Let’s Get Relevant – Vertigo Resurrected: Finals

You might think this column is not very relevant. It is about comic books and movies but not comic book movies. The comic book isn’t a new comic and the movie is a documentary. There are no stills or rumors. We are talking slow burn-style stories here.

When relevance is tossed about in the world of comic books strange things can happen to the definition. It becomes more about making the “wheres” and “whats” very modern while mixing it with an old fashioned “who”.  Relevance CAN mean that, but It can mean a whole lot more than that as well. A story can be told with such masterful skill that it will always resonate with audiences.  It may take a special set of circumstances to jumpstart your own acknowledgement of a book’s continuing relevance.

The special set of conditions that opened up my eyes was the unintentional pairing of a documentary with a comic book. The movie in question is the 2010 Academy Award winning documentary Inside Job by Charles Ferguson, and the book in question is the 1999 Vertigo miniseries Finals by Will Pfeifer and Jill Thompson. The movie happened to be next on my Netflix queue and I had just picked up the Vertigo Resurrected reprint of Finals. (Side note: I love the mini trades that DC is putting out. I say down with the tyranny of the 6 issue trade!)

It took a few days after finishing Finals and having watched Inside Job to realize how perfectly that documentary and that comic book dovetailed into each other. Both covered the same ground, but to vastly different emotional results for me. The differing emotions ended up creating a rather satisfying harmony. Through pure chance I ended up pairing a movie and comic like a fine wine with a steak. This is beyond reading Batman: Year One after watching Batman Begins. This was finding two different media covering a timely and relevant aspect of world in their own unique voices.  It is a relevance that resonates a bit deeper than just topical geographic locations and news buzzwords.

The documentary left me incredibly sad and angry. As with all documentaries, you have to acknowledge that the creator of the film has a point of view they are trying to express.  The point of view of the film is that the blame for the economic collapse falls squarely on the shoulders of the captains of the financial industry. The movie gets a touch preachy at the end but I think it does quite an effective job of explaining exactly what happened in the financial markets several years ago. Instead of simply throwing their hands up and saying “It really isn’t anybody’s fault, who could have known?”, the film yells “THEY KNEW, AND IT WAS THEIR FAULT!”

The most nefarious, to me, part of the film was the discussion of the financial education system. This is when the Finals connection really hits home.  The film proposes that our financial issues are due to the close ties between the financial industry and financial education institutions. Orthodoxy of thought has taken a hold of both and killed off important cautionary ideals. It is a pretty sobering viewpoint of our a portion of our education system.

Get to the comics Tom!

Calm down, I am getting there. Be patient.

After watching the movie I picked up my copy of Vertigo Resurrected: Finals and got swept away in it’s extremely dark but also funny portrayal of our higher education system.  A system where students were taught to do whatever it takes to get the best grades, regardless of how it affects those around them. Pfeifer and Thompson create a reality that is just close enough to the real world to make the characters relatable, but put enough of a twist on the situation to make us laugh instead of cry.  Knox State (KAOS U) is a school that is pumping out monsters obsessed with a twisted definition of success.  None of the projects are to benefit anyone; they are simply awful experiments in pushing the human condition.  The arts are to be phased out in favor of more lucrative fields.

Any glimmer of human decency has been squeezed out of the kids. The schools maxim of ‘Strength Through Study” has a rather benign sound to it, until you see how it is applied. Each senior has a final project in their realm of study that they must pass in order to graduate. Wally is seeking to film horrible tragedy for his “extreme cinema” project. His girlfriend Nancy has started a cult on campus. Wally’s roommate Dave has started a crime spree for his criminal justice degree.  Tim is making a time machine that actually works. It works well enough that a future version of himself pops up, only to accidently get shot by Dave. All of this just rolls right off the students as they are focused only on their narrow goal of graduation. It is all about proving a point instead of learning. Pfeifer gives the characters a voice that is crazy but almost believable.

Jill Thompson’s art is the key to creating the balance of the twisted and the real. She captures the maniacal energy of the campus, the atmosphere in which all of this craziness is encouraged. The students are just the right amount of ramshackle to pass off as actual students. They are exaggerated just enough to let us know that we are supposed to laugh.  It is hard to imagine another style working as well with Pfeifer’s approach to the story.

For all of the insanity in Finals it actually reminds me of college in the late nineties and early aughts. I remember a very specific phase right around my own graduation where many of my acquaintances had their pick of excellent jobs.  Everyone was burning through school and heading out to the world. I remember having a study session in the business school building and being blown away by the fact that they had a white board paint and padded chairs. I was used to the humanities building, which was too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. The chairs were small and there was always just a hint of urine in the air. It was the first time I really grasped the realities of our education system. There are “have” fields and “have not” fields.  That is just reality. The business school felt like a futuristic factory and the humanities building was a dungeon. I am sure it hasn’t changed that much since then. It might have been a little bit better for everyone in the long run if there was a bit more mixing between the two realms.

The combo of the movie and the comic suddenly put the last fifteen years of my life into a new context.  That is a relevance that most comics would kill to achieve. It was comic books meet the real world and it didn’t involve Superman’s viewpoint on foreign policy. The events of the real world can feel mysterious at times, like they materialized out of nothing. There is back story to everyone and everything. It just doesn’t seem like a story until you get to the climax. Reading Finals suddenly made me realize that I lived through the first chapters in the story of the economic collapse. I just hope it has a happy ending.

Tom Katers can't just talk about comic book movies, he has to get all weird.