Quick.  Where were you when you first read Love & Rockets?  What time of day was it when you initially read Frank Miller’s Daredevil?  What year when Jeff Smith’s Bone caught your whimsy?  What was happening in the background when it finally sunk in that Dave Sim was a genius?  These are not only rhetorical questions, they’re all trick questions, at least if you’re anything like me.  When I read a comic book that I love, I could be sitting on a 747 noisily plummeting from the sky with all the surrounding passengers spontaneously bursting into flame and I wouldn’t really notice.  What matters, to me, is the book.  I’m much more likely to remember where I got the comic that changed my life than what was happening when I actually read it.  To remember some years, I have to remember what comics I read at the time before I can remember what was happening.

So it’s ironic that I remember precisely where I was when I first read Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder.  I was at home sick, feeling generally miserable, and going through the big stack o’comics that I had bought that Friday.  That Friday, Larry had waved Sin-Eater, which is the trade collecting the first seven issues of Finder, at me. “I read the first few pages of this,” he said, putting it in my hands, “and it’s really good.”

I feel compelled to warn you; my history of gut reactions is not the best.  I’m easily swayed by public opinion, by where I am at that point in my life, by what’s said by people who I respect.  My brother still mocks me over the reviews I gave over Indiana Jones & The Temple of The Doom (“Even better than Raiders”) and Return of the Jedi (“The best of the three.”)   In my defense, I saw those movies on opening day, with a hyped-up crowd; I was a victim of mob mentality, swept along by fan fervor.  I really believed what I told my brother–for a day or two.

So this isn’t the well-measured Fanboy Rampage that looked at Moore and Campbell’s From Hell.  This isn’t the “fool me once, shame on me” cynical Fanboy that watched Phantom Menace.  This is the “Remember those issues of Spider-Man where the police were hunting Spider-Man for murder and Gwen Stacy was acting like she hated Peter Parker and he was so miserable he could barely move?  I wish I felt that well.” fanboy, who maybe just needed a really good comic to take away his problems for a few hours.

Or maybe... Carla Speed McNeil is a freaking comics genius!

Because when I put down Sin-Eater to get some water, after about only fifteen pages or so, I had that feeling inside that I remember most clearly from when I first finished 100 Rooms all those years ago; the feeling that somebody had popped one of the seams holding this world closed, and allowed me to peek through to see a completely new world, rich and complex and delightful. I spent the rest of that day trying not to be greedy, to make the first volume last as long as possible.  I lost, but it was one of the best days that I’ve ever spent sick, getting myself immersed deeper into McNeil’s considerably deep comic.  I guess the easiest way for me to explain Finder, although I don’t guarantee that it will be the easiest way for you to understand it, is kind of if you morphed Cap’n Easy with Wolverine, plopped him into the middle of Strangers in Paradise and then set the whole thing in Matt Howarth’s Bugtown.  See, Jaeger Ayers is a Finder, blessed (and cursed) with acute senses, a healing ability, and a wild animal’s inability to stay still for too long, come to the uber-city of Avnard to keep an eye on Emma Grosvenor and her three daughters.  I almost feel like I’ve given away too much already, because part of Finder’s considerable charms is how McNeil puts us in a new world, without a quick point of reference, lets the reader seize on things that we recognize, and then reveals bits of the world around us, the drama enfolding us, bit by bit.  Nothing’s ever as easy or as predictable as we might think, (I found my eyes popping out of my head in realization seven or eight times throughout my reading of the trade), and McNeil really reminds me of Dave Sim in her effortless ability to take characters that we know and show us surprisingly new layer after layer, without ever contradicting what we already knew.

Another similarity to Sim is the way in which McNeil keeps Avnard refreshingly cartoony in the best sense; without distinction for the highbrow or the lowbrow, and with a willingness to throw in whatever catches the fancy.  People sing snatches of the Beatles, Rogers & Hammerstein, Paul Simon; they watch The Producers and Night of the Hunter on TV; they hear about verite movies made from Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me and find William Messner-Loeb’s Journey on the bookshelves.  That may sound fannish and unprofessional but it’s not.  It’s done brilliantly, an aid to perfectly conveying that sour mash of the unknown and the utterly familiar from which every immigrant drinks when they first enter a new town, a new country, a new world.  At some point, surrounded by aviator’s symbols, hobo code and arabic letters, I realized that McNeil had made me an immigrant to her world, a world that works because of both her significant storytelling abilities and her peripatetic knowledge.  Even at those rare points where her very thin drawing line runs a bit too thin, her way with body language is spot-on, her dialogue is witty and charming and acute.  In short, unless I’m mistaken (and I’m always willing to admit that’s a possibility), Carla Speed McNeil is a freaking comics genius!

Now, I’m no comic book store owner, and I could be creating a lot of hassles for Brian, but hear me now and listen to me later; if you buy a copy of Sin-Eater, the first graphic novel, I guarantee you that you will dig it.  If you do not, return it to Brian, and I will buy your copy.  You lose nothing, he loses nothing.  In fact, I lose nothing, because I already have a long list of people for whom I’ll be buying this book for birthdays, for Christmas, for whatever.  Finder gave me more than a good read; it helped remind me why I love comics (which, what with Preacher and the Invisibles gone and Hitman leaving, I frankly needed).  If you’re anything like me, I think freaking comics genius Carla Speed McNeil will make you feel exactly the same.