Cult comic book Preacher is coming to the screen at last, as HBO announces plans to make a one-hour series based on the books by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon.

As comic-book heroes go, Preacher is an unusual one. Jesse Custer, our hero, is tall, dark, handsome and handy with his fists, sure enough, but he drinks and smokes more heavily than your average do-gooder, has an unfortunate tendency towards white jeans and is possessed by a half-demonic, half-angelic force that's as powerful as God. And he's on a mission to find the Almighty (who's gone AWOL from Heaven) and kick his ass, along with his gun-totin' girlfriend Tulip and his Irish vampire mate Cassidy.

The books were almost adapted into a film a couple of years back, with James Marsden lined up to play Custer and Samuel L. Jackson rumoured to be in talks to play the sinister Saint of Killers, but now we have Daredevil's Mark Steven Johnson writing the pilot with Pretty in Pink's Howard Deutch directing.

What's going to be interesting about this is seeing how much of the comic's more extreme content makes it to the screen. Will we see Arseface, the young man who shot himself in the face following Kurt Cobain's suicide? Will there be the retarded offspring of 2,000 years of inbreeding from Jesus' bloodline? Will we see Herr Starr, leader of the sinister Grail organisation, lose body parts at a rate of knots? And will there be sex, violence, mescaline and mutilation galore? Well, with Ennis and Dillon exec-producing, don't rule anything out.