Final Destination: Spring Break

Final Destination fans, we've seen it all. From airplane crashes to car wrecks to faulty rollercoasters and collapsing bridges, there are only so many ways that you can tell the same story, even with different plot elements, before you get tired of the whole thing. And that was my mindset going into Final Destination: Spring Break. And coming out of it, that is still my mindset, but I did get an entertaining comic out of it.The story is exactly the same as the first film, and the second film, and the third film, and all other movies in the series, and bares more than a passing resemblance to Black Flame's series of Final Destination novels: a pretty young girl has a premonition of death that results in the death of her friends, archtypes of which ranging all the way from the slut to the jock, the scholar and the loving boyfriend, and all in between. As a result of the premonition, she saves her friends from one horrible death only for them to succumb to another, far more gruesome death. In this graphic novel, which collects issues 1-5 of the Spring Break comic series, the inciting disaster is a hotel fire (wow, a premonition that finally does NOT involve moving vehicular objects).The comic itself is not a bad piece of work. The artwork is very interesting, as well as the use of colors at the beginning. But when the action starts to pick up (read: people start dying), the images tend to become hard to follow. The writing tends to be prosey and lengthy at times, and, if this were a film instead of a comic, I'd laugh at some of the things the characters said, despite not being funny, because I can't imagine a real person saying them.But nobody watches (or reads) Final Destination for the writing, or character development (speaking of which, there is next to none) for that matter: the people want violent, bloody, messy death scenes for these characters, and this book does not disappoint, with some of the most vivid deaths I've ever seen represented in a comic of this genre, including the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street comics.Despite the shortcomings mentioned here, I actually enjoyed this comic. It's not as good as the majority of the films (or any of Black Flame's novels, which really set the bar high for the series' future), but as a quiet weekend read or if you're a Final Destination fan, like me, who wants to take in all that the series has to offer, it's a lot of fun. So if you can get past the cheesy writing, the hard-to-follow-at-times artwork, poorly developed characters, and a confusing ending that leaves a bad taste in your mouth, you might have as much fun with it as I did.Also included in this trade-paperback is a very poignant one-shot comic called Sacrifice, which was an exclusive to the Final Destination 3 DVD when purchased at Circuit City. This small, sixteen page comic may be the saving grace if you actually ARE looking for a Final Destination comic with a good story and real tragic characters.

You'd think for a graphic novel it would go more in depth but the story feels over rushed and it's much cheesier than the movies.

Love the Final Destination series. Wished there was a bit more character development, but it's a comic. It would've been fantastic as a novel!

This book covers none of the movie so its better because u don't know who well live!! Which left me at the edge at my seat!! It is about teenager go on a trip that becomes into there worst trip that coust theme there LIVES!!!!!

This book reprints the five issue series from Zenescope and closely follows the style of the films. A group of hot, young students are on Spring break down in Cancun when one of their members, Carly, has a vision of an explosion at the hotel where they are staying. Her friends play it off as perhaps a nightmare but they humor her by getting out of the hotel...which of course explodes due to a gas leak. Their group of seven escaped the destruction, as did three other people who overhead Carly talking about her premonition.Soon though, Death begins to strike at the survivors one-by-one, in horrifying ways: Kris is killed when he falls into a motorboat's propeller; Katie dies from Mercury Poisoning when her thermometer leaks; Jake gets a shard of glass from a glass-bottom boat down his throat; and so on...While I'll still never like the films that much, I have to give writer Mike Kalvoda due credit. He has definitely captured the spirit of the films quite well, especially the overall tone of helplessness as each of the friends begins to realize that there is simply no escaping death.Highlighting the book was sensational art by Lan Medina who handled issues #1 - 3 and Rodel Noora who did the final two issues. They managed to give readers some remarkably beautiful and sexy women as well as some very gruesome death scenes. I look forward to seeing more from both of them in the future. Fans of the films and horror in general should give this title a look.REVIEWED BY TIM JANSON

I would say the art of the comic is very pretty to look at and a keen eye to detail was given to the death scenes that are in there. Sadly it's ends there.What makes Final Destination deaths so appealing is the rube goldberg factor, where accidents would occur though a chain reaction. The deaths in the comic have machinery that malfunctions at random without seeing what caused to happen.Example is the swimming pool death were the pool curtain closes and drowns someone, the shutter function just randomly sparked and that's all it took. It made me feel like I was watching Final destination 4 again, were death just doesn't care how it kills the survivors.The characters don't fare better either, I re-read it a few times now and I still don't remember anyone's name or anything interesting about them. They really were just there to die and that was it. No one seemed bothered that a supernatural force is trying to kill them, they all wanted to have a holiday and that was it.Random quotes about death were thrown into the comic at parts, no real reason to be there other than make the comic feel deeper than it is.I think the short story at the end was the best because it was quite tragic to see a man cheat death so many times he had nothing left to live for.Not much else to say. it's just ok.