DC/Vertigo 1995-2000), qui fait usage du tableau sous forme de pastiche dans une
illustration de couverture, qui intègre ses thèmes dans sa structure narrative, et qui présente
également la peinture comme un artefact au sein de la diégèse. Ce texte se concentre sur
les objectifs et les eets de cette remédiation, pour rééchir notamment aux représenta-
tions genrées dans le récit et aux hiérarchies culturelles codées, elles aussi genrées dans le
monde de la bande dessinée et de l’art. L’article étudie également les multiples façons dont
Preacher intègre la pluralité des lectures permises par l’œuvre de Wyeth, comme une forme
de célébration qui contourne la distinction entre la haute et la basse culture.
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e woman’s shapely body contrasts with her anomalously thin arms. She is wearing a
summer dress and her dark hair is rued by the wind blowing over the yellow and brown
eld. She is looking away, towards the back of the painting and a sinister-looking wooden
house, while her face remains hidden.
Despite the obvious similarities, this is not a description of Christina’s World. e
wooden house occupies nearly the whole height of the vertically oriented picture, and
three people are standing on the porch, looking back at the woman and at the viewer. e
woman herself is sitting rather than reclining, leaning away from the house rather than
towards it. is is the cover of issue 43 of the comic book series Preacher, from November
1998, a series written by Garth Ennis and drawn by Steve Dillon, with painted covers by
Glenn Fabry. In the published version, the title of the comic series and various indicia are
also superimposed over the top of the picture, further distinguishing Fabry’s recreation
from its model. e issue is appropriately entitled “Christina’s World”, and it relies on
Wyeth’s most famous painting, beyond Fabry’s framing visual pastiche. In the narrative,
Christina is the name of the long-lost mother of the main protagonist, Jesse Custer, who
renews her ties with her son thanks in part to their common understanding of the paint-
ing. Preacher does not merely quote from Wyeth, it simultaneously mines the painting for
narrative possibilities and re-presents it within the diegesis at a second remove. It also lets
the reader see a recreation of the painting, interprets the original work, and reects on the
reading of these various instances of the picture by the ctional characters. Christina’s World
functions at the same time as a picture, as an isolated frame meant to be reintegrated into
a meaningful sequence, and as a work of art framed by existing discourses.
Fig.1 Glenn Fabry, Preacher n°43 (nov. 1998), cover
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is text will seek to examine this remediation of Wyeth’s painting, rst by contextual-
izing the repurposing of ne arts in Preacher as well as in other contemporary mainstream
North American comics. It will then examine the way Christina’s World is relocated and
re-presented in the series as well as the intent and eect of this remediation, which makes
it possible to critically reect on gender within the narrative and on gender-coded cultural
hierarchies. Finally, going back to Christina’s World will enable us to examine the narrative
potential of this specic painting and the multiple ways in which Preacher seeks to validate
the plurality of readings aorded by Wyeth’s work as a form of celebration.
A Short Introduction
In order to frame this discussion adequately, it may be useful to provide a few elements
on Preacher. e series was published from 1995 to 2000 in the United States by Vertigo, a
dedicated “adult” label of one of the two main contemporary comic book publishers, DC
Comics. ough Preacher was not a tremendous commercial success at the time of its initial
publication, in 66 monthly comic books, the collected edition has remained in print since.
e series has also been the object of sustained scholarly attention,1 and was adapted for
television by AMC between 2016 and 2019.2 Preacher has remained relevant to the comic
book industry and beyond, in a way many other contemporary intellectual properties have
not, which in itself warrants some scrutiny.
Preacher tells the story of Jesse Custer, a clergyman in a small Texas town, who receives
superhuman powers when he is invaded by Genesis—the result of the union of a demon
and an angel—in an incident which also leads to the complete devastation of his parish.
Custer then embarks on a 1500-page epic, roaming (mostly) through the South of the
United States, with his gun-toting girlfriend, Tulip O’Hare, and an Irish vampire, Cassidy.
Together, they seek to nd God, who has apparently ed from heaven when Genesis was
born, and whom Custer intends to hold accountable. In the course of their quest, Custer’s
backstory is gradually revealed. In particular, the story arc entitled “All in the Family” (#8-
12) oers a long ashback presenting Custer’s mistreatment by his paternal grandmother in
childhood. Marie L’Angelle,3 a terrifying matriarch, had both his parents—John Custer and
Christina L’Angelle—killed for rebelling against her authority at her Louisiana plantation.
When the L’Angelles manage to capture Tulip and Jesse after the Genesis incidents, he
kills them all and burns down their decaying plantation house.
Only later does he discover that his mother did not in fact die in the L’Angelle plan-
tation. She lost her memory as a result of a severe head wound and the trauma of having
her arm eaten o by an alligator, and she is living in the small town of Salvation under the
name of one of her former captors, Jodie. Jesse’s reunion with his long-lost mother is the
1 is pattern of low initial sales with comparatively more robust “long tail”, to use the expression
popularized by Chris Anderson, recurs for most successful post-Sandman Vertigo titles.
2 Christina’s World does not feature in the TV show, except as an easter egg in S1E7, when the
painting can be seen on the wall in the hero’s room.
3 Also somewhat confusingly spelt as “Langell” in issueeight (21) and as a consequence in
various articles on the series.
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object of the aforementioned “Christina’s World” episode, in issue43 of the series. is
storyline corresponds to a pause in the overall narrative arc: Custer is separated from his
two companions who believe him to be dead, and he is considering abandoning his quest.
Soon afterwards, however, he decides to leave Salvation and sets into motion the last act
of the series, which culminates with a showdown at the Alamo and the death of God.
Hybridity and Rewriting
Preacher functions with a high degree of generic hybridity, borrowing plot points,
narrative structures, characters and settings from such genres as the Western, the Southern
gothic, superhero comics, horror and road movies. Much scholarly attention has been de-
voted to this breaking down of boundaries (Round, “It’s All Relative”; Labarre; St. Onge;
Licari-Guillaume), which is not only present in the text itself but also relayed in various
peritextual elements, from the letter pages to the accompanying promotional interviews.
Scholars have suggested that this breaking down of boundaries works to sustain the delib-
erately blasphemous nature of the narrative, which repeatedly and systematically questions
moral gures and institutions (the police, the family, the church, etc.).
Preacher thus repurposes a variety of cultural objects and uses a range of strategies to
embed them within the narrative. John Wayne is simultaneously used as a character or force
within the diegesis—serving as a possibly hallucinatory surrogate father for Custer—and as
a dead western actor. Similarly, Elvis occupies an intermediate space, pointing to the singer’s
place in popular mythology, while also being just an anonymous hitchhiker with whom
Custer is having a conversation (in #53): his heavily shadowed face visually materializes
the ambiguity of a character functioning as an outline, at once drawn onto the page and
conspicuously incomplete. Movies such as Deliverance (Boorman, 1972) or Gone with the
Wind (Fleming, 1939) similarly occupy two distinct intertextual positions at the same time,
through visual and structural allusions on the one hand, and through overt quotes by the
characters themselves in the diegesis. For instance, at one point, Custer argues with Tulip
against the bias in conventional (northern) representations of the South by suggesting that
“You don’t start rapin’ canoesits ’cause you had grits for breakfast” (#34, 13), referencing a
traumatic scene in Deliverance. Yet at the same time, Ennis and his collaborators did mine
Deliverance to enrich their own plots and imagery, according to cover artist Glenn Fabry
(Fabry et al. 88). e cultural references are simultaneously used as sources and critically
commented upon through the characters, making intertextuality overt, helping readers
decipher the allusions,
4
and inviting them to supply their own interpretations or judgments
on the works used. is use of a mosaic of references enables the series to oer a thoroughly
re-constructed vision of the South of the United States, at once familiar and ostensibly
articial, which encourages the reader to pick and choose from the mosaic of sometimes
contradictory representations of the region (Labarre 262–64).5
4 As noted by Isabelle Licari-Guillaume, Vertigo comics commonly oered “treasure hunts” for
their readers, oering clues to elucidate otherwise “silent” quotations (Licari-Guillaume 95–105).
5 Julia Round similarly stresses the role of the active reader in her study of Preacher’s deliberate
and multi-targeted transgressiveness: “Our culpability in the narrative’s events is therefore inherent
to the reading experience, and perhaps this is what ultimately enables Preacher’s narrative to so con-
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Christophe Dony has argued that the “ethos of rewriting” is to be found throughout
the whole Vertigo line of comic books, a label established by DC Comics in 1992 to give
shape to a then inchoate collection of titles aimed at “adult” readers. To take but a few
examples, series such as Sandman (Neil Gaiman et al.; 1989-1996), Shade: e Changing
Man (Milligan, Bachalo; 1990-1996), or Fables (Buckingham, Willigham; 2002-2015)
all relied to a great extent on overt intertextuality and rewritings of sources ranging from
superheroes to Greek mythology to fairy tales through the Zapfruder movie and Jorge Luis
Borges. Dony further argues that this strategy coheres into a line-wide, though probably
uncoordinated, interrogation of “canon formation, memory-making, and commodication”
(para.8). All three of these issues are present in the use Preacher makes of the ne arts, and
of Wyeth in particular.
Representing the Fine Arts
e “ne arts”—a problematic concept, used here as broadly as possible—constitute
but a fraction of the references mobilized in Vertigo titles. However, they too are subjected
to this process of ostensible “iconographic genealogy”, a phrase which Dony suggests as
a possible alternative to the text-centric concept of “rewriting”. In addition to Christina’s
World, the only other overt representation of a painting is located on the cover of #53, an
acknowledged reprise of a Jasper Johns ag (Fabry et al. 116). e same issue also contains
the Elvis monologue. e American pictorial tradition is thus limited to two artists (a few
panels could also possibly function as Hopper allusions). Preacher does not seek to canvass
the eld of the ne arts as thoroughly as it does southern-set movie genres, for instance; the
series notably eschews such icons as Grant Wood’s American Gothic or Hopper’s Nighthawks,
both of which would have t easily at various points in the narrative. e ne arts play
a visible—appearing twice on the cover of an issue—but ultimately marginal role in the
construction of Preacher’s Americanness. Yet, Christina’s World is woven into the fabric of
the series. Its importance in #43 is primed by a heretofore cryptic single-page sequence in
#28, during which Jesse Custer pays a visit to the MoMA in New York and merely has a
look at the painting.6 e episode is brief but striking, even in this unfocused issue which
serves as a transition between two story arcs, since it is both unconnected to the narrative
and left uncommented upon. e year-and-a-half gap between issue 28 (August 1997)
and issue 43 (November 1998) attests to a long-term vision of the role to be played by the
painting.
While Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey, among others, have argued that the graphic novel
movement signals the opening of a multidirectional dialogue between literature and comics
(Baetens and Frey 191–216), ierry Groensteen suggested in a 2014 conference that the
“convergence” between the eld of comics and the art world is recent and still ongoing
(Groensteen, “Convergences et questionnements”). ough comics and the art world have
sistently and eectively transgress boundaries, invert binaries and subvert our expectations.”(Round,
“It’s All Relative” 11)
6 ough to be complete, he also uses his power to lift the ban on smoking in museums, in a
routine example of libertarian spirit.
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had frequent historical interaction, from Lionel Feininger to Gary Panter (for a historical
overview, cf. Molotiu), their relationship is more akin to a game of citations and borrowings
than to a dialogue.
Painting and the art world are frequent enough subjects, both in comics and in bande
dessinée, from Hergé’s unnished Tintin et l’Alph-Art to Manu Larcenet’s La ligne de front,
to many Carl Barks stories, to the celebrated pastiches in the Sunday pages of Gasoline
Alley. Groensteen, building on Sylvain Bouyer, has argued that the rise of such subjects is
tied, at least for bande dessinée, to the period during which it was trying to construct its
cultural legitimacy, by celebrating other, better established, forms of cultural production
(Groensteen, “Figures de l’artiste”). e culmination of this process is to be found in the
albums commissioned by museums, and in particular in the series of albums produced by
Futuropolis for Le Louvre or the Musée d’Orsay. In this case, the implicit appeal to the
cultural potency of the ne arts has been turned into an explicit cross-promotional strategy.
Interestingly, none of the twenty albums produced since 2005 involve any creator associated
with American comics, be they mainstream comic books or graphic novels, though most
of these albums are available for an American readership in translation.
ough such generalizations are to be treated cautiously, there does seem to be a
dierence in attitude between European and American artists regarding their perception
of the art world, correlated with a “relative visual quietness” of the US alternative comics
(Baetens 105). In Comics versus Art, his study of the vexed relationship between comics and
the “art world”, Bart Beaty notes that “at present, it is common for [feelings of resentment]
to play themselves out as an absolute rejection of the art world by those working in the
comics eld.” (Beaty, Comics versus Art 52) is deance and resentment are grounded in
a long-standing tradition of mockery, expressed in popular comics such as Archie (Beaty,
Twelve-Cent Archie 44–46) or Donald Duck, and reinforced by the misunderstandings over
the appropriation of comic book imagery by pop artists (Beaty, Comics versus Art 55–59).
ough Andrei Molotiu argues that Jack Kirby silently reworked Lichtenstein’s technique
in his own comics, reinjecting the experiments of the art world into mainstream comics
(122), this resentment is still vividly present in the work of such prominent gures as Chris
Ware, Peter Bagge and Daniel Clowes. ough he was English, Steve Dillon, who drew
and inked Preacher, seems to align with this American stance. Espousing the “resolutely
anti-intellectual” stance of Preacher (Licari-Guillaume 103), he describes his role as crafts-
manship rather than artistry: “is isn’t art with a capital ‘A’, people have to remember that.
It’s done for publication on a regular basis, and ultimately you’re getting paid to put stu
on the shelves every month.” (Salisbury, Artists on Comic Art 64; 8).
Notwithstanding cultural dierences between European and American comics, it is
striking to note that representations of the ne arts in comics tend to cluster around two
functions: they tend to serve as the subject of the narrative or to be assimilated into the
visual idiom of the comics, as “silent” references.
Even the celebrated Gasoline Alley pages in the manner of modernist paintings or
woodcuts (Nov. 2, 1930; Nov. 30 1930), which function rst and foremost as visual explora-
tions, make art the explicit subject of the story: they are framed by introductory discourses,
in which Walt and Skeezix, the two main protagonists, are shown looking at paintings
and identifying them as modernist. is is also true of the many instances in which the
art world is presented within a squarely parodic or satirical mode. In comic books, the
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founding example of this irreverent attitude—which Groensteen calls “the insolence of
the dominated”—is to be found in Harvey Kurtzman’s inuential Mad. Mad #22 (April
1955), was presented as a “Special Art Issue,” with a cover appropriating Picasso’s own
appropriation of Les demoiselles d’Avignon, replacing one of the faces with that of Mad
cartoonist Will Elder. e whole issue presents Will Elder as the more or less accidental
creator of a wide variety of work of arts, from cubist masterpieces to Mount Rushmore
to Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1 (better known as Mother). Groensteen,
again, suggests that single-panel newspaper cartoons have abundantly used this frontal
approach to the art world, at least since the Armory Show (Groensteen, “L’insolence du
dominé”).
7
ese strategies typically imply redrawings of the original work, contextualized
either diegetically or through peritextual indications.
e other end of the spectrum of uses is to be found in “silent” quotes, in which the
cartoonist reworks an existing painting into a comics without any indication thereof, and
relies on their readers’ knowledge to make the connection. For instance, Michael Picone
mentions one of the many allusions to be found in Joann Sfar’s Rabbi’s Cat series, with a
critical repurposing of Matisse’s Odalisque à la culotte rouge (Picone 51–52). Picone further
asserts that Sfar’s parody of oriental tropes exonerates him from the charge of perpetuating
orientalist stereotypes. Convincing as this reading may be, one has to wonder about the
size of the subgroup for which this non-signposted quote is accessible, especially when
related to the series’ popularity. ese invisible insertions may be destined for a small group
of ideal readers, as in Sfar’s case, or for a larger one, when Asterix incorporates Gericault’s
Le Radeau de la Méduse for instance (Picone 50; Groensteen, “L’insolence du dominé”),
or even recede in the background as an acknowledged but rarely discernable source of
inspiration, when Mike Mignola makes use of Goya or Dürer for Hellboy (Brayshaw and
Mignola 83–84). Beyond this point lie mere homages and plagiarism, in which the reader
is not supposed to identify the reference.8
Preacher explores these various options. e painting is presented as a work of art within
the diegesis, as an object of discourse for the characters, as a subterranean inuence and
also as an image that can be “dissolved” in the visual style of the series, a point I shall revisit
later. e presence of the painting in the series is also at the same time anomalous—the
remarkable irruption of high art in a pop-culture saturated world—and typical of the tight
network of references, transpositions and quotations around which Preacher is structured.
Merging emes
How is Christina’s World relevant to Preacher? Part of the answer to that question is
explicit in the text: the powerlessness of Jesse’s mother, her entrapment at Angelville both
echo the mood and the salient elements in Wyeth’s painting. is is discussed over several
7 On the other hand, the Armory Show oers more example of the deep relationship between
the art and comic world, as several of the exhibited artists, Jack B. Yeats, Rudolph Dirks and Gus
Mager, were also active comic strip creators (Burns; Connerty)
8 By and large, though, comics artists tend to swipe more from their peers or from contemporary
magazines than from high art.
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pages at the time of the cathartic reunion between Jesse and his mother, in a dialogue which
blends exposition with interpretation:
Christina: I found it in a book in that huge library in Angelville. I was about twelve.
Just starting to understand that things would never change for me … and I read about
the picture. /And my God, I thought. My God. [page break] Somebody’s painted my
life. /e girl was some cousin of Wyeth’s. She had polio.
Jesse: I know Mom.
Christina: She was so weak, and this was as far as she could go, the bottom of the
eld. Always in view of the house.
Jesse: I remember.
Christina: It centered her world. She couldn’t escape it. It reached out and brought
her back, no matter what … (#43, 14-15)
e dialogue claries the reference for the lay reader—Jesse Custer already knows
all of this and says so, readers are the ones who need a reminder—and oers an inventory
of the thematic echoes to be found between the comics and the painting. ese echoes
are reinforced by graphic elements, which further the continuity between the two; in the
panel in which Christina Custer says “Somebody’s painted my life”, her cropped face is
juxtaposed with a similarly cropped representation of the painting, and the esh tones of
both Christinas are matched. Obviously, the information provided by Christina is far from
neutral, and I will come back later to the implications of this superimposed narrative, which
is but one of the multiple possible readings.
Beyond that explicit meaning and the obvious similarities (a remote rural place, a
wooden building, a lonely girl), several unmentioned connections between the comics and
the painting can be identied. One such connection is the inuence Wyeth’s painting had
on horror lms, and most notably on e Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) (Galluzzo), an
ever-perceptible hypotext throughout the series. Another common thread is the attention
paid to grotesque and deformed bodies. Such bodies, often bordering on the monstrous,
abound in Preacher. Julia Round has shown that these “monsters” have a variety of roles and
gendered positions within the series, often in contradiction with conventional expectations,
both in society at large and in American comic books in particular, a eld whose dominant
genre—superheroes—is thoroughly reliant on idealized bodies:
e visible attributes of the material body are frequently opposed to identity dis-
courses created by its limitations and possibilities. is comic exposes and sustains this
contradiction by subverting industry stereotypes, plot expectations and genre conventions
to create a reverse discourse of comic-book iconography, where visual or generic elements
do not reect what lies beneath. (Round, “Mutilation and Monsters” 126)
Although the two main roles in Preacher, the hero and the heroine, are at rst occupied
by two able-bodied and fairly idealized characters, the “monsters” come to the forefront in
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single issues centered on Cassidy (the Irish vampire) or Arseface (a disgured adolescent),
within the main series and in ancillary “special” issues. By issue 43, Custer himself has
lost an eye and his mother, as mentioned above, has lost an arm to an alligator. Randall
Grin, writing in American Art similarly argues that the “abnormal” body is central to any
sustained examination in Wyeth’s Christina’s World, although it tends to be overlooked by
many viewers. e represented Christina is herself a composite body, using the skinny up-
per body of the actual Christina Olson, with the lower body of Wyeth’s younger, attractive
wife (Grin 36). It is, in other words, a reconstructed body, both sensual and sickly, both
tragic and “monstrous.” is uncertain body, at once glamorous and uncanny, meshes not
only with the representation of bodies in Preacher, but with the underlying conception of
the United States, which Garth Ennis described as an uneasy alliance between idealized
splendors and a more squalid reality:
I do like the States very much, I respond very strongly to it as a romantic dream,
while at the same time being under no illusion as to the reality of America and the harm
it has done. But the dream, the romance of it, the idea of a country where ideals like
liberty and freedom and justice are so much a part of the very documents that began
the country. Of course, whether those things are acted on is another matter. (Salisbury,
Writers on Comics Scriptwriting 91)
e status of Wyeth’s painting as both an American icon and a depiction of personal
suering further embeds this dichotomy in the narrative.
Gender is among the many categories held under critical scrutiny in Preacher, and
again, Christina’s World, both as a cultural object and as representation, is instrumental in
this reexamination. It is tempting to read the rst appearance of the painting, in #28, as a
mere precursor to the explanation provided in #43. A continuous reading of the series in
collected editions certainly encourages that interpretation. However, in a serial reading,
the gap between the two issues is a signicant one and the visit to the museum should be
understood not only as priming the reader for the revelation, but also as part of the specic
themes developed in the earlier issue. Specically, the scene in the MoMA closely follows a
long discussion between Jesse and Tulip on the subject of gender roles and trust. e scene
ends with Tulip oering to handcu Jesse as part of sexual playacting. In the previous issue,
the same proposal had led to Jesse being left tied to the bed while Tulip went drinking
with her girlfriend, in an overt reversal of the male-drinking scenes which abound in the
series. She meant to punish him for having abandoned her earlier, a decision which he
had taken to shield her from imminent danger and which she construed as a lack of trust.
Signicantly, she leaves him tied, naked and gagged with her own bra before running o.
ough they are reconciled in #28, the gender ambiguity persists, as Jesse agrees to be
handcued again, while Tulip mockingly calls him a “slut” (#28, p.6).
In this context, Jesse’s visit to the museum, as opposed to a seedy bar, furthers the
existing ambiguity. While he does use his superpower, the word of God, to get rid of
the museum guard, he mostly sits in silence, staring, renouncing action for the duration
of the page, turning into an immobile spectator. Banal as it may sound in many graphic
novels, such a narrative decision stands out sharply in a serialized ction usually driven by
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dialogues and/or spectacle. e spectacle in this case is a tiny frame within a frame, a picture
of a helpless woman, painted by a man, intensely gazed upon by a male character whose
sense of traditional gender roles has just been called into question. In #43, Jesse starts by
suggesting that the painting helped him connect with his mother’s plight and role: “You
used to stare at it for hours, but I never did know why at the time. Wasn’t ’til the museum
I gured it out.” However, the issue ends with an incident somewhat symmetrical to his
misunderstanding of Tulip’s complexity. Jesse’s mother openly dotes on one of her neighbors
(who later turns out to be a former Nazi). Embarrassed, Jesse suggests that she “can’t talk
about stu like that to… You know, with…”, to which his mother gleefully answers: “Oh
what, I’ve got to clean up my act now I’m your Mom?” (#43, p.22). e scene ends again
with Jesse sitting in silence.
ese two incidents, symmetrically arranged around Christina’s World, turn the painting
into a pivot for Jesse’s examination and also point to the impossibility of using art to resolve
uncertainties concerning gendered roles. Jesse appears to nd solace in Wyeth’s painting
as a depiction of the conict between will and entrapment—a possible echo of Tulip’s
predicament—but he is still shocked to discover that his mother, like Wyeth’s painted
Christina, is both a wounded woman and an attractive lover. Christina’s World only oers
partial answers, fraught with the same ambiguities as the rest of the narrative.
High and Low
In a seminal essay, “Mass Culture as Woman” Andreas Huyssen argued in 1986 that
the various mass culture theories of the 19th and 20th century, from Flaubert to Dwight
Macdonald, had constructed mass/popular culture as a feminine other to a more masculine
high culture. While mass culture theories have lost their authority in academic circles,
they still shape the constructions of implicit and explicit cultural hierarchies, as models or
countermodels. us, the rst major exhibition of comics art at a legitimate venue in the
United States, was the controversial “High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture”
exhibition in 1990 (Beaty, Comics versus Art 188–89). It is perhaps not a coincidence that
it was also organized at the MoMA, the place in which Custer (correctly) gets to see
Christina’s World in Preacher.
In Preacher, the reconstruction of gender roles around Christina’s World is undergirded
by an approach to cultural hierarchies which both echoes Huyssen’s analysis and seeks to
provide an escape from conventionally gendered cultural dichotomies. e use of Wyeth
rather than Whistler or Hopper for instance, is in itself signicant. As underlined by Helena
Lamouliatte-Schmitt, Wyeth’s position in the art world is still hotly debated, though it
seems to have consolidated since the time of Preacher’s initial publication. He is at once a
recognized and valued painter, the author of “one of the most familiar American paintings
of the
th
century” (Lamouliatte-Schmitt 47) and an artist whose work has been demeaned
by critics as mere “illustration” (28-29; 320), similar in kind to Norman Rockwell’s work. Of
course N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth’s father, who taught him his craft, was himself a noted
illustrator of popular novels. e aura of cultural legitimacy which surrounds Christina’s
World in Preacher stems from the same source which elevated Andrew Wyeth in the art
world, the New York Museum of Modern Art and its prescriptive power: the museum’s
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acquisition of the painting in 1949 was a crucial step in establishing Wyeth’s importance.
In other words, the social apparatus by which “high art” is constructed is very much in
evidence in the series. Conversely, while Preacher indulges in carnivalesque excesses, the
Vertigo line had already published such acclaimed and ambitious works as Neil Gaiman’s
Sandman, Alan Moore’s Swamp ing or Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol and could only be
called “low art” by considering comics as a whole to be ontologically illegitimate.
In Comics versus Art, Bart Beaty, building on Huyssen, argues that the gendered mass
culture discourse is one of the ways in which comics’s resentment towards the art world
can be explained.
e ressentiment of the comic book industry is a response to the processes of
institutional legitimization that have championed the work of Lichtenstein as a mascu-
linized savior of commercial culture, while dismissing the cultural and aesthetic import
of popular forms as sentimental. (Comics versus Art 67)
e issue here is that the self-representations of the art world contrasted sharply with
that of the comics readers and practitioners.
Pop art (…) was a threat because it absconded with the one element that comic
book fans assumed would never be in question: the red-blooded American masculinity
that informed war and romance comics alike with their rigid adherence to patriarchal
gender norms. (Comics versus Art 67)
ough one can argue with Beaty’s broad characterization of gender roles in these
two genres, his analysis points to the fact that both modernist high culture critics and
mainstream practitioners have sought to demean the other by stressing their own implicit
or explicit masculinity. ere is undoubtedly an element of “red-blooded masculinity” in
Preacher, and a fair amount of literal masculine red blood on display, but as we have seen
gender roles shift around Christina’s World. e presence of the painting tends to reduce
Jesse to deference and contemplation, “absconding” with his masculinity while he is in the
museum but also turning him into a shy boy impressed by his mother, later in the narrative.
Both scenes would thus seem to play out Beaty’s analysis within the narrative, with high
art exposing the fragile masculinity of the hero. On the other hand, the painting itself is
not pop art, it does not appropriate or comment upon commercial culture, but oers a
quiet and constrained scene, one that explicitly centers on feminine powerlessness. When
Christina Custer exclaims: “Somebody’s painted my life,” the painting itself is clearly
posited as feminine.
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e presentation of the painting within the comics reinforces this gendered framing.
In her essay “De la toile à la bande,” Danielle Chaperon has identied the many strategies
used by cartoonists to integrate existing paintings in their comics: translating it in the
comics’ style, using it as such, avoiding it, re-framing it and delegating it to another comics
artist (Chaperon 20–31). In the course of the narrative, Christina’s World is represented
using the simple outlines and color schemes of the series. According to Chaperon, the
strategy of “translating” one style into another tends to “make the painting disappears as
such, by making it impossible for it to produce a distinctive aesthetic impact” (Chaperon
20 [my translation]). I have previously argued that this disappearance is an intended eect
in a work in which ostensible boundaries—such as a movie screen or a painting frame—
dissolve to suggest a possible circulation between what is in the frame and what stands
outside (Labarre 248). During Custer’s visit to the museum, the painting thus stands not as
a grandiose achievement but as a small and austere frame on the wall. It is itself enclosed,
a frame within a panel, looking much smaller than the painting’s actual size (82x121cm).
In other words, it is far from oering a masculine alternative to commercial culture
of the kind identied by Bart Beaty and Andrea Huyssen in previous critical discourses.
Although Preacher pays attention to the social construction of legitimacy and foregrounds
the gendered role of art and culture, it construes neither commercial culture nor the ne
arts as a feminine other. While blurring this distinction is a frequent postmodern strategy,
Preacher posits a possible reconciliation without irony or distance. If anything, it displays
a high level of reverence for the painting, for its level of craft and for its singularity as a
work of art.
Fig. 2. Preacher #28, p. 9 (detail)
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Remediation and Celebration
Preacher faces a serious problem in introducing the painting to its reader, who may be
familiar with the image, and who may fail to recognize it in its redrawn form. As demon-
strated by the Sfar example mentioned above, there is a distinct risk in staking part of a
narrative strategy on a reference which might be missed by your intended audience. is helps
explain why the visual allusions to classical paintings in comics center on a limited corpus
of references. Le Radeau de la Méduse and La liberté guidant le peuple are both extremely
common occurrences in the Francophone area, for instance, while Hopper’s Nighthawks
has unsurprisingly been used in many American comics. e diculty is compounded by
the fact that, unlike literary references, pictures are still very hard to look for in reference
books or online without the name of the author or the painting itself. Garth Ennis, who
wrote detailed scripts for the series, clearly wanted to make sure that his readers would
not miss the reference, and took the unusual step of including a panel comprising solely
the necessary references during Custer’s visit to the MoMA (g. 2):
“Andrew Wyeth
(American b. 1917)
Christina’s World
1948
Tempera on Gesso Panel”
Unlike the actual caption accompanying the painting in the museum,9 this does not
provide any backstory of biographical detail. It merely provides the reader with details meant
to convince him or her that the painting exists and that it can be found. In the sparsely
furnished world of Preacher, there is no such thing as a “Gesso Panel”: frames tend to be
simple lines, rooms are anonymous and furniture non-important. e level of detail thus
functions as an index, an invitation to look beyond the diegetic world for an object that
transcends its boundaries.
In #48, the painting is not shown in full, nor is it described, but again, its name fea-
tures prominently, both in the dialogue and as the title of the episode. Christina herself has
never seen the original, merely reproductions in art books, and this leads to the following
dialogue in which Garth Ennis articulates a paradoxical modesty towards the painting:
9 e caption from 2007 reads: “e woman crawling through the tawny grass was the artist’s
neighbor in Maine, who, crippled by polio, ‘was limited physically but by no means spiritually.’
Wyeth further explained, ‘e challenge to me was to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a
life which most people would consider hopeless.’ He recorded the arid landscape, rural house, and
shacks with great detail, painting minute blades of grass, individual strands of hair, and nuances
of light and shadow. In this style of painting, known as magic realism, everyday scenes are imbued
with poetic mystery.” (“Andrew Wyeth. Christina’s World. 1948”)
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Christina: What was it like?
Jesse: It was beautiful, Mom. Colors were so vivid, more’n any book or print could
reproduce/It was about the saddest thing I did ever see. (16)
Again, the existence of an original painting before and beyond the comics is acknowl-
edged. Adaptations of classical plays in comics used to conclude by inviting the readers to
go back to the “original,” and this dialogue seems to convey a similar invitation. Wyeth’s
painting cannot be paraphrased, it cannot be fully represented, it has to be seen.
e celebration of the aurality of the pictorial arts expands beyond this overt piece of
meta-commentary. roughout #48, Christina’s search for her own identity is described
as a visual and spatial process, in which details are gradually added. If her whole life has
been painted by Wyeth, it is quite literally redrawn by Ennis and Dillon:
“One of the blanks got lled in.” (10)
“I was like an empty space waiting to be lled in, and the lling came slowly, in bits
and pieces. Who I was—the kind of person I was—that came with Lorie.” (11)
“It was easier moving forward than back, because it lled up the spaces in my head.
Anything new was good: a home, a job, a book to read, even a goddamn bottle of whiskey.
It was all experience. It made me a person again.” (13)
ere is a paradoxical move here, as the narrative equates identity and picture, then
states that this picture is unattainable within the comics, that it cannot be reproduced.
However, what the comic book can supply is a narrative, or rather several narratives. As
noted above, Ennis does not paraphrase the painting. Instead, through Christina, he in-
troduces a narrative reading of the painting.
e girl was some cousin of Wyeth’s. She had polio. […] She was so weak, and
this was as far as she could go, the bottom of the eld. Always in view of the house.
It centered her world. She couldn’t escape it. It reached out and brought her back, no
matter what … (17)
us, the painting as image is left undiscussed, but its possible narrative content is open
to discussion. When Christina suggests that Wyeth had painted her life, the connection
between that possible narrative and Preacher’s is brought into the open. In the conclusion
to her dissertation, Helena Lamouliatte-Schmitt discusses the possible narrative readings
of Christina’s World, and suggests that because of the painting’s openness, any one narrative
reading is bound to be arbitrary. e various elements of the picture invite these readings,
but their disconnection, the vast empty space of the eld and the sky makes it impossible
to go beyond “the threshold of iconicity” (Lamouliatte-Schmitt 383).
In Preacher, pictorial virtuosity is assigned to the absent original painting, while Ennis
endeavors to explore Christina’s World as a narrative. According to Garth Ennis, Preacher
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was primarily conceived as a storytelling engine, as opposed to the various other uses to
which comics can be put, from art showcase to poetic devices — “e object of [Preacher]
was to have a monthly platform to tell the stories I wanted to tell.”(Ennis and Hasted
60–61)—and Christina’s World is thus adapted to t this narrative form. e remediation
simultaneously results in an expansion (of the narrative potential) and a reduction (of its
“distinctive aesthetic impact” in Chaperon’s words), which reect the perceived respective
aordances of each form. It gives the woman a name, a backstory, it identies the house
and it denes the entrapment. In doing so, it does not mean to replace the original painting,
but to supply one possible way of resolving the atomization of narrative perspective, even
though it may contradict what we know about Wyeth’s work, from the name Christina
Olson to its locale.
Furthermore, Preacher includes not one but several reinterpretations: Dillon’s rendering
(twice), Ennis’s narrativization and Fabry’s pastiche. at cover is itself an overt reinterpre-
tation. ough all the signicant elements of the original are recognizably present, their
articulation is dierent and attuned to the story of the comics. e open space is missing
and has been replaced by various bars and forms of enclosure. In addition to the vertical
bars of the railings, the crosses planted at various angles on the laws sketch an isosceles
triangle, with the closed doors of the plantation at its center. e empty diagonal of the
original is thus replaced with a diagram of stability and inescapability, which is further
reinforced by the position of the woman in the foreground: her arm is resting on her knee
instead of drawing her towards the house. e multi-storied building itself, so dierent from
the Olson’s farm and barn, suggests a connection with one of the other icons of American
painting in the th century, Hopper’s House by the Railroad (1925), along with its inter-
textual weight. is is at once a conrmation of Christina’s reading of the painting and of
her life and a new image, which does not occupy any denite space in the chronology of
events in the series. It too contains gaps and multiple possible readings.
Conclusion
Preacher asserts the irreducibility of Christina’s World to any narrative, to any book.
Simultaneously, it embraces a plurality of meaning and presentations, which do not exhaust
the painting but celebrate it as a living and productive work of art. e series does not bypass
the issue of cultural legitimacy, nor does it embrace conventional high/low hierarchies. It
does set the ne arts apart in many ways, by setting them in legitimate settings: muse-
ums, books, places and things to be looked at in silence in an otherwise loud and restless
storyworld. In that sense, high art is aligned with nature, for they both have this capacity
to elicit moments of awe and contemplation. Both the desert and Wyeth elicit this sense
of the sublime, in the Kantian meaning of the word, while religious gures are belittled.
High art is posited as a better alternative to religion. Nevertheless, this embrace is best
described as deferent rather than “subservient”, to use an adjective which Rocco Versaci
applies to comics adaptation of literary classics (Versaci 200). Preacher may elevate some
instances of the ne arts but does not do so by downplaying the value of popular culture,
which informs much of the series.
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Nicolas Labarre is a professor in American Studies at University Bordeaux Montaigne, France,
where he teaches US political institutions, comics and video games. His research focuses on co-
mics, with a particular interest in issues of adaptations, genres and transnational circulations. His
latest publication was Understanding Genres in Comics (2020) and he is the author of an upcoming
biography of Jean Giraud/Moebius, to be published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2025.
Email: nicolas.labarre@u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr
