Finder: Talisman

"Finder is still the core of Carla Speed McNeil’s work. Along with her partner, she created her own imprint, Lightspeed Press, in order to publish it. It dates to the 1980s and 1990s – most of my choices are classics, in the sense that they’re pre- the turn of the millennium. No apology for that! If I was going to do a contemporary series, or contemporary choices, it would be very different… Yes! So Finder is a book that I discovered when it was still coming out in single issues. What makes it so wonderful is that it never ever stops to explain itself; it lets the world just gradually take shape around you. There’s nothing in the way of exegesis, no verbal explanation of how this world came to be. It’s obvious that it’s in the far future of our world, and that it’s very sparsely populated compared to our world, but not really post-apocalyptic. There are cities, and there are people who live in the cities and who have a relatively high-tech lifestyle. And then there are spaces between the cities which are inhabited by many different kinds of beings, human and non-human. The lead character is a man named Jaeger Ayers, and he is equally at home in the cities and out in the wilderness. His father was a city dweller, his mother was ‘Ascian’ – the Ascians are Native American coded. I said he’s at home in both places, but he’s also kind of an outsider in both places; his mixed-race heritage makes him stand out. It gives him an exoticism in the city, but when he’s outside, in the wilderness, he’s not really accepted as being of his mother’s caste. But he does have a place in Ascian society: he is a Finder. If you ask him to find someone or something, he will do it. He has incredible tracking skills. And he’s also a ‘sin-eater’: he will take on the blame for other people’s misdeeds in ritual expiations. “It’s so easy to immerse a reader in a fantasy world if you’re able to present it in visuals” Around him, Speed McNeil assembles this enormous cast of fascinating characters. The first two collections of Finder were largely about Jaeger’s relationship with a family: Emma Lockhart and her three daughters (one of one of the three daughters is biologically male), and her abusive husband, Brigham. And Jaeger is put in the predicament of standing between this very violent, unstable man, and the family that he’s trying to reconnect with. Talisman is different. Talisman is about the youngest of those three Lockhart girls, Marcie. And it’s about a book. It’s a book that she had when she was a very little girl; Jaeger gives it to her. Because she can’t read at that time, he reads stories from the book to her, over a space of years. They light up the inside of her head: marvellous, wonderful stories. And then she loses the book – actually, her mother throws the book out, thinking it’s rubbish. Marcie tries very, very hard to find the book again; and Talisman is about that process, about her quest for the book. She finally has the realisation that if she can’t find it, she will have to remake it: you have to write the book that you need, you have to be the fulfilment of your own quest. But along the way, it’s just such a wonderful celebration of the power of story, and the role of imagination in our lives. It’s my favourite of these Finder collections, and it’s the smallest – it’s only 60 or 70 pages. But it’s just a magical story full of indelible characters. They’re best read in sequence, because McNeil tends to pay things off unexpectedly in later volumes. So Brigham is introduced in the first story, and then Brigham’s relationship with the Lockhart family plays through quite a few of the later books… Some of them are standalones. But I would recommend reading the two big omnibus collections, Finder Library volumes one and two . It depends. In the American mainstream, if you look at DC and Marvel, it’s far more usual to have a team – a writer, a penciller, an inker, a colourist, a letterer. A comic is the coming together of all those different skill sets. But in the independent scene, it’s very, very common to have writer-artists. And you’re right, most of the books I’ve chosen are in that tradition. The Sandman is the exception."