Comic Review: Metal: Jenny Finn

[bedsitter23]

Jenny Finn #1 by Mike Mignola

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I gave my comic shop owner (and even longer time friend) grief over never ordering Dark Horse stuff when the latest lineup was announced. So I pretty much had to buy this.

(It's not new though. This was confusingly hard to find on the internet, but this is the same book that has seen the light of the day before. Most recently, it was a four issue series released by Boom (not Dark Horse) in 2011 as a black and white run. But it still looked vaguely familiar and I was not sure, and so it sounds like this was released in Oni back in 1999. I do believe I already have read this and probably have it stuffed away somewhere. Oh well)

I stopped picking up Mignola right around 2012. He was becoming a bit too prolific for me to keep up with. Although he was no longer at 100%, I don't necessarily feel his quality had dropped. As I said up top, I should probably get my comic book guy to keep ordering the titles. He is a great guy in all aspects, but he also is smart enough not to stock titles he can't sell.

Issue one is pretty great to me- separate from the Hellboyverse. It's a gothic horror with heavy doses of Lovecraft and Jack the Ripper tropes. The kind of book only Mignola could do, or surely pretty close (I can't think of anyone besides Alan Moore who regularly travels down the road).

It has the best things about Mignola- there's paranoia, terror, grotesque, ribaldry, and all delivered in a minimal style, because overexplaining wouldn't make it work.

Troy Nixey's art adds those essential elements. It has now been colored by Dave Stewart so it fits well with Mignola's other work.

Re-reading past reviews on this are brutal. Readers (Mignola fans and not) absolutely hate it. There are a few positive reviews from people like myself who really like that it is what it is, but others hate the lack of depth. It has also been close to two decades since (and if) I read it the first time, and I can't remember how the story plays out. Four issues are not much to work with.

Anyway, maybe everyone missed it in those days of over the top - post Grindhouse, post Saw, post Peter Jackson and Japanese and Korean horror. I like the Victorian kind of eerie steampunkish Ripper horror with nods to classic Stoker/Shelly books and a bit of the sea shanty element. I will have to dig this one back out or keep buying.



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