Cassidy made a deal with God at the end of Preacher.
In Cassidy’s final encounter with Jesse, it looked like Cassidy let the sun take him, and thus earn the redemption he sought in Jesse’s eyes.
But later we saw Cassidy restored to health (if not life), and we get a flashback to the scene where Cassidy made his deal. His demand of God was: “I get to live.”
So, at the very end we see Cassidy sitting on a hill somewhere, and he takes off his ubiquitous sunglasses. I couldn’t tell if it was still nighttime or not. My question, therefore, is:
Was Cassidy still a vampire?
Or did God restore him to genuine life as a human?
If you’ve got the last compilation, Alamo, check out page 219 (the page after the Saint sits on God’s throne). The top panel shows Cassidy staring right at the setting sun, but not bursting into flames. It is night time in the fourth panel on that page, when we see Cassidy’s face. He’s clearly younger: he no longer looks like Keith Richards after a rough week. Also, his eyes aren’t fucked up. Clearly, God restored him to as he was before he was turned into a vampire: an eighteen year-old human. This ties into what Jesse told him in their fight: that because he was turned into a vampire, with his immortality and super-powers, he’d never had to “grow up.” Frankly, I don’t quite see what Jesse’s ass whupping taught him that he would not have learned when he was being tortured by a castrated mafioso at Masada, but I think Garth Ennis was trying to draw a parrallel between what Jesse was doing with Cassidy and what Jody did to Jesse when he was a kid. From that perspective, I thought it was a very effective ending.