Spotlight: Jenny Finn: Doom Messiah

“Jenny Finn. Jenny Finn. Where you goin’? Where you been?” sing the children who will not be children for terribly long.

In the City by the sea, the whores are turning up dead at an unseemly rate. The fishes as they flop on the piers or lay motionless in the mongers’ stalls speak, “Doom. Doom. Doom.” It’s disconcerting, but such is life for the rabble in the City by the sea. The tide ushers in and out, taking just as it gives. It takes men and girls. It brings bounty. It brings mutation. There are those in this city with sores and pustules, not all of them from ill-spent nights in the brothels and alleyways. A wart can be explained away, but what of a barnacle on the brow, a tentacle concealed within a sleeve? Horrors to most, but just another wrong turn in the City by the sea.

Humble Joe leaves his pint as he spots a young girl through the tavern window, a girl far too young to have washed up here. Let her be, they tell him. It’s just Jenny Finn. But Joe won’t have it. She’s too precious a thing to remain amongst these pale-eyed wasters and thieves. Not nearly old and spoilt enough to cast her lot with the night women and lap-sitters. Joe seeks the crook of her elbow in the crowd and finds a soul reluctant for a kind man’s attention. A man strikes from the crowd, bellowing out warnings of damnation. It’s not Joe he’s after. It’s the girl, the harpy Jenny Finn. By day’s end, one of these will be dead, strung up like a trophy shark in the square.

Jenny Finn: Doom Messiah is a sordid tale of murderers, mediums, mutations and misery in the Victorian age. Mike Mignola, Troy Nixey and Farel Dalrymple reel in something loathsome and wriggling from the darkest depths of the Lovecraftian pool and serve it up raw and cold. If you liked Moore and Campbell’s From Hell, but hunger for six-dozen more tentacles this one’s for you. Call Joe Ishmael, a perfect protagonist, tortured by guilt and mercy. He’s quickly embroiled in an unsettling ghost story, obsessed with a lost girl and beset by cruel men from either end of the social spectrum. It’s an uncaring place where every soul is prey to another, where even the scheming prime minister hides behind a clockwork countenance of steampunk terror. Beautifully rendered in black and white by Nixey and Dalrymple, it’s often revolting, but always compelling.

Grab all four issues of Jenny Finn: Doom Messiah on Graphicly today.