[This is proof that I should not have been writing comic
book reviews back then. My knowledge was limited to what I liked (and hated). I
officially take back what I said about Bruce Jones and Richard Corben. I found
a lot of their other work, and I was thoroughly impressed. As for Steve Pugh,
he has grown on me. I’m sorry to all of you. Also, it’s worth noting that
Flinch did get better, especially when it started publishing the likes of Joe
R. Lansdale. This is from the Elmhurst College Leader May 11, 1999.]
Anyone who has been in a comic shop recently will no doubt
have seen the cover for Flinch, a new horror series in anthology format. Phil
Hale, the artist, obviously knows what he’s doing, considering how Flinch
nearly jumped off the rack with such demented power that it is impossible to
pass up. In a mix of red and shades of gray, it depicts a doctor marking up his
own body for surgery. The catch phrase: “Horror gets a facelift.”
If only that were true. Flinch starts out with “Rocket-Man,”
a story written by Richard Bruning and drawn by Jim Lee. This is perhaps the
most clichéd horror gets, aside from the classic revenge story, maybe. Bruning
must have been hard up for a story, so he simply did what many others did
before him—he ripped off Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Man builds jetpack, man
launches himself, man thinks he’s succeeded, yet man was really blown up and is
dead.
There is only one merit to this story—the relationship
between the man and his family. Apparently, he’s been trying to build the jet
pack for a while, and to Lee’s credit you can see the exhausted look in the
eyes of both mother and son.
Next up is “Nice Neighborhood,” written by Jen Van Meter and
drawn by Frank Quitely. This isn’t even horror; it’s just a bunch of laughs.
Unfortunately, Van Meter can’t write comedy. “Nice
Neighborhood” runs like a joke told in monotone—it’s a lot of funny stuff with
a deadly serious tone. There’s a new drug going around called Rigora (they
might as well have called it Viagra), and elderly men are so desperate to get
it that they’ve formed gangs with names like the Country Club Kings and the
Silver Wolves.
Apparently, a group of old men with canes are extremely
dangerous. The funniest moment is seeing an old man with a knife demanding
Rigora while wearing a hat that says, “World’s Greatest Grampa.” The older
gangs are against the youth in a crazy gang war that gets a lot of people hurt
and killed. In true battle tradition, the young warriors wear trophy
necklaces—in this case, it’s a string of dentures presumably taken from rivals
they’ve killed.
Flinch finishes up with “Wolfe Eats Girl,” written by Bruce
Jones and drawn by Richard Corbin. The art isn’t much, a low-rent version of
Steve Pugh, who wasn’t that great to begin with—but the story is actually the
closest of the three to the promised facelift.
There’s a lot of symbolism in Jones’s story. The town the
Reverend and his flock come to is called Angel Falls,
reflecting what happens to the Reverend in the end. The narrator’s name is
Peter Milkin, for St. Peter and a holy man’s natural affinity to milking people
for all they’re worth.
However, Jones doesn’t have a lot of reason to this madness
of contradicting terms, and as a result, it’s hard to buy into the plot. This
is really more a tale of a reverend’s fall from grace, and those stories are
everywhere.
Flinch is off to a bad start. Instead of horror getting a
facelift, it gets fingers stuck down its throat in a shameless regurgitation of
all that came before. We can only hope future writers know what they’re doing.
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