Garth Ennis’ romance comic book about a lovelorn small-town preacher who explodes his own grandmother and travels the land with his loveable band of sidekicks – a vampire, a chick with big boobs, a seven foot tall zombie/death personified in a dirty duster, a dude with an asshole for a face, the retarded great-great-grandson of Jesus, and God – has been drifting up and down development hell’s River Styx almost as long as Lindsay Lohan’s been a dirty whore (she’s 21 now and has been sucking cock since she still had baby teeth, so you do the math).

Fans of the groundbreaking funny book relinquished any festering hopes of seeing Reverend Custer’s wacky high-jinx in anything more than a two dimensional artist’s rendering when it was announced last year that Mark Steven Johnson – the man responsible for turning Frank Miller’s Daredevil into a creepy date-rapist who fakes blindness to ingratiate himself to his victims – would develop Preacher as a series for HBO. Because there’s NO way that could possibly fly, right? Well thankfully it didn’t, because when Johnson’s vision of the series was deemed “too hardcore” (in other words it was gut-wrenchingly bad and no one had the sack to tell him the truth) HBO’s execs dropped the project and Johnson was left, well — holding his Johnson.

But just like that colored fellah on all the pseudo-Che Guevara bumper stickers in the Whole Foods parking lot, Columbia Pictures delivered a message of HOPE yesterday, by announcing they’d be developing Preacher as a feature with American Beauty helmer Sam Mendes attached to direct. Okay, admittedly Mendes’ last dalliance with the darker side of comics – Road to Perdition – bored me into the arms of Morpheus, but as a Preacher fan this is still good news. With the project finally in the hands of a capable director hopefully some killer cast will jump on board and this thing will see the light of day. I want to live in a world where I can see an ass-kicking man of God using the Good Word to make another man ass-bang himself. I want to live in that world HARD.

Hopefully Reverend Custer himself will stop in and give us his thoughts on this nipple-erecting news. Stay tuned.

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