PREACHER: Behind the Arse (nobody told me that Arseface was a real person)
on April 11th, 2012
Yesterday I was floating around Google searches when I stumbled onto this painting of Arseface from Preacher.
You all remember Arseface, the teenaged rock-fan who survived his botched suicide attempt at the expense of his looks, leaving himself disfigured with a sort of groove through the middle and a mouth that looked vaguely like an anus (hence the less than PC name; ‘Arseface’).
I don’t remember what I was searching for, but it wasn’t at all Preacher related, so I had to pop the image open for some context.
What I would find beyond that link would throw my entire perception of reality into question.
This image was not a painting Arseface at all, but a real guy named James Vance. At first I was fascinated by the superficial similarities, believing it to be a coincidence, but the more I read, the more obvious it became that James Vance’s life had formed the basis for Arseface’s. The fictional character I’d been reading and re-reading about since my teens was barely fictional at all, but the very real embodiment of teenaged tragedy that we see here;
Mind blown, I blurted this revelation out in a (possibly insensitive) Facebook post and asked everyone I knew if they had known this all along. Many of my industry friends were aware of it, but most of the readers I know from my own generation had no clue.
This raised questions. ‘Why was this lost on so many of us us?’ ‘Was it really okay for Ennis to use Vance’s likeness and basic life story in an often comedic context?’… and ‘should we ever have laughed at it?‘ I don’t know the answers (I’m still trying to iron out these new mind-wrinkles as I type this down), but I’ll attempt to explain my thinking on this as best I can.
Vance’s story was famous back in the 80s because it tapped into the then-current religious fear of rock music. After he died in ’88, his parents famously put the blame on Judas Priest and took the band to court for allegedly hiding the subliminal messages in their songs that convinced James to take his own life (this was essentially disproven in court). Before yesterday, what little I knew about this case was half-remembered from the stand-up act of another real-life person who had once made a posthumous appearance in Preacher;
The late, great, sane man himself.
This in mind, I can only assume that the Arseface parody of Vance wasn’t intended to be hidden at all. Instead I think that Garth Ennis fully expected us all to recognize him. Hell, maybe audiences did in the 90s, when Arseface first appeared in the comic and this case was prominent in the country’s collective memory… but these days you’d be hard pushed to find a person on the street who remembers Judas Priest, let alone some legal battle they fought in way back in the boring part of the 80s.
Now that I think about it, it’s not that much stranger than some of the other dead celebrity cameos in the series, like Bill Hicks or John Wayne… the biggest difference with this cameo/parody is that they made this poor kid’s disfigurement synonymous with the less-than-flattering name ‘Arseface’. I can’t fool myself into thinking that this was a particularly generous move on Garth Ennis’s part. On the other hand, Ennis did go to great pains to make readers care about Arseface and to essentially see beyond his extensive scarring and onto the fragile child inside. This might have been more of a blessing than a curse, had James Vance survived for long enough to see it.
This is why I’m torn. I first read preacher back in my middle-teens and I remember Arseface’s origin story in great detail — a story that I now see is essentially a mostly accurate retelling of James Vance’s failed suicide attempt. As a teenager constantly fighting depression, rejected and often bullied by my peers, I really felt the character’s sense of claustrophobia and misery. I could feel what made him pull that trigger. Before I had read that issue, it’d been easy to dismiss this character as an idiot (in much the same way that Bill Hicks dismissed the real James Vance up above), but that Arseface origin story humanized him and helped me understand and empathize with that character. Now I feel like the knowledge of that fiction helps me better understand this true story and the real human behind it.
In a strange way, that much feels like a service to the guy’s memory, but there’s no forgetting that choice of name. Perhaps by making us accept the character as a joke acted as a gateway to us to understanding him as a person… Or maybe Ennis was showing us that accepting a disfigurement and the nasty names that come with it de-powers the people who might use those names against us (after all, what can you say to insult a guy who calls himself Arseface? Not much, I’d wager).
… Or perhaps I’m over-thinking it and Garth Ennis has a sick and exploitative sense of humour. I don’t know him, so I can’t be the judge of that. I really don’t have the answers. I can only speculate.
Right or wrong, sympathetic or just plain sick; I do love Preacher. As ugly or as offensive as it gets, there is always an underlying element of humanity to it that makes it an unforgettable and enriching read.
Please feel free to leave your thoughts below in the comments.
-MVB
YOU MANIACS! (Roll Credits)
“We never talk any more. “
Directed by Tim Burto– Aw Shit. 
TIM BURTON IS A GENIUS!
I’d been burned before. 
