Tulsa, Oklahoma

Lore & Background

Tulsa in Preacher is not the Tulsa of tourism brochures or oil tycoons. It is a place rendered in Steve Dillon's ink as a town of wide, flat horizons, clapboard houses, and churches with steeples that look like they were nailed up by a drunk carpenter. The Custer property sits at the edge of this flatness, a modest house that carries the weight of a family name synonymous with preaching, stubbornness, and a particular brand of Southern-adjacent pride. Jesse's father, the Reverend, filled its pews with a congregation that treated scripture the way they treated a good barbecue: with reverence, grease, and zero patience for nuance. When he died, the house went quiet in a way that no amount of Tulisa's humming could fill.

The mother's death is the catalyst that cracks Tulsa open. She dies in that house, and the finality of it—no resurrection, no divine intervention, just a body going cold on a kitchen table—seems to confirm to Jesse that whatever God is supposed to be, He is not in this house, not in this town, not in this flat Oklahoma sky. He packs a bag, kisses Tulisa, and walks out the front door into a wind that smells like dry grass and diesel. Tulsa does not chase him. It simply watches, the way a small town watches everyone who ever left, holding its breath and hoping they come back with a story.

The city's deeper mythic weight in the series is that of the American promise reduced to its smallest, most honest unit. Tulsa is where the idea of God as a neighbor, a father figure, a guy you can walk up to and ask for directions, is born. It is the last place where the world is still two-dimensional, where the rules are that you mow your lawn, you pray on Sunday, and you don't ask too many questions. Jesse's departure is the moment those rules shatter, and Tulsa becomes the origin coordinate for every subsequent impossibility.

In Their Own Story

The kitchen light was the kind that hummed, a low B-flat that had been in that house since before Jesse could walk. He stood at the counter with a coffee mug in both hands, the ceramic cold, the coffee colder, and watched the last of the afternoon sun drag itself across the linoleum in a long, orange smear. Tulisa was in the yard, pulling weeds from the patch behind the garage, her back to the house, her hair a dark knot against the flat white sky. His mother was in the bedroom. Had been in the bedroom for three days now. The doctor had used the word *inevitable* like it was a weather report, something that was just going to happen whether you wanted it to or not.

Jesse set the mug down. The hum of the light got louder, or maybe it was just that everything else had gone quiet. He could hear the wind off the open prairie, the distant clatter of a truck on Route 66, the soft thud of Tulisa's trowel against the dirt. Normal sounds. Tulsa sounds. The kind of sounds that meant the world was still a place you could drive through in a straight line and come out the other side the same way you went in.

He picked the mug back up. Set it down again. Picked it up. And then, very quietly, the way a man does when he's already made the decision but hasn't told anyone yet, he said, "I'm gonna go find Him."

Tulisa didn't turn around. She kept pulling weeds. The trowel went in, came out, went in again. And the wind kept blowing off the flat, endless, beautiful, ordinary sky.

Reader's Guide

Tulsa in Preacher hits you first through the flatness. The horizon is a hard line, unbroken, the sky pressing down like a sheet of hammered aluminum. The colors are muted—dusty ochre, faded red, the pale blue of a sky that has never seen a cloud it wasn't supposed to have. Dillon's inking gives the city a grainy, sun-bleached quality, as if the whole town has been left in the yard too long and the paint is peeling.

The Custer house is the emotional center. It's not grand. It's a two-story clapboard with a porch that sags slightly, a screen door that sticks, and a kitchen where the linoleum is worn to a pale ghost of its original pattern. The church where the Reverend preached sits a few blocks off, its steeple a thin needle against the wide sky, its pews worn smooth by generations of hard hats and cowboy boots.

Jesse, Tulisa, and the late Reverend are the characters who give Tulsa its pulse. The mother's death is the single event that defines the town's role: it is the last ordinary thing that happens before the extraordinary takes over. After Jesse walks out, Tulsa becomes a memory, a coordinate, a place the story keeps referencing the way a wound keeps aching when the weather changes.

Thematically, Tulsa is the American ground zero. It is where the idea of God as a person you can walk up to is born, where the shotgun is loaded before it's ever fired, where the flat, honest, sun-baked reality of small-town life is the baseline from which every subsequent impossibility measures its distance. It is the dirt. The starting line. The place you come back to, or don't.

Did You Know?

• Tulsa is the sole setting of the very first pages of Preacher before the narrative scatters across the American Southwest and eventually the globe, making it the one location every reader shares as a starting point.
• Tulisa Custer's nickname 'Tulsa' is a direct nod to the city itself, tying the wife's identity to the hometown in a way that reinforces how inseparable the two are in the story's architecture.
• The Custer family's connection to preaching and the church in Tulsa sets up the central irony of the series: the man most qualified to question God is the one raised in a house where God was a given, a neighbor, a father
• Tulsa's flat, open landscape visually mirrors the tone of the early issues—unadorned, honest, and slightly suffocating—before the art and narrative explode into the dense, layered, international chaos of the rest of the