‘Preacher’ dark, funny and very strange

‘Preacher” sneaks up on you like a hulking man with a bloody sword, but also makes you laugh by serving up pancakes with a message spelled on them in M&Ms.

Based on a comic book, the AMC series (9 p.m. Mondays) is crazy — and crazy good.

The show, now in its second season, is filmed in New Orleans, with its decay and decadence on full display.

The plot? Let’s say good versus evil, except the good folks have more than a touch of bad.

The Preacher is Jesse (Dominic Cooper), a pouty ex-crook who aspires to serve God and can make others do his bidding.

And all hail Ethiopian-Irish thespian Ruth Negga as Jesse’s pancake-making grifter girlfriend Tulip. Those big, seemingly innocent eyes! That smoldering passion!

The show’s sword-wielding bad guy is known as the Saint of Killers. He’s a couple hundred years old and spent time in hell but is back on Earth aiming to slay Jesse. He’ll slice off a guy’s head. Just because.

Episodes deftly weave in backstory even while barreling forward. Last week, Jesse, Tulip and their vampire pal Cassidy went to the library to listen to chapter 57 of the audiobook “American Psychopaths,” which is devoted to the Saint. Turns out he had a wife and baby, only they died.

Meanwhile, three men are driving around in a van labeled “Soul Happy Go Go” in Japanese characters. They seek donors who’ll let a machine suck out a percentage of their soul. “You won’t even miss it,” they say. One donor gets $150K. His soul fragment is turned into a pill that’s sold to a rich guy for $2.7 million. He hopes it’ll fix his wife, who has dementia.

The Saint of Killers has no soul but wants one. Maybe it’ll get him into heaven for a reunion with his deceased family. He ends up swallowing a pill with 1 percent of the Preacher’s soul! Then the Preacher locks him in a van and sinks it in a swamp.

The suspense is killing me! So are the sly jokes. After the “American Psychopaths” chapter on the Saint of Killers, the narrator says the next chapter is: “Dick Cheney.”