Just a Pilgrim

AUTHOR: Ennis, Garth

ARTIST: Carlos Ezquerra (illustrator); Paul Mounts (colorist); Ken Wolak (colorist); Chris Eliopoulos (letterer); Mark Texeira (cover artist)

PUBLISHER: Black Bull Comics

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 2001

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2001

Publication History

Garth Ennis’s Just a Pilgrim was originally published as a full-color limited series in five issues, from May, 2001, to September, 2001, by Black Bull Comics, a short-lived imprint of Wizard Entertainment. A follow-up limited series in four issues (from May to August of 2002), Just a Pilgrim: Garden of Eden, was also published by Black Bull.

The original limited series was first collected into a single volume in 2001 by Titan Books. Garden of Eden was collected into a single volume in 2002, also by Titan Books. Reprinting rights were acquired by Dynamite Entertainment, which collected both miniseries into a single volume —first in hardcover, then in trade paperback—in 2008. Dynamite’s volume also includes a cover gallery, reproducing the covers from the two series, examples of Carlos Ezquerra’s concept art for characters, and sketches for covers by J. G. Jones.

Plot

Just a Pilgrim combines elements of several genres, including postapocalyptic science fiction, the American Western, horror, and, as the title implies, Christian pilgrimage stories. The science fiction and Western elements are combined to provide a general setting, while the principal plot points and tensions are drawn from science fiction and horror. The Christian pilgrimage stories are used primarily to define the main character as he introduces himself (“just a pilgrim”), relates his background, and accounts for his actions and behavior throughout.

Both Just a Pilgrim series are set in a near future, eight years after a coronal expansion of the sun, referred to diegetically as “The Burn,” has evaporated all water and killed most life from the surface of the Earth. Human survivors are presented as straggling in small groups, including the group to which the original series’ narrator belongs, or in somewhat larger groups with better access to resources, including some relatively advanced technology (such as flying vehicles in the first series and hydroponics and the possibility of faster-than-light travel in the second). The Burn has produced mutations in surviving species, resulting in monstrous forms that terrorize the few remaining people.

Both series focus on the movements and actions of the titular pilgrim as a means of displaying those freak-show horrors; in this way, both series are generally similar to Dante’s Inferno (from La divina commedia, c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802). The first series is told as an ekphrasis from the diary of Billy Shepherd, beginning with a summary of The Burn before turning to “[t]he first time [Billy and his family] saw the pilgrim” under attack by heavily armed raiders (called “buckers” and stylized as postapocalyptic pirates). Billy and his family are saved only by the timely and extremely violent intervention of the pilgrim, a wanderer wearing a duster who dispatches dozens of buckers with ease while issuing oaths and quips derived from the Bible and other Christian sources.

The pilgrim is revealed to have been a Green Beret, who, in order to survive while adrift at sea, resorted to cannibalism, continuing the practice when he returned to society. As the series progresses, the buckers are revealed to be operating under Castenado, a multiple amputee who lost his feet and hands, as well as a mutant with enhanced senses that compensate for his missing eyes. The pilgrim and Castenado seem destined for a totalizing conflict, which occurs in the final issue, as the buckers stage a raid on the other group’s last stand. It is revealed that the pilgrim used the families, including Billy’s, as bait in order to kill all the buckers. Initially carrying only the Bible, he later also carries Billy’s diary.

The second series generally repeats the structure of the first, with movement, discovery, violence, and a concluding conflict that results in general destruction and only a few survivors. Set four years after the end of the first series, it is also told as an ekphrasis, in this case, from the journal of Dr. Christine Page. Walking ever westward as if in search of the titular Garden of Eden, the pilgrim reaches the Mariana Trench (the comic calls it “Marianas”), where he is saved from reanimated human corpses by a small group of scientists preparing to leave the Earth in a space shuttle modified for faster-than-light interstellar flight.

The scientists’ “garden” is beset by the parasitic life-form, called “sliders” after their mode of locomotion, responsible for reanimating the corpses. Eventually the life-form sets fire to the garden, kidnaps a little girl, and, in an inversion of the pilgrim’s strategy in the first series, uses her as bait to lure the scientists into the Challenger Deep, where the girl is discovered to have already been killed and reanimated. Three characters, including the pilgrim, make it back to the shuttle, where the pilgrim, holding off corpses to allow two scientists to escape, insists that only Billy’s diary and not the Bible be taken with them.

Characters

•The pilgrim, the otherwise-unnamed protagonist, is a former Green Beret with expertise in military strategy, tactics, and armed and unarmed combat. While imprisoned for cannibalism, he was gradually befriended by a priest whose years of persistence led the pilgrim to forge a belief in God and to love the Bible. Having escaped from the prison during The Burn, and having seen the priest burned alive, he dedicates his life to walking the Earth attempting to do “the Lord’s work.”

•Billy Shepherd, a ten-and-a-half-year-old boy, is part of a small group of survivors wandering the former American West. Billy keeps a diary, which forms the basis of the original series’ narrative and is featured in the second series as well. He looks up to the pilgrim with a mixture of admiration and fear. His trust costs him his life when he is used, alongside the rest of his group, as bait in the pilgrim’s trap for Castenado and his buckers. However, his memory lives on, as the pilgrim first carries Billy’s diary and then gives it to the scientists leaving Earth.

•Castenado, the antagonist of the first series, is the leader of the buckers. Stylized as a pirate, he has two peg legs and hooks in place of both hands; at one point the narrative reveals that he has also lost his penis. Enhanced senses compensate for his missing pieces. Given to referring to himself in the third person, he is intended to embody the sterile amorality and purposeless violence of the future Earth. He is killed in an explosion set off by Billy.

•Carla Shepherd, mother of Billy, reveals to both the group of survivors and the reader the pilgrim’s identity by remembering his backstory of cannibalism; this prompts the pilgrim to tell his story.

•John Shepherd, father of Billy, was a sort of moral center to the group of survivors before the pilgrim’s arrival. Unable to protect the survivors as the pilgrim seemingly can, he finds that “the world [he] belong[ed] to is passed away.”

•A priest, always wearing a white suit and Bryl cream in his hair, is sincere and his weekly visits to the imprisoned pilgrim over three years convert him to a sort of Christianity.

•Christine Page was a graduate student in oceanography at the time of The Burn and is now one of the scientific leaders of the garden. Tall, strapping, and assured, she would be a sex object in a different sort of story; in Just a Pilgrim, her flirtation with fellow gardener Cameron leads to nothing. The series concludes with Christine figuring Eve—earlier, she had a beloved pet snake—alongside Cameron as Adam, as the two leave Earth for “another garden.”

•The Doc, lead scientist of the garden, is a short, spritely, redheaded figure in John Lennon glasses, a magenta jacket, and parachute pants. Evidently responsible for the most advanced technologies, including faster-than-light travel, he would be an incongruous figure if not for an accommodating amorality that, like Castenado’s, embodies a certain aspect of the future Earth.

•Sliders are this series’ main “antagonist,” a collective of mutated jellyfish that may enter into and reanimate corpses.

Artistic Style

Just a Pilgrim is illustrated by Ezquerra in a style that is garish, at times almost cartoonish, and seemingly intended to capture Ennis’s interest in discovering the comedy at and beyond the boundaries of plausibility and acceptability. Character designs tend toward exaggerated icons; for example, the pilgrim not only wears a cowboy hat and a duster but also is branded across the face by a cross. Castenado is piratical in the extreme, with not one but two peg legs, hooks for both hands, and both eyes missing.

Scenes are depicted fairly statically, as if each is intended not to represent action in progress but to catch at the eye level and, as exemplified by the collected volume ’s cover gallery, to serve as images for copying and for further exaggeration by other artists. In this context, splash pages occur frequently and without clear structural significance. Similarly, the pages are pervaded by extremely graphic violent imagery as well as gross-out horror. The art is generally played for comic effect; the reader is expected to laugh aloud equally at protagonists and antagonists, to the extent that both depend on the same kinds of graphic violence. However, the art is probably too sluggish to serve as satire.

Themes

Just a Pilgrim touches on a range of themes in keeping with its mixture of genres. A great weakness of the series, however, is that, although some of those themes are hammered at, none is developed with any subtlety or depth: The result is an entirely superficial use of potentially thought-provoking themes for rather thoughtless provocation, which in its garish bluntness verges on a wholly crass exploitation. In this way, the series’ closest analogue outside of comics is probably “torture porn,” such as the Saw films (2000’s) or, at certain points, The Human Centipede (2009). Hardly interested in raising questions, nor even in telling its limited story, it seeks much more simplistically to show what it can get away with.

The postapocalyptic science-fictional setting, for example, could raise questions about ecology; the survival of species, including the human race; and the relationship between culture and nature. However, in Just a Pilgrim, science fiction is combined with horror primarily to allow for monsters and to push all society toward rape society (indeed, the primary monsters rape human beings). Similarly, the series’ interest in the American Western could, as an analogue of ancient epic, raise questions about the value of individual action or, in its historical guise, about the exploration of “frontier” and the consequent exploitation of its “native” peoples; however, it mainly does little more than provide a location and manner of dress.

Finally, the series’ most obvious attempt at a thematic, Christian pilgrimage falls far short, taking the form of superficial visual and aural symbolism rather than any deeper or more complicated thematic allegory such as American or global millenarianism at the end of the twentieth century. The main character is identified only as “the pilgrim,” and his backstory culminates in a discovery of faith. However, his seeming Christianity serves primarily to supply him with justifications for violence (he kills characters whom “the Devil” has possessed and sacrifices “innocent” survivors so as to kill a greater number of “sinful” buckers) and leaden quips at moments of violence.

In the second series, the pilgrim’s conversations with scientists responsible for a new “garden” are perfunctory and unironic, and he seems to have more in common than not with the scientists’ off-kilter, amoral leader, the Doc. All of this goes unexamined by the series; the pilgrim’s disavowal of his Christianity at the end of the second series—when he demands that the scientists leave the Bible behind on Earth, lest it do more harm in the universe—seems to go unexplained. It is a pilgrimage to nowhere.

Impact

Produced by Ennis just after his well-received Preacher, Just a Pilgrim does not seem to have had the same kind or intensity of impact. Were it not for the success of the earlier series, this later series might not be remembered or, perhaps, have happened. Indeed, Ennis has said that he intended Just a Pilgrim to explore some of the same themes and settings—science fiction, faith and reason, the American West, the antihero—as that earlier series, but pushing farther at and past the boundaries of acceptability. If the setting, the characters, and the plot are all intended to be iconic (or more violent or otherwise repugnant versions of traditional icons), they have not achieved that status in the comic’s audience.

Some of the same themes and settings are explored in later comics, but whether those comics were influenced by Just a Pilgrim is a matter for debate. For example, the genre of postapocalyptic Western clearly shapes parts of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead (2003- ): the main character is, at least at first, a cowboy-hat wearing and gun-toting lawman, and the television version of that series explains its zombies as the result of microorganisms able to reanimate human corpses. However, rather than indicating the impact of Just a Pilgrim, the similarities are probably best understood as showing that such themes and settings have been “in the air.” With Just a Pilgrim available in its entirety as a collected volume, a potential future impact remains possible but seems unlikely, especially given the commercial failure of the film version of the generically similar Jonah Hex (2010).

Further Reading

Briggs, Raymond. When the Wind Blows (1982).

Ennis, Garth, and Steve Dillon. Preacher (1995-2000).

Kirkman, Robert, and Tony Moore. The Walking Dead (2003- ).

Miller, Frank. Ronin (1987).

Otomo, Katsuhiro. Akira (1982-1990).

Bibliography

“Dynamite Collects Ennis’ Just a Pilgrim in December.” Newsarama, October 15, 2008.

Ennis, Garth. “Remembering Just a Pilgrim with Garth Ennis.” Interview by Joe Rybandt. Newsarama, October 23, 2008.