7) Preacher [#3]: Proud Americans, by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon (.co.uk, .com)

I find myself strangely compelled to buy and read more volumes in this series, even if I didn’t much enjoy the graphic violence of the first two. Volume 3 is a game of two halves, with the first part seeing our heroes bust their Irish vampire friend out of captivity in southern France, overcoming adversaries who, if this weren’t a graphic novel, you would happily describe as “comic-book villains”. But the second part of the book was much more interesting for me; a presentation of the Easter Rising as witnessed by Cassidy, followed by a melancholy meditation on immortality and watching his friends grow old and die around him. I winced a wee bit at the historical inaccuracies in the Irish bit, yet it is a decent effort to portray the story to an audience who would have been mostly utterly unfamiliar with it.

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