Comic Review // Missionary Man: Going South — God, Guns & Mutants

I've had this comic sitting on my shelf for far too long. So, time to correct the error of my ways and finally get it read!

Honestly, this feels like exactly the sort of story I should have got around to sooner. If you've been following Adventures with Peps for any length of time, you'll know there are two things I have a particular weakness for: Mutants and the Cursed Earth. So what better way to spend an afternoon than following a heavily armed preacher through the post-apocalyptic wastelands?

Book Details

Title: Missionary Man: Goin' South
Writer: Gordon Rennie
Artist Team: Simon Davis, Alex Ronald, Henry Flint, Jesus Redondo, Roberto Corona, John Burns & Ron Smith
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 216

Blurb
Preacher Cain—known as the 'Missionary Man' out in the radlands of the Cursed Earth—was once a feared Texas City Judge until he took the Long Walk into the blasted wastes. There he embarked upon a holy mission to bring law to the lawless and God to the godless, one bullet at a time.

But Cain's corrupt and ruthless former colleagues in the Lone Star Justice Department see him as a threat—one they'll take extreme measures to silence...

Review
Unsurprisingly, Goin' South is all about former Texas Senior Judge Saul Cain, now better known as Preacher, the Missionary Man, and this is exactly the sort of character I enjoy finding in the wider Judge Dredd universe. He's a little bit Judge, a little bit Western gunslinger, a little bit religious fanatic and completely at home in the madness of the Cursed Earth. Which brings us nicely to my favourite story in the collection.

The Big Sleazy

For me, The Big Sleazy is the standout. We head down into post-nuclear-war New Orleans, and this is where the book really grabbed me. The setting is fantastic, the villains are suitably terrifying, and the whole thing has that wonderfully grimy, weird Cursed Earth feeling that I absolutely love. In fact, I immediately started thinking about how I could recreate some of these characters for the tabletop. That's always a good sign.

The artwork throughout this section really helps sell the world. The artists manage to make the Cursed Earth feel like more than simply a radioactive wasteland. It has its own cultures, monsters, strange communities and bizarre corners of civilisation hanging on after the apocalypse. I also really enjoyed the way the story takes traditional Western themes and drops them into this post-apocalyptic setting. It works incredibly well.

You've got the lone preacher riding into dangerous territory, outlaws, violence, religious themes and strange settlements; but instead of the American frontier, you're travelling through the irradiated remains of civilisation. It's basically a Western after the end of the world. And I'm completely here for it.

Back into the Cursed Earth

The second half of the collection brings us into a series of more straightforward Cursed Earth adventures, with John Wagner taking us back into familiar territory. These stories are perhaps less ambitious than The Big Sleazy, but they work really well as the closing section of the book. There's something quite enjoyable about simply travelling through the Cursed Earth and seeing what horrors, mutants and strange communities are waiting around the next corner. And yes...I love the mutants. I love the Cursed Earth. So, I'm probably exactly the target audience for this.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I really enjoyed Missionary Man: Goin' South. The artwork is fantastic, the setting is exactly the sort of post-apocalyptic madness I enjoy, and Preacher Cain is a brilliant character to explore this world through. Is it an epic story that is going to completely change the way I look at the Judge Dredd universe? No, and I don't think it's trying to be. Instead, it's a great afternoon escape. You pick it up, disappear into the Cursed Earth for a few hours, enjoy some mutants, some violence, some Western-inspired storytelling and some wonderfully strange characters, and then put it back on the shelf. And sometimes that's exactly what I want from a comic.

If anything, my biggest problem is that I now have a collection of strange Cursed Earth characters running around in my head that I desperately want to put onto a tabletop. Sector 102 may have a problem (or more problems coming soon).

As always, thanks for reading. Have you read Missionary Man: Goin' South? If you have, let me know what you thought in the comments. It’s a hard book to find, but if you can enjoy it!

Cheers!