The Vertigo Vault # 2: The Minx # 4-8

The seemingly unconnected Sex Death storyline is followed by The Monkey Quarter (issues 4-7), of the Monkey finally coming down to Earth.

The story concerns Anna trying to find out how she was conceived, along with having to deal with religious nutts, her crazy alter ego and a monkey who'se oral report to God may doom mankind. She fares quite well, given the circumstances, which include her mother still being a horrible, horrible person.  Just recently done having sex with an old Monkey Cult priest, she finds that after being gone without a word for like over a week her husband is having sex with another woman, who is actually Anna's roommate. This upsets her for some reasons as I suppose fucking an old man because you were told to is somehow not cheating, apparently.

Anna manages to seemingly patch things up in her life as much as she can, and the Monkey's report seems favourable....until we get to issue 8.

Here, we find reality is suddenly unravelling and people and whole countries are being erased from history. Including Canada. And Anna's boyfriend Tom. Who is incidentally the saddest character I've seen in years. Dude nearly gets castrated while being abducted by a crazy psychopath, slandered in the media by his mental cousin Shannon who wants him to date her so badly she takes everyone in the store she works at hostage, and Anna (or The Minx) promising him an ideal date only to stand him up and fly to London. All to finally be able to do it with Anna. And almost as soon as he does, the man is erased from history. Tom Jones (not the other one), you are the new Yamcha.

Anna then realises that not only is Bob, the senator Tom worked for her father and McAnguish is her grandfather but....apparently her father was born from a giant alien vagina McAnguish found in a desert once and then in the midst of researching it decided to stick his dick into case why not.

Naturally this throws Anna quite hard so they fly to try and find the Monkey, who'se went to live with the Bonobos in the jungle, hoping he might have some answers. However, Anna only finds his dead body. So, as she was retroactively revirgined by having her only sexual partner wiped from history, she decides to jump the bones of her big, muscular black guide.

Afterwards, things look, well....

Not good. So McAnguish takes Bob, Anna, her parents (well her mother and non biological father as well as Ben so.....yeah, kinda needed to elaborate there) and Ngongo, the black guide Anna screwed in the jungle, to the institute and has them jump into the giant Monster Vag Bob was born from, hoping it will allow them to survive in some way now the world's being erased.

The end.

I did like The Monkey Quarter, and the final issue has a really nice surreal atmoshpere to it, but you sort of expect there to be more to the story, and the ending does feel like a bit of a copout. In fact the final issue comes way too soon after the end of the Monkey God storyline and sort of nullifies the ending of that story, and of course there's the fact I just feel really, really bad for what Milligan did to Tom, who couldn't even get the decency of being dead and having had existed by the end of the story. Of course I can guess why issue 8 happened, and why it ended as it did. It seems the Minx failed spectacularily and so they ended it before even reaching issue 12. It's apparent in how the Minx does not even have any part in the series finale, despite being the "mysterious entity" the series was named after.

It's a pitty since it was really well written and it could have been a good, psychedelic little series about the Supernatural. It still holds up but the ending will leave you wanting more.

The Vertigo Vault # 1 The Minx # 1-3

The idea of this little side project is to write down thoughts and observations on obscure Vertigo titles that hardly anyone remembers.

Truly a great use of one's time. First off we have The Minx, written by Peter Milligan. I remember seeing a sample of the first issue in an issue of Preacher and I was intrigued by the idea of a serial killer surgically remodeling his victims into an assexual featurless mass of tentacles. It is a really disturbing idea of surgically transforming someone to the point of no longer being a member of one's species.

The larger story revolves around a Monkey God, a monkey they sent in a rocket into space, returning to earth and sending telepathic messages to people on Earth.

Meanwhile the main character, Anna Schwarz, is caught in the middle of this while having to deal with preparing to lose her virginity to her boyfriend. This first post will cover the first Story Arc of this series, The Chosen.

The first Story Arc

Taking up the first three issues, it deals with Anna's woes, with her mother being snared by a monkey worshipping cult, her grandmother's death and the fact that her boyfriend got kidnapped by the surgicall serial killer Sexdeath, the self proclaimed messiah. Meanwhile the President pukes into a toilet and hopes his man McAnguish won't stop the guy who'se going around castrating and mutilating people into brainless, skinless, boneless, asexual tentacle monsters cause it would hurt his popularity as compared to the Monkey god.

The main problem of the story is it is over in 3 issues. Two issues are spent on setup and then Anna gets kidnapped by Sexdeath, only for McAnguish, the guy who set her up as bait for the serial killer, to prance into the room in a hot pink bikini (may I add the guy is like sixty five ?), to then start begging to be able to work with Sexdeath instead of capturing him/her cause McAnguish is afraid of death. Anna lets her other personality, the titular Minx which has supernatural powers, take over and resolve the situation by forcing the two to have sex which givent hat Sexdeath is a hermaphrodite is all kinds of disturbing. The end shows McAnguish has Sexdeath locked up in his Monkey Research Institute while he talks about how much potential Anna has.

During this story Anna had to deal with her second personality, being nervous about having sex for the first time, McAnguish stuffing her in a car to look at Sexdeaths demented creations and to top it all off she has to deal with her mother being just about the worst human being who is not Sexdeath. Seriously, she tells Anna her father is not her actual father and that she's a product of her getting high as a kite and getting fucked at a punk rock concert. Which she springs on her husband, daughter and father-in-law right after the funeral of Anna's Grandmother. And not only that, she goes on about how it was the best sex she's ever had. Trust me folks, you will want this woman to get hit by a bus.

Tom's boyfriend didn't have much of a good time either. Blueballed and then nearly had his balls cut off by Sexdeath, he spends time in the hospital with a whole list of ailments, including having something that Sexdeth poured down his ass which the doctors couldn't get out yet. Plus he gets captured and nearly gets turned into a giant leech by accident, as Sexdeath realises he's not a psychic, which is why s/he captured him to begin with. S/he sees her/himself as the Messiah and the Monkey God as the False Prophet and s/he wants the telepaths who have been receiving the Monkeys messages for some reason that's never made all too clear

At least the story ends with Anna finally changing her mind about being too nervous and the two finally go at it as the story ends so I guess there's something a bit positive to come out of this whole thing.

I've spent years wondering about how this would all turn out. I never picked up Minx at the time when it came out, hearing about it a long time after it was over in fact, and living in another country didn't help with that either. But after so many years of wondering where this story would go, it's a bit underwhelming. Not sure if that's just me being biased, but I can't help the story fell short of what it could become.

Plus the sight of the old bugger up there in pink lingerie was not something I was hoping to see. He spends two issues going on about how serious he is about the whole affair, but then we find out he's just a pathetic and demented nutter who'd have the procedure he describes in the picture above happen to him and countless other people because he's "scared of death".

Let me put it this way: if you're somehow handling a situation like this worse then Morgan Freeman's Commander Abraham "Heihachi" Curtis from Dreamcatcher, you've seriously fucked up somewhere along the way. And old Banana Brow only did two things in that movie. Yell and shoot at his own men.

* As an addendum, I hope no one will pull  the racism card because I used the word "banana" in conjunction with a black actor. The fact is his eyebrows in the movie really do look like two bananas got glued to his forehead. I hope we can get to the point where people mentioned alongside fruit can no longer be offensive.