Douglas Wolk on Finder

Carla Speed McNeil self-published Finder for fifteen years, including the stories that you, lucky person, are about to encounter. It took way too many of those years before I discovered it, but once I did, it became my stock answer to nearly anyone who asked me to recommend a comic that would satisfy their particular interests. You like crazy world-building science fiction? Have you tried Finder? Smart relationship dramas that acknowledge that relationships and sex are really complicated? Have a look at Finder. Adventure stories with stylistic flair and top-flight visual storytelling? Anthropological satire? Ultra-dense allusive responses to pop-culture overload? Comics that are, in a lot of ways, genuinely not like anything else you’ve ever read? Let me show you Finder. You can really start anywhere with it—the volumes are kind of modular—but maybe try Talisman if you’re going to get just one.

I’ve lost track of how many times I slipped one Finder volume or another into a friend’s hands, but more often than not I’d get a message a few days later that was something along the lines of “Wow. That was really not what I was expecting that story to be like. Where can I get more?” (The answer was “Well, if you can find a really well-stocked comic book store, you might find a volume or two around, or there’s always mail-order.” So three cheers to Dark Horse for making this stuff more widely available.)

McNeil is a cartoonist’s cartoonist, the kind of artist that other comics professionals talk about with a little bit of awe. She’s so much a master of character design that Finder’s premise involves multiple clusters of characters who look almost exactly like each other, and she still manages to make it clear who’s who at a glance. Over the course of “Sin-Eater,” you get to watch her alarmingly rapid artistic evolution as she picks up cues from a handful of inspirations—Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, Dave Sim and Gerhard, Hayao Miyazaki—tips her hat to them, then runs like wildfire into her own territory. She also thinks harder about storytelling than anybody else I’ve ever talked to, and as unusual as most of Finder’s story structures (and stories-within-stories) are, they’ve got rock-solid architecture. You just have to take the time to investigate them.

Which leads me to a bit of advice. If you’re plunging into the world of Finder for the first time, the temptation is obviously to devour the book as fast as possible—to race through the book like a hellhound (or a Finder) is on your trail, flipping frantically between the story itself and the end-notes in which McNeil explains the dense web of invented and borrowed cultural traditions and extratextual references that make up the conceptual backdrop of almost every page. My advice is: don’t. Don’t even look at the end-notes your first time through. Read every page as slowly as you possibly can. This is a very big book—you really don’t have to read it all in one sitting, or even three or four.

Finder plunks you down in a setting as alien as anything in our world, and a lot of the fun of it is the process of figuring out what’s going on. McNeil’s been known to describe the series as “Aboriginal Science Fiction,” which is a good way of putting it. If you see a person or object or gesture whose significance you can’t immediately identify, pause for a moment. File it away in your memory. You’re likely to see something else later that makes it make more sense. If you don’t, there are always the end-notes, but those can wait for a second or third re-reading. (Trust me: you’ll be coming back for those.)

If, on the other hand, you’re a veteran Finder reader, returning to the domed city of Anvard and the immaculately maintained attractions of Munkytown: welcome back. This brick of a volume is a good way to get a sense of the magnitude of what McNeil has invented. “Sin-Eater,” in retrospect, is an introduction to the characters and themes of the whole Finder series—just not the way it seems to be on a first reading. (We see that in miniature in its interlude, “Fight Scene,” originally written and drawn after the rest of this volume, and later expanded for its 2007 appearance in the Sin-Eater hardcover; it’s about a conflict between a pair of badasses, but not the kind of tussle you’d expect.) “King of the Cats” is a pitch-black farce that moves away from the setting McNeil’s established in the first story arc and makes Finder’s culture-clash theme more explicit.

And then there’s “Talisman”—the section of this collection that I secretly wish were available as an oversized hardcover volume with hand-tooled leather covers and gilt edges, in part because it’s great, in part because that would be formally appropriate, and in part because it would remind me that I really ought to keep it in my house. (I’ve lent way too many copies of the paperback to friends who appreciated it so much they never gave it back.) It’s a story about a girl who falls in love with a book, and returns to it to find that it’s something different from what she remembers. To say more would be too much for first-time readers.

But I’ll say one more thing to those fortunate enough to be reading McNeil’s work for the first time: Finder is another story you can fall into, a story not just to enjoy once but to explore. Whatever obstacles have kept it from you since it began in 1995, the last of them has just been removed. Turn the page, in fact, and Ganesha, the remover of obstacles, will introduce you to the unlikely hero sleeping in his bowl.

- Douglas Wolk