Being: the second of three posts on Carla Speed McNeil’s “aboriginal science fiction” comic Finder…

He did not want to compose another Quixote —which is easy— but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes.

“My intent is no more than astonishing,” he wrote me the 30th of September, 1934, from Bayonne. “The final term in a theological or metaphysical demonstration—the objective world, God, causality, the forms of the universe—is no less previous and common than my famed novel. The only difference is that the philosophers publish the intermediary stages of their labor in pleasant volumes and I have resolved to do away with those stages.” In truth, not one worksheet remains to bear witness to his years of effort.

(J.L. Borges – ‘Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote’)

You find yourself bored and lost in your local comics shop on a crisp Thursday afternoon.  You’ve exhausted all your usual favourites, or at least, you’re pretty sure that you’re not paying that amount for that hardcover collection today.  Thankfully whoever does the ordering for your local shop has anticipated your boredom, and has made sure that one of Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder comics is waiting there on the shelf for you.

You’ve read a lot about Finder and — your friend Cat’s admonition that you “like music that’s fun to read about instead of music that’s fun to listen to” still fresh in your ears — you have to admit that this counts for a lot for you.

The specific Finder comic that’s in front of you is Talisman:

You seem to remember that this is a particularly well-regarded volume. What was it Douglas Wolk said about it in his Reading Comics? Ah yes:

McNeil didn’t entirely hit her stride until the fourth Finder volume, Talisman, and it’s not a coincidence that it’s her most tightly focused story: it’s about a girl who falls in love with a book, loses it, and becomes a writer in her attempts to find it again.

Well, imagine that–a storyteller inspired by other people’s stories!

Click here to watch me struggle to escape from the confines of language as only a comics blogger can!

Being: the first of three posts about Carla Speed McNeil’s “aboriginal science fiction” series Finder…

Reading one of Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder comics is like wandering through a strange new city without a reliable guide. Or a map, for that matter, but maybe that’s better in the end. After all, sometimes maps can cause a different sort of trouble:

A map can organize the world according to almost any principle of order…. All classificatory grids are arbitrary. They have no necessary or absolute status. It does not matter what kind of grid is used on the map. Any system of lines or points of reference can be imposed to provide orientation, although different mappings may serve very different interests…. For those who inhabit particular mappings, they are likely to be viewed simply as reality.

(Geoff King, Mapping Reality – an Exploration of Cultural Cartographies – via Dylan Horrocks)

Forget maps for a minute.  Let’s stick our head in there and see what we see…

Ah, well, as far as broad statements of intent go, that one’s as good a starting place as any for this post.  You see, unlike that other master of anthropological science fiction, Ursula Le Guin, McNeil doesn’t pretend to build up her world up systematically in front of your eyes.  Instead,  find yourself discovering information about the cultures in Finder almost accidentally, by watching the characters interact and keeping your eye on some of the key sights. No wonder Kelly Sue DeConnick compared the book to a shotgun blast!  Still, I’ll stick with my ‘strange city’ analogy, if only because of the comic’s pace.

Freshly re-released as part of this collected edition, Finder: Sin Eater is a brilliant, wandering introduction to a truly great comic book. It’s a twisted mess of a story, with family ties, military ties and cultural boundaries revealing themselves at a leisurely pace, all the better to fully appreciate the damaged contexts the cast of characters live in. McNeil’s art becomes more and less abstract as the story dictates, sometimes suggesting an expressionistic hybrid of Western alt-comics and manga tropes, at other points snapping into “realistic” focus to give us a better look at the thoroughly singular world she’s created.

Want to find yourself falling faster and faster until your body bursts into fire? Then click away dear reader, click away!

Incredible Hulk pants V

February 27th, 2009

These are my favourite new pants. They bring the total of Hulk pants to five, making the mean green smashing machine a clear winner in the pantularity stakes. (Regular skidophiles will remember that for reasons unclear half the total Hulk pants feature him taking big licks from Iron Man. Technically this is only gamma pant solo mark three.)

hulk-front

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees / Is my destroyer. – Swamp Thing #140

FC:SB(!)3D#2

January 27th, 2009

It’s just gibberish, eh? Or machine code, something something. That title. Or is it compressed, purposive – come see!

supeyonda supeyondb

(A short note about covers, because I had been rather smug about purchasing story covers – look, I’m not buying two covers, it’s ridic – but am now, after three consecutive Carlos Pacheco “this event does not occur in the comic” covers, and missing that ace Darkseid DC logo one on #4… I’m now sad and regretful about that choice. Laugh, if you will, damn you.)

Final Crisis: Superman Beyond(!) 3D #2 does not actually contain an exclamation in its listing, though I could swear there was one originally supposed to be there – like socialism, I’m sticking insistently with it in the face of all countervailing evidence. Hoo-hah!

unmail yourself through the Letterbox of Existence

Final FUCKING Crisis x 5!

December 13th, 2008

I feel like the Mindless Ones have been in on a secret. Since its inception, both beasts, Lord Nuneaton Savage, Bobsy and I have all been whispering amongst ourselves about how Final Crisis is actually good.

A few thoughts from Zom:

“I noticed that Brian Hibbs, amongst others, recently commented that Final Crisis lacks weight because of the way it seems divorced from continuity. That’s a criticism that I have some sympathy with – as a reader of ongoing comics how could I not? – but it is rooted in an understanding of the DCU that differs significantly from my own. Brian is positioning continuity as central to our relationship with the fictional space, whereas I tend to approach things from another angle. It seems to me that as fans we all have a much deeper connection with the DCU. I’m talking about our relationship with our private, idealized DCUs. We all know where Gotham and Metropolis are and what’s important about them, we’ve all been to Oa, we care about our favorite superheroes even when their continuities have taken a turn down shit alley. Especially then, perhaps.

Final Crisis is threatening those DCUs. Give a fuck about the one where “superpants punched bumhead so that couldn’t happen!”. Yeah, yeah none of it’s entirely separable- obviously! – but I tend to think that the world is best approached as an analogue rather than a binary experience. It’s not either/or, it’s just about turning down the continuity volume, and trust me it is possible – I do it all the time – and so do you, it’s just that you might not notice.

I’ll be giving you an example in my next post: FUCK YEAH!

Kick it out the door, Poodle!”

Back to me. Welcome.

Stop reading the interviews, ignore the hype, immerse yourself in some Kirby, trust the creative team, stick on some apocalyptic music and you’re ready to begin.

Just a little aside before we get into this. There’s plenty of sites out there featuring balanced reviews, there’s plenty of sites out there featuring scathing reviews, and there’s plenty of sites out there drooling like a muthafucker. This site, however, is all about celebrating what we like about the comic, with a healthy wodge of gushing, but hopefully in an intelligent, infectious way.

I could write the negative review. I could write the balanced review. I could go ‘I MARRY GRANT MORRISON LOVE WEDDING!!!!11123!YOU R BASE BELONG GRANT MORRISON!’

All this would bore the shit out of me. It’s like I’ve just heard a brilliant new tune and I want to enthuse about it, regardless if it’s a bit tatty round the edges and the breakdown’s a bit overlong.

So there!