Review by Ian Keogh
Looking for something creepy, atmospheric, offbeat and different? Jenny Finn could well be the solution. Mike Mignola and Troy Nixey team to plot this period horror tale set in a coastal town where marine life recurs throughout. We first see the fishermen landing their catch, but shortly thereafter someone once human is transformed into a writhing mass of combined sea creatures. Nixey’s illustration is intended to prompt fear and disgust, and does.
Joe is the way into events. He’s new to the place and reacts with a horror other residents don’t when seeing deformed people. His attention is caught by Jenny Finn, a kindly young girl considerate of the unfortunate and helping where she can. He follows her, but is separated by an attack. Also relevant is that someone has been murdering women.
Nixey’s art is deliberately disorienting, some characters too large for their backgrounds, others too small, and the buildings around them seeming to lean in and enclose them. There are elements of Victorian formality in more opulent surroundings, and absolute squalor elsewhere, yet even within alleged respectability there’s strangeness. The sample art shows Joe seeing the ghosts of dead women walking the streets. Faryl Dalrymple draws the final chapter, deliberately contrasting Nixey’s art by providing darkness, not light, but while perhaps a better artist technically, he can’t maintain the atmosphere and in some places the exaggeration is too great.
We learn Jenny Finn’s origin and how her first meeting with men showed them at their absolute worst, the consequences of which are being played put in the town, while Mignola and Nixey construct a parade of eccentrics. Some are malign, some harmless, yet almost all disturbing in some respect, perhaps the worst of them the Prime Minister in his elaborately constructed mask.
More about mood than reality, Jenny Finn nods definitely towards the works of H.P. Lovecraft with its squidgy horrors, and an original take on them should have appeal to that audience. There have been two printings, the Dark Horse hardcover now more readily available than the original Boom! Studios paperback. That’s titled Jenny Finn: Doom Messiah, but the content is the same.
