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CBG SATELLITES
The ADD Blog by Alan David Doane
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Jenny Finn: Messiah
And thus we return once again to the sea-slick streets of some merry old
England, tucked away somewhere back toward the genre borders, that place
where whimsy and technological fancy and the horror of disease lay tumbled
into a single urban bed. But it’s not the outbreak from the flesh of
sentient tentacles and pus-dribbling boils that most alarm the citizens and
fauna of this sweetened and atrocious burg - it’s the very look of the
place, the extra-dimensional stamping boot heel of comics industry reality
that is molding each face and each structure into strange and indelicate
forms.
Jenny Finn is no stranger to upheaval. As I explained in my
review of the prior book in this most recent incarnation of the series,
the saga began back at Oni Press in 1999,
intended as a four-issue miniseries teaming Hellboy creator Mike
Mignola (who’d co-write and handle the covers) with Troy Nixey (who’d
co-write and tackle the interior art), then known as an interesting
contributor to anthologies like Oni Double Shot and Dark Horse
Presents. But the miniseries never made it past two issues before the
creative team found various time demands to be too much; the material
wouldn’t be revisited until earlier this year, when the Oni material was
collected into the aforementioned Jenny Finn: Doom, which was
published by Atomeka in
association with Boom! Studios. A
conclusion to the story was promised; unfortunately, it soon became clear
that such a goal would have to be attained without Nixey, whom, having
completed about an issue’s worth of additional artwork, apparently opted to
stop working in comics altogether. Scott Morse soon arrived as his
replacement, and then departed due to an increasing workload before
completing any artwork.
 Which brings us to the present. Finally, we have those last two issues of Jenny Finn, presented as a single volume. It’s now published by Boom! alone, and Farel Dalrymple is providing the remaining art. Dalrymple is an interesting, seemingly fitting choice for a replacement; a veteran of the respected Meathaus anthology and creator of the weathered symbol-drunk streetscapes of his own Pop Gun War (he’ll next be providing art for Jonathan Lethem’s Omega the Unknown revival at Marvel, on the off chance that anyone still remembers that in light of the recent Stephen King hoopla), on first glance his visual style seems informed by a moderately similar scratched urban ethos as Nixey’s Jenny Finn approach (albeit one informed by a different culture and time period), with a like-minded appreciation for moments of mystic transformational aplomb. But really what Jenny Finn: Messiah acts most efficiently as is a quick refresher lecture on the complimentary roles of story and art, and how a unique drive of the former can lift certain aspects of the latter into the realm of necessity, making the presence of replacement art a dodgy proposition. Nixey handles twenty pages of art in this book, along with a few pin-up pages, and even when taken on their own it’s easy to see how they feed off of the atmosphere exuded by the script; Nixey’s character designs are even more squinty and shadowed, lumpen in every sense of the word. It’s as if gravity has grown upset with these citizens of London, and elected to unify the aristocratic and the plebian through invisible hooks to the jowls, dragging their faces down, down. And the pliability of the matter is still a focal concern: men crumple to heaps of writhing, wormy aquatic suction cups, and pools of water smoothly curl into tentacles, diabolic octopi and squid not longer denizens of the deep, but the deep itself. This all stands in contrast to the technology of Nixey’s world, from endless ropes and pulleys protecting old men from malevolent puddles, to the inky rubber armor of government shock troopers, a militia of phantom blots, helmets unmistakably modeled like gigantic condoms with handy portholes. This image easily summarizes the interplay between disease and whimsy in the menagerie of tones that is Nixey’s visual approach - it doesn’t quite matter that he’s changed Jenny’s hair around for some reason since last time, as the boiling stink of rancid sea life and soaking streets emanates right off his lines, and that’s what enlivens the book’s plot. Speaking of which, the story here sees Joe, our somewhat heroic working man protagonist, finally confronting the villain who’s been carving up prostitutes all over town. He’s obsessed with uncovering the true form of the Lovecraftian being that’s been causing mutations across the city (it’s Jenny who’s giving everyone fins, as we all know), because the Secret Masters say that’s the messiah, the daughter of Oannes, the one who will broker mankind’s ascension above the turgid ape form. Everyone then runs afoul of the steampunk-masked Prime Minister, who plans to utilize the luminous egg of doom for the glory of the British Empire. It’s in such a synopsis that we can sense Mignola’s presence, his love of monstrous beasts and secret literary conspiracy, and ultimately the crashing finale puts one slightly in the mind of Hellboy’s beat-‘em-up finales. But the fascination with, the faith in, the fetish for growths and organic modification is emphasized by Nixey’s pen; it’s total dedication to the story’s drive, with even the smaller details made potent, like the alarmingly young prostitutes that populate this world. One of them leads Joe to an artist, and sitting in the lobby he becomes aware of her presence in a series of lurid portraits. “Don’t look, Joe. I do it for the money,“ she says, but it’s Nixey’s rendering of her perfectly tiny hands covering her eyes that really does the trick. And Dalrymple simply cannot connect in the same way. I noted that draws the same character’s hands as large, supple, though the character sort of looks the same. Dalrymple has twenty-four pages of art here, and while it’s perhaps objectively supple, effectively haggard and efficiently staged work, it suffers greatly in comparison with the rest of this book. As I’ve mentioned before, the focus of Migona’s and Nixey’s script is often on the revulsion or pleasure the characters derive from the notion of physical transformation; while Nixey’s art could service this attitude perfectly, Dalrymple simply seems lost, approaching everything in a heroically detailed, straightforward style, but his lines don’t have the weight of Nixey’s, his characters seem less weathered, more simplified, and simplification is simply not what this material needed - the reader ought to soak in the book, ought to be surrounded with tactile visions, and Dalrymple keeps them detached. His is a more distanced viewpoint, and while his envisioning of big monsters and small boils is far from deficient, the flesh doesn’t curve into jellied tendrils nearly as well, the aquatic demons seem dried out. And in a book that has relied so much on rigorously maintained atmosphere, this is a serious defect, and one is left attempting to pull their visual impressions of earlier chapters across to cover the difference. It’s been a long road for Jenny Finn, and the story is finally complete. It’s not a failed effort, no. Even as the art loses as tight a connection as it had with the story, the story itself remains charmingly breakneck - a cook’s tour of a deranged fantasy London, with dabs of literary influence all over. But this wasn’t the sort of thing anyone could approach on its story alone, and thus couldn’t easily handle an artist substitution; there was high interrelation between visuals and words, and that’s an easy thing to spoil. Ah, but for the diseases of Jenny’s difficult world, maybe a spoiling is strangely, ultimately fitting. -- Jog
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