Mindless Decade: Finding a Finder
February 25th, 2018
I often find myself being drawn into arguments where I know almost every example of the thing I’m defending is bad yet still feel compelled to argue for what I believe to a worthy principle.
“Text section in comic books” is one example. People can tell me that they’re often bad (they are!) or that good comics writers aren’t always good prose writers (they aren’t!) but no matter how many pointed examples they come up with I’ll still find myself determined to argue that they’re closing off possibilities we can’t afford to lose.
Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder provides a good, if typically atypical, counterargument. Every time I read the comics sections I find my brain racing in a million new directions, lost, determined to find answers to questions I’m struggling to formulate. Every time I read McNeil’s annotations I find myself presented with answers to a whole other set of questions, all of which are equally mysterious to me.
This shouldn’t work.
It does.
SILENCE! #167
December 1st, 2015
THE TOUGHEST, AHH… THE TOUGHEST MAN IN THE WORLD
…he will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the Vuldronaii, the Traveller came as a large and moving Torb! Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the Meketrex Supplicants they chose a new form for him… that of a Giant Sloar! many Shubs and Zulls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Sloar that day I can tell you…
Oh excuse me! Sorry do come in! What? No that wasn’t me talking…talking, ha ha, no I was sitting contemplating the serene beauty of this fine morning. Just me, my thoughts, and this fine morning. What? Have I got sh*t on my face?
<ITEM> Holy roly poly shlamoley! This is a very exciting episode of SILENCE! indeed. Why? Well I’ll tell you – not only are The Beast Must Die and Gary Lactus here with another hot pocket of podcastin’ goodness, with a gooey melt-in-the-middle of opinions but they’re joined by Bobsy. But wait. That’s not all. Who’s this poking his cheeky face over the horizon? Why it’s special guest pod-sprite, and comics mega-whopper BRANDON GRAHAM!! That’s right, it’s a red-hot four-way – a sandwich you know with a surprising filling. Kind of like cheese, pickle and octopus beak? But nice? It’s 2 hours of awesome amazing just for you dear listenoids.
<ITEM> But that doesn’t mean that we can’t have some good old admin – Dave’s Comics, Gosh Comics, and RX Comics from Vancouver?? Some special guest admin and then we’re away!
<ITEM> The Reviewniverse is bent into ungodly shapes to accommodate the four horsemen of the apocomicalypse, so there better be some big comics talk to match it. Well we got Frank The Tank Miller and DKIII and Uncle Alan’s delightful Providence. 1986 suckers! But that’s not all – there’s talk of Finder, Two Faces of Tomorrow, Steve The Dude Rude, Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, Mr T, KRS One, Three Men & a Little Lady, Spiderwoman, Metropol, Battling Boy, Elektra Assassin, Lynn Varley, man-babies, Mutant Bieber Clans, Canada and oh so much more.
<ITEM> A special moral message from our guest and some of the finest singing you ever heard. And we’re done. You lucky, lucky people.
click to download SILENCE!#167
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This edition of SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the greatest comics shop on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton. It’s also sponsored the greatest comics shop on the planet GOSH! Comics of London.
The 3 Bawbags of Xmas-yet-to-come present: Tue Massacre: Beyond the New 52! (featuring Mister Attack)
December 14th, 2011
Illogical Volume: Okay, so the idea here is that we’re going to do another one of these shit-talky back and forths, this time on DC’s New 52 (I hate the whole Nu52 thing, smells like team Durst), with various diversions into non-DC comics for added flavour. I don’t know, I guess I’ve just read a veritable CUMPKINLOAD OF COMICS in the last three-and-a-half months and I feel the need to share my thoughts on them with both you and the rest of the world. Do you feel like enabling me big man?
Botswana Beast: Yeah, the nomenclature is – it’s external, it is entirely New Metal (the first music I loved, forefathers: Faith No More, whose cassette album ‘Angel Dust’ was the first by a single band I owned, in fucking Christmas 1991/2, I did have Now 17 before that.) It should have an ümlaut ideally, because comics are nothing if not racist and utterly without taste.
But anyway, yes, I think I have some feelings about comics, still, in my one remaining nerve, the world passes me by in numb shock, but these – well, one can express oneself. Isn’t it wonderful now everyone can express themselves via this technological medium? Wunderbar.
Illogical Volume: FEELINGS ABOUT COMICS ARE THE ONLY TRUE FEELINGS! So long as we can keep that in mind, we should do just fine here…
2000AD Progs 1750 – 1763
If I was writing about 2000AD like The Beast Must Die is was doing for a while there (note to The Beast Must Die: please write about 2000AD again soon!) I’d have the slight problem of wanting to repeat myself every week – there are two strips in here that are regularly worthwhile, you know what they are (Indigo Prime and Judge Dredd) and I can’t think of much to say about the other strips. Which is just another reason why TBMD >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> me, obviously.
I’d feel like a total dilettante trying to say anything clever about Judge Dredd, so I’ll focus on Indigo Prime right now, which… well, thanks for “making” me buy the Indigo Prime trade at Kapow!, Botswana Beast, because this is so exactly WHAT I WANT that I can’t believe I hadn’t read it all before.
The last strip in Indigo Prime’s previous incarnation, Killing Time, also happened to be the best one. It’s both From Hell as written by a skin-sick sensualist and (thanks to the bulgy brilliance of Chris Weston’s art) a warped precursor to The Filth, which is to say that it’s pretty close to comic book perfection. This freshly relaunched series doesn’t quite have the same queasy feel to, but that’s okay. If Killing Time was the blue meat you’d pick up from a bad butcher, these two new stories have had a sort of processed meat feel to them, more like something you’d buy from the local Spar on yr lunch break and instantly regret. Only, you know, good.
Regardless of the exact flavour of meat involved, it (the old and new incarnations of Indigo Prime) is (are) one (two) of my favourites. Yes.
Plus, also, Al Ewing and Brendan McCarthy are going to be working together on a new strip called Zaucer of Zilk for 2K, so you can consider me officially THERE for the New McCarthysim, as always…
Click here for more! An early Xmas Overload awaits, now with extra added Scottish!
No Roads Lead Home: Finding a Finder part 3
September 12th, 2011
Being the third of three posts on Carla Speed McNeil’s “aboriginal science fiction” comic Finder…
‘Well, enjoy yourself Lise,’ says the voice on the telephone. Send me a card.
‘Oh, of course,’ Lise says, and when she has hung up she laughs heartily. She does not stop. She goes to the wash-basin and fills a glass of water, which she drinks, gurgling, then another. She has stopped laughing, and now breathing heavily says to the put telephone, ‘Of course. Oh, of course.’
(Muriel Spark, The Driver’s Seat)
I’ve never made a secret of the fact that I hate bildungsromans, but I’m not sure if I hate them because they suggest that life can follow a neatly conclusive trajectory and mine’s hasn’t, or if my life hasn’t followed a neat trajectory because I hate bildungsromans. Either way, I found myself sizing up Finder: Voice and feeling even more cynical than I did when I first encountered the front piece to Finder: Talisman.
Thankfully, from the cover on in, Voice is a little bit more complicated than that:
Click here to get truly and deeply lost in one of the best comics of the year!
Ghost Stories: Finding a Finder part 2
August 30th, 2011
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.
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!
Aggregator aggravator
August 26th, 2011
SPECIAL “BAD TOUCH IN GOOD COMPANY” EDITION!!!
Like I said last time, it’s been a while since we did one of these, eh? Still, that’s alright – it’s not like there’s been another Royal Wedding I could have sniped at or anything!
Anyway, enough of that (You’re telling us! – Ed) – I want to put some filth in you . Best take your shots first, unless you actually want to catch something…
Sex/Violence/Other: Finding a Finder part 1
August 23rd, 2011
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.
