Story & Art: Carla Speed McNeil
Publisher: Lightspeed Press
Price: $15.95
Five Crazy Women is the Eighth collection in the Finder series, and the first released since Carla Speed McNeil decided to stop publishing the story as single issues and post them online, to be printed as trades at a later date. It follows the story of sometime protagonist Jaeger Ayers, a member of the Ascani tribe, a nomadic people whose customs and strange ways are not often welcome in the larger villages and cities that Jaeger occasionally finds himself in. He’s a serial womanizer, attributing his ‘gone by morning’ attitude to his upbringing in the tribe, as well as his being a Sin Eater a kind of scapegoat who takes the blame (and punishment) for crimes/situations that for one reason or another cannot be put upon the guilty party. It’s a duty he takes seriously, even if he hates it and what it ultimately means for his soul. His womanizing ways eventually catch up to him though, as he finds himself alone once more in a city where all of his usual beds are filled with other men. With nowhere to go and no female company to turn to, Jaeger finds himself telling the sorry story of Five Crazy Women to an old friend over many, many beers.
Each character in this world is a richly drawn person, with a history and personality unique to them and them alone. No easy to cheat with archetypes here, just good old fashioned writing, fleshing out those traits which carry the story along. And it is story that’s important here, not plot. The whole feel of Finder is of a world that’s driven by and carried along with the stories and tales, histories and conversations that occur within it. Each time a character converses with another we’re treated to an experience unlike any other in comics- these people act and react as if they were really alive, almost as if they’d have these discussions whether we were reading them or not. To me, that’s the sign of a great writer, the ability to charge your protagonists with the task of moving the story along, whilst the really interesting stuff (the characters development, the history and politics of their situations and their dialogue with others) just floats along naturally, without ever appearing to force its way into the story to advance the plot.
Carla Speed McNeil draws her characters simply, with little fuss or pomp. This is no bad thing, and her art is a very important part of the Finder world. Some pages appear almost empty, with only a few panels featuring one or two characters; others are a veritable banquet of images, with text (often thought captions as well as speech) interwoven into the art seamlessly. It’s this adventurous nature that keeps Finder exciting, McNeil never gets bored and just fills a page with random, superfluous imagery to kill time and try and keep herself amused, everything on the page is considered and edited to enhance both the way the page looks and the story it’s trying to tell. Every person she draws looks ‘right’, and fits into the world she’s created- even a misfit like Jaeger seems to really fit into the way her world works- nomadic, yet comfortable in any environment and with the scars and tattoos to distance himself from anyone else. Even the similar looking members of his clan don’t really see themselves in him; he’s become something else.
There are many recurring themes and images in Finder- the facial shapes of the more prominent clans appear from book to book (even though many story arcs are set in cities far, far apart) signifying the nomadic or industrious nature of some of the inhabitants of McNeil’s world. Other recurring themes are the relationships between both sexes and the problems that differences in society can cause to those relationships. As a Finder (an ‘aboriginal detective’ as McNeil describes him), Jaeger Ayers is an outsider to almost all cultures and levels of society. The privileged look down on him as he tries to have his way with their daughters, and the poor see him as a wandering troublemaker. It’s true that trouble seems to follow Jaeger around; in previous stories he’s been the main suspect in kidnapping cases, murders and many, many thefts. It’s the outsider status again; he can’t belong to any tribe, clan or group as he’s got responsibilities he can’t share, but that isolation also makes him a target for the kind of trouble that he can’t get out of alone.
At its heart Finder is an adventure comic, with aspects of the SF and Fantasy genres thrown in and accepted, but also subverted and twisted around. There’s a kind of crazy logic to the world that makes more sense the more you read and the further you delve into it. Things happen, not just because they do, but because they must. People are crowded into protective dome cities, and yet each one is alone and suffering; children are abused and treated like slave-workers (much like Victorian England), but are also treasured and spoilt. Technology is hi-tech, but much of it is also broken and too expensive to fix. In short, it’s a real world, with its own problems and idiosyncrasies that affect everyone in it, and anyone reading about it also.
The true joy of reading Finder in trade-paperback form, comes after about a chapter and a half, when you realise that you totally accept everything McNeil’s presenting to you, and are utterly involved in both the intriguing storylines and the ever so well observed characters. It kind of creeps up on you, you don’t see it coming at all, but before you know it you’re hooked. From page one of the very first Finder collection (Sin Eater, available now at only the best comic shops) you are drawn slowly into a world that’s not quite ours and yet not quite alien. There are elements of both science fiction and classic fantasy genres, but this series not only embraces these but defies them also. It refuses to be classified as either one or the other, stepping between the holes that lead so many series to fall and fail as inconsequential genre ‘filler’. On one page you might find an anthropomorphic cat-woman dressed in her finest hand-woven silk gown with half-domesticated Lion lovers prowling around her feet; on the next you might discover a frighteningly busy road with speeding cars and ambulances. Neither jostle for position as the main signifier of the book, they don’t try to grab your attention and scream “Here! Here are the tropes you’re looking for! This is the kind of book this is!”.
Everything is set in its place delicately and very definitely, and each piece of the story affects each other piece around it. There are no happy accidents in Finder everything that appears is there for a reason. Ms. McNeil herself offers an in-depth analysis/scrapbook of her ideas and thoughts at the end of each collection, and they alone are a fascinating read, offering a rare glimpse into the mind of one of (in my humble opinion) the single best writers in comics today.
Adam is the Manager of the Travelling Man Comic Book and Hobby Games Store in Leeds, UK. He’s a self-confessed über-fanboy and loves nothing more than chatting about the obvious superiority of the old-skool JSA over “Those damn glory-hogging kids, the Justice League”. He’s also a massive fan of small press indie comics, and loves reading new and exciting books that haven’t had all of the soul sucked out of them by the mainstream (yet). He also over-uses parentheses and hyphens, but likes the attention it gets him.