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CBG SATELLITES
The ADD Blog by Alan David Doane
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Jenny Finn: Doom
So begins the awful saga of Jenny Finn, and such a charging introduction can
only leave the reader in anticipation for all sorts of high-spirited
Lovecraftian steampunk shenanigans. But ‘anticipation’ has been the defining
term for Jenny Finn, a work over half a decade in the making, and still not
entirely completed. Originally intended at its inception in 1999 as a
four-issue miniseries from Oni, Jenny Finn
fell victim to the increasing time demands on its creative team, stalling
after only two issues. I strongly doubt there’s a soul reading this site
that hasn’t heard of co-writer Mike Mignola, he of Hellboy fame. Co-writer
cum artist Troy Nixey, on the other hand, will prove familiar largely to
connoisseurs of early Oni and various anthologies, having contributed work
to several issues of Oni Double Shot and Dark Horse Presents, along with
both volumes of The Matrix Comics. He also produced the two-issue miniseries
Trout from Oni in 2001. He even re-teamed with Mignola in a way for the DC
Batman Elseworlds miniseries The Doom That Came to Gotham, in 2000, for
which Mignola served as co-writer, and he as co-artist.
But Jenny’s ending was not easily forthcoming, until hopefully now. The
volume under consideration here collects both of the published Oni issues
under one cover, along with a few pieces of Nixey production art. The
heretofore unseen conclusion is scheduled for July, under the title of Jenny
Finn: Messiah, but Nixey will not be providing all of the art; Farel
Dalrymple of Pop Gun War and Marvel’s upcoming Omega the Unknown revival
will be finishing the visuals off (there was also an earlier replacement,
Scott Morse, who had to drop out due to increasing commitments even before
any art was completed). Dalrymple’s scratchy visual style will offer a
measure of visual continuity, but there will doubtlessly be bumps.
Nixey, you see, has a talent for long, weathered faces. His characters have
stretched or fat cheeks, often large noses, and little more than shadows for
eyes. Their collective caricature emphasizes their humanity though, which
leads directly into Nixey’s primary strength: the mutative possibilities of
the flesh. There is a lot of bubbling, pockmarked change in this book..
Cheeks and noses are dotted with octopi puckers as if they’re freckles.
Rolls of fat become prehensile tentacles. You’d never believe how natural
and organic a wriggling fishtail can look extending from a man’s face, but
Nixey pulls it off. It’s gorgeously revolting character work, and there’s a
lot of it. Initial steampunk concerns are quickly brushed aside to emphasize
the teeming population of London’s streets; there’s constantly a crowd on
these pages (as least when everyone’s outside), and every face is a new
opportunity for fresh disgust. Nixey’s eye for background mood and period
dress help out as well.
There’s contagion out there, you see. One can pick up touches of Mignola’s
familiar wit throughout (such as the recurring image of a flopping fish
exclaiming “Doom.”), but this is a more crawling, sweating work. The
mysterious title character, really little more than a thin young girl, is
spreading her bizarre oceanic STD throughout the city, although her power is
not confined to the pleasures or mutations of the flesh. Rather than
crafting a pulpier Black Hole, Mignola and Nixey’s script seems to eject
metaphor (as of now) to build a more consuming surface dead. The deceased
rise from their graves. The sea’s bounty becomes awful and poisoned. A
slasher roams the streets, searching for whores to kill. And a fellow named
Joe finds himself transfixed by Jenny Finn, allured to the point of giving
her his protection, which cannot possibly turn out well.
There’s not very much in the way of tight plotting here; just as metaphor is
traded off for atmosphere, so is twisty storytelling, leaving a somewhat
wandering, almost improvisational yarn. Joe runs all over town for the first
chapter, aiding Jenny from religion-drunk attackers and confronting killers
and whipping mobs into a frenzy and generally encountering important
characters one after another. The second chapter sees him falling in with a
crew of aristocratic occultists, their masked medium channeling both ghosts
of the past and Jenny’s tragic secret origin. If there’s any character
complexity here, it’s in the lonely, sexualized little miss title being; all
else in everyone else can be read in Nixey’s tired urban faces, as the story
bounces from happening to happening.
But there’s a lot of happenings to hold one’s interest, along with that
lovely art. It must have been quite a pain for fans to have waited this
long, and the book will probably suffer from Nixey’s visual absence come
July and the delayed conclusion, guaranteeing further minor tooth gnashing.
But it will be fun to see how Dalrymple, a slightly more shaded, heavier
character artist will take on Nixey’s playdough properties for human and
fish skin. The mélange can tantalize with the possibility for differing
visual interpretation, though what’s presented here will please fans of the
grotesque and Victorian, so long as conclusions are not a priority, nor
depth beyond the stinking mutant atmosphere.
-- Jog
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It’s a bustling day at a large cathouse somewhere in London, in some
unspecific Victorian time. One of the regular ladies runs screaming out of
her bedchambers; something has happened to her latest client! A crowd
gathers at the boudoir, transfixed by the awful thing writing on the girl’s
bed: it looks like a fused mass of assorted sea life, tentacles and boils
and fishtails and snapping jaws, all as one thrashing entity, all growing
from the tortured skin of some sorry john. Suddenly, the Prime Minister
bursts in, geared up in an elaborate mask of tubes and lenses, high science
indeed. He is informed that the poor chap was seen the week prior with the
new girl, a Jenny Finn. The Prime Minister pops a cigarette into his mouth,
through the mask, and contemplates.