Cinema Suicide

Jesus.  This place is turning into a Friday the 13th repository.  I realize this but what can I say?  I’m a devoted fan of The Mask.  It’s this devotion that led me to the recent publication of the trade paperback that reprints all six issues of the mini-series.  I used to read a lot of comics  but I fell off the wagon back in 2000.  The rising cost of monthly books and a waning interest in the medium led me to take a break.  In the meantime I’ve dropped a few bucks here and there on trades and am discovering that they’re really the way to go in terms of comic buying.  For a reduced price you get a sturdier product with identical arts and inks rather than the hasty re-renderings of older trades and reprints.  I dropped the illusion of monthly books as an investment a long, long time ago and have fully embraced the trade paperback route.

So my love of Friday the 13th and comics led me right up to this book.  An introduction written by super-posi party rocker Andrew W.K. only served to help matters since I’m also a huge fan of that guy, too.  Unfortunately, things didn’t work out as well as I had hoped.  I’d heard from some friends that the book wasn’t thatgood but what did they know?  They weren’t Jason fans like I was.  Turns out you don’t need to be to gauge its quality.

A snotty rich guy buys Camp Crystal Lake with the intention of using its reputation as Camp Blood as a selling point to kids looking for a thrill during their summer vacation.  To shape up the dilapidated campground, he hires a cast of Jason Voorhees victims, a couple of stoners, a tough guy and trash talking girlfriend, an ordinary dude, his shitty girlfriend and his nerdy friend.  To top it all off, there’s a girl with baggage and the guy in charge of the whole thing.   Things go down like you might expect in a Friday movie.  There’s plenty of pot smoking, beer drinking and sex which pretty much paints a target on everyone’s chest.  Sure enough, Jason rolls along and starts carving people up.  Mind you, this is all told in flashbacks and in between, the lone survivor, the chick with baggage who may or may not be in a coma, retells the tale to a cop who has no idea about Jason.

The story moves along for the first few issues in fashion faithful to the movies, but it takes a sharp left turn during the second half and gets lost trying to cram a muddy, chaotic plot into three thirty page issues.   A couple of guys turn out to be gay.  At one point it looks like the nerdy guy is the killer, then Jason spares baggage girl and hands his machette to her, encouraging her to kill the others.  At another point it shoots back to the settlement of the area where peaceful indians were slaughtered by settlers and the death of the tribe’s shaman cursed the lake which found a vessel for walking vengeance in little Jason Voorhees as he drowned.

Written by Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, the story is all over the place and by the finale, it can’t decide where the hell it was going in the first place ending on a note that is even too absurd for Friday the 13th.  It’s clear that part of the plan was to add some background with the indian story but it never comes together in a way that feels anything other than incidental.  At other times it looks like baggage girl was supposed to be the killer and Jason a halucination.  However, while they’re trying to establish this, Jason is showing up, being seen by others and then killing them.  The whole thing is way out of control and by the final issue, it’s apparent that they just threw caution to the wind and called it a day.

There’s also far too much time spent establishing our victims to be.   Most of their pages are spent bickering and arguing with one another.  Even before Jason shows up.  It’s a sad state of affairs when the kooky stoner guys killed in the first issue are far more interesting than the people you have to put up with for the remaining five.  I suppose it was a nice try.

On the bright side, the art is great.  I’ve never been one to be drawn to a book for its graphics but this is a nice looking book with great coloring and a smooth, curvy style to the art.  The violence is drawn in increasingly gruesome detail as the book goes on.  There’s also an alarming amount of nudity even for a book published by Wildstorm.

Better luck next time, I suppose.  I should have listened to my friends.