Buy the collected edition of Finals here, and buy an electronic version of the issues here.
Finals was my comic book debut, appearing on the stands in the fall of 1999. It was a dark satire of college, based on my experiences at Kent State University (B.A. in Journalism, Dec. 1989), and it was drawn and co-created by Jill Thompson. The four-issue miniseries (published by the DC imprint Vertigo) followed a group of seniors at the fictional Knox State University as they lurched toward their graduation and worked on their life-changing (and, in many cases, life-ending) senior projects. Spoiler alert: Only one of them survived to don the cap and gown at the end of the last issue. It was that sort of a comic.
In April of 1999, when the first issue of Finals had been drawn, edited and was getting set to go the the printer, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris shot up their high school in Columbine, Colo. It was one of the first of the mass shootings (that, sadly, seem a lot more common these days) and the country was stunned. The first issue of Finals originally opened with a student sniping his classmates from the roof of the library as part of his senior project (like I said, it was that sort of comic) before being taken down by the, shall we say, rather enthusiastic campus security force. Well, once the news of Columbine broke, the higher ups at DC decided a school shooting might not be the ideal way to open their new comic, so we scrambled and reworked it to something a little less bullet-oriented and a little-more sci-fi. That’s the version that ran in the printed issue, but if you’re curious, here’s the original opening with Jill’s not-yet-colored artwork. Enjoy?
