I've never seen the show, but I read the comic (and its spin-offs) monthly starting with issue one the week that it was released until the final issue in 2000.
http://www.mikesamazingworld.com/main/features/series.php?seriesid=1596&page=gallery
Frankly, love it or hate it, the comic's an absolute cultural milestone.
[rant!]
I can testify as a primary source -- a lifelong comic book reader and collector (I started my addiction before kindergarten) -- that the impact that books like Preacher had on the comic book industry were massively and permanently game-changing. DC and Marvel had both been slowly but steadily chipping away at
the industry's self-imposed censorship since the '70s (gotta keep those keep sales up -- "Systems either change or die!", to quote a favorite villain), and when DC's "Suggested For Mature Readers" Vertigo imprint was forged like a hammer from hell in '93 (by editor Karen Berger), it shattered that damned dam that had been holding back content like Preacher's completely and irrevocably. I was 17 and just a few months away from graduating high school when the first issue of Preacher came crashing into comic shops in early '95, so for kids like me, the timing couldn't have been more perfect: we went from reading mostly PG and PG-13 books our entire lives to hard R content as we turned old enough to vote in what
seemed like
a flash.
Personally, I very much dislike some of the terms that came with that change: "mature readers" (I know a lot of cool comic fans, but I also know a lot that are anything but) and "graphic novel" (to me, they'll always be just silly little ol'
comic books!!)...
...and I never use either -- but still, the late-80s to mid-90s was a weird and wonderful time to be a comic book fan, and we'll probably never see such a particular transitory era like it with something so quietly relevant to our culture ever, ever again.
[/rant! Sorry, can't sleep, so it's time to binge more of The Boys]