Written By: Neil Gaiman
Art By: Michael Zulli
Published By: Dark Horse
If you recognize the name of this comic, it’s because The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch (henceforth referred to as Miss Finch) was first published as a comic book back in 2007 and before that as a short story in Neil Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors collection. I know this because I literally just looked it up so I’d have a more mature-sounding intro than, “I adore Neil Gaiman guys! Moving on.”
Though that intro works just as well, really.
I’ve read quite a few Neil Gaiman works, from his novels to his comics, and damn if Miss Finch isn’t the most normal of them all. Gaiman has this air about him, this surreal quality and charm that make a lot of his stories unpredictable, like they’re a dream come alive, and while Miss Finch does share this quality, it’s really only in the last five to ten pages that it shows up.
Everything else? Fairly standard.
A struggling American author—because authors love to write about struggling authors—takes a trip to England in hopes of finding some spark of imagination to finish his screenplay. It mostly doesn’t work, and when his friends find out where he is, they invite him on a double-date. The catch is that he has to entertain Miss Finch, a stuffy biogeologist who knows a few too many facts about what can and can’t kill a man if he eats raw fish.
Instead of seeing a musical like they had planned on, the four wind up going to a kind of freak-show circus, and that’s where things get interesting.
See, the story is told in the first person, or as close to the first person as a comic book can get. The aforementioned author is narrating what happened on the night Miss Finch did her curious thing, and while he knows you probably won’t believe him, he feels compelled to tell his story anyways. I think it’s because he’s an author more than anything else. There’s certainly no desire for truth or to solve the mystery. Stories are just better told than not told.
What this framework does, however, is create a small air of unreliability, and one that plays with the comic book medium beautifully. Throughout the freak-show circus, all four people comment on how fake everything looks, from the costumes to the special effects, yet the drawings themselves are very realistic. The monsters look like monsters, even if Miss Finch says otherwise.
And I’m not entirely sure who we’re supposed to believe.
The big joy throughout this comic is: Is this real or not? We never get an answer, and like a good open-ended mystery, there are enough clues to point in either direction. How far you want to go with scrutinizing everything is up to you.
I love the idea here, and I mostly love the execution, but as I said earlier, this comic is the most normal thing I’ve read by Gaiman. His normal is still strange, but I’m used to a little bit more. It doesn’t help that the circus itself is a pretty stereotypical circus in terms of rooms and events, with its monsters, cheap magic, and strong men. Given the kind of nonsense Richard finds in Neverwhere, this almost reads like nonfiction.
Which, I’ve just realized, is the whole damn point.
Well shit. Now I have to rethink my whole stance on this comic, and right near the end of the review too. Well, I did still find it a bit dull at points, point or not, but damn if I don’t think it’s one of the most clever things I’ve read in a long while. Talk about using the comic book medium to perfection. This is how you make a story about a bored group of adults going to a freak-show circus into a light piece of literature. Very impressive.
Uh…I feel like I owe Mr. Zulli a good paragraph on his artwork, but since it’s just really, really good and I’m kind of sick of writing this thing, I’ll leave it at that. If I keep talking I might start nitpicking anyhow.
If you like Neil Gaiman and haven’t read this story before, it’s very much worth picking up. I had some fun with it, and there’s a lot to think about once you close the final page. In that way, it’s easily worth a reread. If you don’t like Neil Gaiman then you’re a bad person with bad opinions that are bad. Go sit in a corner and feel bad some more, you baddy baddy McBadbad.
