Vertigo Resurrected: Finals #1

Written by Will Pfieifer
Art by Jill Thompson

The Vertigo Resurrected series, like the DC Comics Presents series, really is a great idea.  A mini-series like Finals, from 1999, doesn't have enough of an audience to warrant receiving a proper trade paperback, but this less-expensive format, similar to Dark Horse Presents, is perfect to bring some attention to some pretty decent comics.

Finals is a pretty amusing comic.  It's set at Knox State University, a bastion of independent academic thought and the pursuit of knowledge.  It's loosely centred around a group of seniors, who have to complete their final projects in order to graduate.  Wally, the more or less main character, is supposed to have been working on an example of extreme cinema verité for his Film Studies course, but so far hasn't shot a single frame.  His girlfriend, Nancy, however has found great success with her project, and is therefore the godhead for an on-campus personality cult.  Dave is plugging away at his project, which involves violently robbing just about every business on the campus.  Gary is working on devolving himself into an animal, and so has left their rented house in favour of living rough on the campus, and Neil, the final main character, finally gets his time machine to work, although Dave shoots the future-Neil that comes through the portal.

There's nothing particularly pointed about the satire here - Pfeifer is taking shots at the pre-9/11 atmosphere of self-indulgent pointless study that has infected higher education, but he doesn't put a lot of bite into his story.  This is a fun little college movie, basically. Jill Thompson is terrific at everything she does, but this is the 90s Thompson, before she reached the heights of Beasts of Burden or her other more recent comics. 

Finals is a fun read.

The Hellboy Project: Hellboy Weird Tales Vol. 2

by too many people to list

It's always cool when new people get to play with someone's toys, especially when a character or property is so tied to one particular style or aesthetic.  The first volume of Weird Tales was pretty exciting, but this second one felt a little less satisfying.

There are some really good stories in here - I liked Kev Walker's Johann Kraus story (really, I like Johann a lot), and Jim Starlin's take on Hellboy, as well as JH Williams's amazing homage to teen slasher flicks.  Scott Morse, Jill Thompson, and Evan Dorkin provided amusing or whimsical tales, and the Will Pfeiffer/P. Craig Russell contribution is of course beautiful, but I found I didn't really get into many of the stories.  It seemed to me more like a bunch of exercises that are technically very skilled, but emotionally vacant.

I good example of that would be the John Cassaday Lobster Johnson story.  It's written in the form of a Sunday paper strip, with yellowed paper and dates that place it in the 1930s, but it works in bondage gags.  I found myself skipping over it; it just seemed a little too precious for me.  I felt similarly towards the Tommy Lee Edwards story - I just didn't really get it.

Oh well, this was never meant to be canon, and was a pretty cool concept, even if it didn't always work out in execution.