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Carla Speed McNeil:

Finders Keepers

Reading her series Finder, I could understand why National Geographic magazine is Carla Speed McNeil’s favourite reading and reference tool. For all its layers of increasing weirdness, the world McNeil is constructing in Finder is not so very far removed from our own world in all its wonder and diversity. As her character Marcie, an aspiring writer reminiscent of a young McNeil, puts it, ‘The strangeness of the world, the mere possiblities, they were so exciting to me.’

In Finder, the ancient and the futuristic are part of everyday life. Races, faiths and tribes maintain their specific customs, whose meanings are often lost in time. Technologies are lurching ahead largely unchecked but traditions and nature somehow survive. And amid all this, family lives, relationships and individuality are as baffling and fascinating as ever.

Finder is an ensemble piece, but McNeil has come up with a charismatic leading man. Jaeger Ayers is a Finder, born if not made to be a supreme tracker. He first appears curled up fetus-like inside a man-sized bowl, held aloft by a huge Ganesha elephant statue in the desert. Waking up, stretching, yawning, bleeding from a wound to his side, striding off into the badlands, Jaeger exudes an animal physicality and a cocky confidence, that masks his vulnerability. McNeil clearly loves drawing the male face and figure, capturing his shifting facial expressions and musculature. She lavishes special care to delineate his body hair, the most sensuous in American comic books since Neal Adams’ Batman.

Finder

Yellow-eyed, Jaeger turns up unexpectedly like a neighbourhood cat. He is a loner and nomad, one of the last of his people, who keeps himself apart and yet is driven to help others. In spite of his wanderlust and self-containment, Jaeger finds himself drawn back periodically to the crowded melting pot of the city of Anvard and to the troubled Grosvenor household. Though he never stops with them for long, they are the nearest equivalent he seems to have of a family.

Some of the mysteries of Jaeger’s origins and his interventions into the lives of the dysfunctional Grosvenors form the backbone of Sin-Eater, the first two of the Finder graphic novel collections. For McNeil, the mixing of races, tribes and even species, within relationships and within individuals, is a recurring issue. The marriage of Brigham and Emma Grosvenor has been torn apart by the stark differences between their clans and by Brigham’s reign of psychological abuse over his wife and three children.

Jaeger finds himself caught between the two parents. He is recruited by Brigham, fresh out of prison, who desperately wants to be reunited with his estranged family, while Jaeger remains a secret part-time lover of Emma and inately protective of her and her kids. To this predicament, Jaeger has to bring his gift, when as a young man he chose to become a Sin-Eater, an almost Christ-like scapegoat who takes on a guilty person’s sins and the punishment they are due for them. Good intentions, however, may not prove enough.

Jaeger heads out on the road again in the third volume, King Of The Cats. To make a bit of money, he’s guarding pilgrims being transported to Munkytown, a supposed holy city to which hordes of people feel obliged to bring their children at least once. On one level, this setting allows McNeil to send up the theme-park excesses of religion and the gullibility of the public. It is also here that she embroils Jaeger in a web of intertribal disputes, which discloses more about his roots and his ambivalence towards his people. Alongside this she develops the complex society of lion people that give the book its title.

Talisman, the fourth collection, is McNeil’s meditation on the power of reading and writing. She achieves this through her endearing character study of Marcie, youngest of the three Grosvenor kids. Marcie longs to find her first favourite book, scavenged and read to her by Jaeger but since discarded, perhaps forever. Thwarted in her search, she grows up with the desire to write her own. McNeil contrasts this love of books with a plausible near-future, in which few people still bother to read old-fashioned print. After all, paper yellows and rots, and besides reading is bad for the eyes. It’s so much easier and more stimulating to access multimedia via skull computers and jacks plugged directly into your brain.

Marcie’s mother, Emma, has such a vivid imagination, she loses herself inside her own head. She has turned this into a way to earn a living, by hooking cables up to her head to transmit her inner worlds to recording devices for others to download. Marcie, on the other hand, wants to move people with her words, the way that first book moved her. In their ways, what also drives both mother and daughter is their needs to cope with the emotional damage wrought by Brigham, now violently disturbed and under constant home care.

McNeil applies the craft of comics superbly, sweeping from domestic detail to fantastical vista, from sensitive interaction to satirical slapstick. She concludes each book with footnotes and sketches, illuminating the rich backstories behind each panel. McNeil is creating some of the most sophisticated and satisfying science fiction in comics. Once you start looking, there’s always more to find - and there’s always more to Finder.

Finder

Posted: February 19, 2006

The original version of this article appeared in 2003 in the pages of Comics International, the UK’s leading magazine about comics.

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My Books



1001 Comics  You Must Read Before You Die edited by Paul Gravett




Comics Art by Paul Gravett from Tate Publishing


Comics Unmasked by Paul Gravett and John Harris Dunning from The British Library



Featured Books

Sin-Eater 1
Finder Vol 1:
Sin-Eater 1

Sin-Eater 2
Finder Vol 2:
Sin-Eater 2

King Of The Cats
Finder Vol 3:
King Of The Cats

Talisman
Finder Vol 4:
Talisman

Dream Sequence
Finder Vol 5:
Dream Sequence

Mystery Date
Finder Vol 6:
Mystery Date

The Rescuers
Finder Vol 7:
The Rescuers