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INTERVIEW: Carla Speed McNeil What I thought I knew about FINDER before I took the very small amount of trouble required to read an issue:
2. The setting is a ‘world’ inhabited by different tribes. Just the kind of place that some nutsack would draw maps of, to put in the front of an unnecessarily thick paperback --the first volume of an endlessly extended trilogy. On the back cover, Anne Macaffrey’s kiss of death -- "Comparable to Tolkien at his best". 3. Not all of the characters are human. Some are animals. The talking kind. And when anthropomorphic creatures in science fantasy stories get to talk, deciduous dialogue about Prophesies and Chosen Ones is sure to follow. I have unresolved issues about this sort of thing. Writer removes head from ass, sees light And then I listened to what some people whose opinions I respect were saying about the story that Carla Speed McNeil has been putting out on a regular basis for 20 issues now. I bought a copy of the first trade paperback, which collects the first seven issues of FINDER in one handy volume. The second volume, which completes the first storyline, is available this month -- that’s called a hint. What I found was a story that captivated me in every respect. Three-dimensional characters who behave as they do because that’s how they are, and not because it’s the most convenient route to get the plot into the reader’s head and still leave room for Playstation ads. FINDER is an immersive experience. You know enough about where you are to enjoy the novelty, and the characters inhabit that world comfortably and credibly. Pretty soon, I found that I cared about those characters, and stories emerged from their relationships and ambitions, their histories and dreams. A story where not just individual characters, but whole cultures are brought to life. Somehow, the strands connect and create a comic that’s unique, a story that seems to exist whether or not readers are there to enjoy it. A word from our sponsor. Irony too. You don’t believe me? Fine. After all, I’m not any kind of authority on comics, not even a self-proclaimed one -- nor do I play one in a commercial. Maybe you should check out what Steve Lieber -- yes, that Steve Lieber, the one who did such a fine job drawing WHITEOUT -- has to say. The Steve Lieber who is currently working with Warren Ellis on MORNING DRAGONS, a brave attempt by two leading creators to breathe new life into the tired old Viking/Samurai crossover format with an original graphic novel. Who is also contributing his talents to BATMAN at the moment, and is widely considered to be an unreasonably talented man of taste and distinction. Yes, him. Take it away Steve: "FINDER impresses me more with every issue. McNeil has that rare gift among storytellers in any medium,she creates characters who are absolutely alive. Despite her fine stylish touch with dialogue and her unmistakable draftsmanship, I'm rarely aware of the author when I read her work, even when I'm flipping to the back of the book to look at a footnote. No, I find I'm instantly involved with her stories and characters. I want to know more about these people, and watch them interact with each other and their fascinating world. And because Carla is a human dynamo, her comics are packed with good, meaty detail. Not fussy detail, no pointless over-rendering or turgid captions. They're full of the real stuff, the stuff that makes two dimensional drawings expand to vivid, three dimensional life. Her work is funny, exciting, disturbing, sexy and compelling, and it keeps getting better. Jump on board."- Steve Leiber Dying horses, dead trees - dubious metaphors abound. When I go into a comics store, I see shelves of garish titles demanding my attention, thinking they know what I want. A frightening percentage of comics exist purely in relation to comics that have come before them, insisting that they be purchased and read because they will satisfy once and for all a point of continuity that’s obscure to a mindboggling degree. Or they promise new thrills and spills, taking a horse that’s already been flogged beyond the point of extinction and breathlessly trying to persuade me that it’s new and different because the characters get to cuss and, hey, the art bleeds to the edge of the page. Whoopee.
Enough - let Carla Speed McNeil have her say Errr.... let's see. Boredom, I think. I'm easily bored. If I didn't have some odd daydream in the back of my head more or less constantly, I'd flip. Reading and drawing fuel the daydream. I'm a voracious reader, never without a book, and among reading, drawing, and wool gathering, I manage to keep myself entertained. And people ask me why I don't have time to watch TV. Whether the world that process creates is credible or not, I can only take the reader's word for it. It's an interesting question, though; lots of stories that are totally impossible -- even untenable -- are credible when you're immersed in them. Take THE STEPFORD WIVES. Totally one-sided, impossible in many practical senses, even improbable when considering how many perspectives aren't considered (what about the kids? All these women have kids! Why aren't the kids shitting themselves with fear over their moms turning into these scary plastic monsters??). But, like a nightmare, it has its own integrity, regardless of logic. Take another movie (I talk about movies a lot), MAGIC. Corniest idea on earth, the evil ventriloquist's doll. It's one of the world's great creepy films. Never does this story cross the line into impossibility; it couldn't, or it'd just fold up. Yet at its heart it follows the logic of the nightmare, same as does THE STEPFORD WIVES. The man with the horrible secret will always be found out, no matter what horrible things he's willing to do to escape. This happens far less, in the real world, than I'm happy thinking about. A meticulously crafted 'otherworld' isn't worth much without an emotional reality. Or at least, it doesn't make for much of a story. This is why, when people ask me, "Is this taking place in the future, or on some other planet, or alternate universe, or just what?" I just smile greasily and shrug. I haven't thought about it much, so I don't know how to answer. It started off as a dreamworld, and dreams are still a huge part of it. I'm amazed that so much of the action takes place 'in reality' as it is. What I'm trying to do now is focus; get the stories to distil into more intense emotional threads. The practical side of things embroiders and shapes the emotional side, but the emotional thread is the story. I'm especially taken with the way that you portray the way that people interact with each other. Emma and her daughters, and the way they get on, between themselves and with Jaeger, are utterly plausible to me. A lot of the effect seems to come from the rhythm of how they are together physically, which I think you capture very well. Are you conscious of how you arrive at this? Yes and no... there's a process which is not unlike trying on clothes. If a character gets this name or that habit or any prominent characteristic, how must his or her character change? And how will he or she be with any other character, how will that be affected?
Does the story tell itself? The story doesn't. The characters do. The trick is in finding a thread of a story in which all of them can have their say -- and in making sure there is a character to express each side of the story. Finding that thread of a story is a different way of going about it, than simply letting them talk. Where do you find that thread? Are you drawing images that you get in your mind's eye? Definitely. Daydreaming and night-dreaming give me my best ideas. Talk-stories -- in which a pair or a few characters are just talking, telling their stories, these often rise from things I hear. A side character in MYSTERY DATE was recently filled out incredibly by a friend of mine who said, "You know, I had a roommate in college who was that cute. We were really good friends, but, maaaan.... one time I just looked at her cute little toes curled up as she slept, and I just hated her guts." There are times when I see in other people's work the core idea which created the story. I've gotten better at this. Sometimes it just glows on the page. Having spotted this, it's easier to see how they 'clothed' the idea in characters to explore the root idea. What's an example of this in your own work? And how about a for instance of where you've seen it in someone else's? Okay... in my own work, I can give you the genesis of a character more than that of a story. MYSTERY DATE was a spin-off of FINDER, first as a series of short stories in the anthology MYTHOGRAPHY, then as a pair of full-sized issues. I peeled two characters off of FINDER, two professors. They were always intended to be part of the storyline in FINDER. Removed from the core story, they needed to be expanded a bit; they're essentially question-answerers, scholars. They need a question-asker. MYSTERY DATE #1, page 14, panel 6, is the genesis of what is now the main character of that storyline, Vary. It's just a little comment; she's leaning against the avian/lizardy professor, Shar. On pages 6, 7, and 8, she's been made to understand some of Shar's truly nonhuman ways; his species feed offspring in a typical predator/avian way, by regurgitating. They get physical pleasure from doing this. On page 14, she's teasing him about this, so he makes a comment about her own, human way of doing the same thing. This scene was taken from a simple two-image cartoon, just three word balloons; I liked the gag (no pun intended) and expanded the female character. She took off. She dragged the story with her.
Anyway, it's my opinion that that is the genesis of MARATHON MAN. Goldman was/is a New Yorker; he would have known the streets of the diamond district well. I'll bet he saw the street, exactly as it was portrayed in the movie, and wondered what would happen if some ancient fugitive were to be recognized by the survivors of the death camps. That's the idea, the seed. The story as it flowed from there was all Goldman. Every writer would have done it differently. The seed idea isn't much different from that of APT PUPIL by Stephen King, and while I think that short story has many merits of its own, I think we'll all agree that it's a very different story. The characters chosen to clothe the idea, the themes used to express the writer's world view, the fears that stair-step to the climax are personal and individual. The setting, what brings the Nazi to the place he is recognized, the person who spots him, when and why... these are the story. Spotting the core is an exercise in writing. It helps the writer to clarify his or her recognition of notions that might become core ideas for his or her own efforts. From there, though... that's the hard part. Getting the ideas is easy. Which to choose, how to use them, that's the work. I like your notion of the core incident. A few days back I woke to find that a pipe had burst and started to soak the living room. Yuck. Especially on a day when I'd got plans more interesting than hanging round for a plumber. I went shopping -- in the rain. Picked up some groceries, and walked back home, still grumbling in my head. I turned a corner, and was given a curious look by a woman walking towards me. She indicated my umbrella, said "It's not raining any more"...I'd been so preoccupied with whining to myself about the plumbing and its knock-on effect that I totally lost sense of what was happening round me. Hey ho. Her comment was almost poetically appropriate, and I just know that's going to find its way into a story somehow, somewhere.
"What the thinker thinks, the prover proves", as Robert Anton Wilson says. Even when you’ve found your core incident, there’s still the question of what to do with it. Story first, or character? The core idea may be either. People gravitate towards characters over story, but a story which rambles forever with no plot begins to feel pointless. It depends largely on length. A short story is about a single small event, affecting only one or two or a few people, and usually only one perspective. A short story can be 'about nothing', a character study. A long story has to have 'bones', a plot to which character studies are attached. Ideally, that is. In a long story, the elements of the plot have to be expressed by the right characters. The characters your readership are accustomed to may not fit. The writer can't cut existing characters to fit; he or she has to make up new ones to say the right things and be in the right places. It's hard, though, to step away from familiar characters. The writer of so-called character-driven fiction is challenged to come up with a cast with which he or she can say anything needed -- and still step away from them to create new ones if necessary. Each character is directed by at least one overarching plotline -- his or her life. I like that description of the process, of taking something from life and using that as a seed. That seems a better description to me that the simplistic idea a lot of people have about writers just copying from the people around them. As if we don't all tell stories to each other anyway. The principal difference is that a writer is aware of the fact, and explores it further. Tries to be aware of it, at any rate. Here's my screed on 'where do you get your ideas': Getting the ideas is not the thing. Everybody can come up with an author's whole lifetime of ideas in the course of an evening, sitting on a barstool. The thing is not the idea; it's how to implement the idea. How to spin it out, what kind of characters to flesh it out with. I myself have a great deal to learn about this -- I have a million ideas. Lots of science fiction writers and 'world builders' do. The mistake is in just packing them all in, worrying about leaving any tiny detail out. That gives the reader that 'drinking from the fire hose' feeling, instead of being engaged with the story. With that in mind, given the sheer scope of ideas you’re playing with in FINDER, do you envisage an ending for the story? Can you imagine writing all the stories you want within its pages, and in that world? Long Answer: That depends largely on how well I manage my characters. I'm just starting to get a feel for how large a story will have to be -- just barely, I still can't really predict. What I've got here is something I've heard called a 'magpie world', a thing into which I've poured every idea I have. These really to turn into bogs so easily, too much detail does it every time. When you don't have a 'world' to maintain from story to story, each thing you write can be cut to fit. A set of characters in a novel can spring directly from the needs of the plot. Their microcosm only has to be seen from the one side necessary to that plot. Even if they appear in a sequel, the reader usually sees only the same side of that microcosm. That's probably part of the reason sequels get so tedious. But in a 'magpie world', which is much more common in comics than in prose fiction, the world is as much a character as the people. The world has to reveal itself the same way as a character does -- the ways it overlaps the 'real' world and the ways it doesn't can't be dumped into the reader's lap. There comes a time with a world when you can kind of see how high or low the ceiling of it is -- how big a story you can tell with it. That's rather vague; think of it this way: once a character is defined past a certain point, you know what you can do with that character and what you can't. Jaeger is never going to get a sex-change operation. Emma is never going to write the Great Anvardian Novel. Maricch is never going to become a nun. If I want to write about characters that do these things, I'll have to find cast members who could do them. The world partly defines what they will or won't do. Making a world that you can write about for years, perhaps all your life, depends on how well you sketch out your rules for characters and setting, the details to be filled in being just as important as the foundation laid. Short answer: I don’t know yet.
Well, it feels lived-in because it is lived-in; it's what I live in, my daydream. I read interesting books, and parts of those books go in. I have interesting conversations, and those go in as well. Frankly, those drive me nuts sometimes, because my brain replays bits of conversations pretty much all the time. Same with dialogue from movies. If the world feels whole, then I must be giving the reader a pretty complete picture of it. Notes and drawings, boy, have I got notes and drawings. I try to keep the basic outlines simple. The fun part is in filling them in. You can't get too hung up on contradictions, because the world is full of apparent contradictions. That sort of thing often makes the best story -- if it takes too long to explain an apparent inconsistency, put the argument and investigations into the mouths of your characters, and ping, you've got the first shoots of a story. I try to incorporate everything, especially negative criticism. If someone really hates the way things are going, put in a character to express that reaction. It may tweak the story into a very interesting direction -- but at the very least, it lets that voice be heard, which often buys a little more of the reader's patience. I always have to keep in mind that it's a big world and other outlines need to be made. Each city, each culture, is going to have its own basic structure -- even though that structure will change over time. There's no need to stick everything into one place, amalgamate every culture into a single area. In time, each place comes to feel as if it is too finished. Including the readers…when I read FINDER, the sense I get is that the story just seeps out, and allows readers to piece things together. See, that's what I enjoy doing myself. I'm just hoping there are plenty of other people who share that... hobby? Approach? Mindset? My highest aspiration is that moment of clarity, when what seems strange and vague suddenly snaps into focus. Or what seems commonplace and dull suddenly turns upside down, and what lies underneath is a huge revelation. Problem-solving is part of pattern-making, and nothing feels better than that flash of insight. I want to recreate that in fiction. How do you keep track of what you’re doing, of whether you’re accomplishing what you set out to do? Ehh... feedback of the right kind is necessary. It's gas for the engine. You have to get a sense of what's being communicated -- what's actually coming through. The daydream that leads to the story, and the story itself, will never be the same thing. But the daydream will never completely come into focus without an audience, and even though the ultimate Getting direct feedback is necessary to build a kind of 'virtual audience' in your head. You get a feel for what will come through clearly after you've had people read and analyze what you've produced. You always need that reality check stuff. However... the best feedback comes from somebody who is engaged with the story and characters, but who is analytical enough to report what he sees and thinks, what he expects, without going into "Well, the way I would do it is..." You need somebody who's mostly an eye. Once you have that, you can get a better idea what effect your work might have on the broader audience. Once you get a handle on their expectations, you can sort of slalom around those expectations. You can't diverge from the path of the story too much -- but you don't have to just hike straightforwardly down it, either. Feedback lets you know where the path of the story is, which way it's going. What sense do you get of your audience? At cons I always look for the bright-eyed ones with tattoos. That's the tip of the iceberg. I seem to get a little bit of everybody, excepting kids under, say, sixteen. I get a lot of folks who don't otherwise read comics, often girlfriends of hardcore comics fans, sometimes boyfriends or other family members. I drew a sketch this past weekend for an attendee who described Jaeger as the only really sexy guy in comics. I will agree, these characters are thin on the ground.... I was talking one night with a group of indy-publisher cronies. One was ranting about hate mail. "Why the hell would anybody waste 33 cents on a stamp just to say 'Fuck you'? Why can't they say what they got so steamed up about??" I have to say, I've never had a single piece of hate mail. What I get is 'bewildered mail'. They are pleased... but confused, like a parrot with an uncracked coconut. "I gotta figure this thing out, right now!" Half the time, when I ask them what they didn't get, it turns out that they did understand what was going on perfectly. It reminds me of that cartoon AEON FLUX, remember that? The guy who directed it came to a few cons, and people would mob him. "I don't get it! I don't understand! Please, for God's sake, let me ask you a few questions!" He'd say, okay, ask away. And you don’t go for the other extreme of beating your audience over the head to reiterate what you’ve told them. There are some big ideas in FINDER, and some interesting ways of communicating them. One element that seems to keep cropping up is magic -- not the showy robes and wand waving version. It comes across to me more as a way of looking at and experiencing the world. What does magic mean to you -- in your life, and in your work (...and is there a difference)? Everybody finds the trappings of ritual attractive. Candles, totems, cave paintings, idols, little glyphic images. Lots of people are into collecting representations of their own or other cultures' rituals. They're often pretty, after all; they lend an exotic, hip, multicultural quality to daily life. But for a lot of folks the beliefs that molded these items don't mean a whole lot. Why should they? If you're not raised with Hindu caste markings or Inuit ivory carvings or Baptist tent-meetings, they do seem pretty weird, even if it's in a way you're very attracted to. But ritual arises from everyday reality. It's a condensation, a refining, of something that evolves in perhaps a single person, and resonates in others. Magical thinking can trip up the working artist just like anything else. Getting too stuck on a 'lucky pencil' can set you up for disaster when it finally breaks or disappears. Setting your sights on a goal you've decided is 'the thing' which will grant you success can be a way of convincing yourself to quit if it doesn't work out. But following the threads of meaning in a theme is very like puzzling out meaningfulness in a ritual. As long as you keep in mind that nothing has any meaning that you do not assign to it -- and many of the meanings you've assigned can be reinvented -- you'll be fine. You won't curl up and die when you lose your lucky pencil. Unless you want to, that is. Actually, that statement -- about how we assign meanings -- may be misread as nihilism. Nihilism is practice is either affectation or self-destructiveness. I think it could overlap with nihilism, but that's more to do with the underlying attitude you take to it. It can equally well work positively, which is the way I like it. That's true. Nihilism says nothing means anything. Many people interpret that as "Nothing can have meaning." Trying to apply that to real life is impossible. We're a pattern-making species. It serves a purpose only to give validity to your own pattern -- your own life, how you look at it, doesn't have to conform to some cookie-cutter Ultimate Meaning. Or at least, if it does, that doesn't mean everyone else's life has to conform to that same underlying structure as well.
Philosophy will always be hard to quantify. That's why it's important for everyone to pursue their own understanding, and not just take the best-sounding answer and swallow it whole, unexamined. My goodness, what a vague collection of bar-stool observations that was. I do hope you can do something with them. If those were bar-stool observations, I’ve obviously been drinking in the wrong bars. I deliberately haven’t gone into any kind of detail about the characters and places and stories you’ll find within the pages of FINDER, because there are some things that you need to discover for yourself. If you’re interested in comics storytelling of subtlety, depth and lasting worth, and a talent who’ll continue to surprise and delight for many years, then you owe it to yourself to check out the work of Carla Speed McNeil. lightspeedpress.com.
All characters, titles, images mentioned or shown are copyright and trademark their respective creators. |
1. It’s some kind of weirdbeard science fiction thing. I hardly read any science fiction these days, and since when does anyone do good science fiction in comics?
Superficially straightforward and beautifully evocative artwork that’s about flesh, not flash. Stories that develop organically and in multiple layers, rather than Boys’ Own Adventures that lift pace and wisecracks from brain dead blockbusters. Never mind ‘widescreen’, anyone remember depth?
FINDER doesn’t do that. It’s refreshing to come across a comic that owes nothing to the superhero tradition, and equally free of the goatee-stroking reference points of a lot of the independent scene. It occupies a space uniquely its own, and does so beautifully. So, how did something this special get to happen in the first place? And what makes it so real?
I'm amazed you find Emma and her family's interactions realistic...they hardly even speak to each other. We only see Emma with her youngest once. I think this is because they're mostly me. Or at least, each one has a side that's me; from there they had to go through this tortuous process which gave them other sides, made them 'not-me'. The questions I ask in this process are conscious, but the answers come from the gut. If I give a character a name that's totally wrong for his or her personality, I must consider his or her reaction to that name; that reaction may make it the perfect name. Defining appearance is much the same.
Simple enough idea; we're all jealous of our friends from time to time. But this comment merged with a lot of vague ideas in the back of my head and the character suddenly had a voice.
In someone else's... err. Think of William Goldman's MARATHON MAN. What is the scene that sticks in everybody's head the clearest? Many wonderful, vivid moments, but I'll bet it's Olivier with the dental pick saying, "Iz it safe?" over and over. That's what everybody remembers, and for good reason. Certainly it's what I remembered, from vague viewings as a kid. But when I took a better look at it, as an adult, I spotted what I think is the heart of the story: the scene where Olivier is walking the streets of New York City, in the diamond district, this ex-Nazi trying to get his boatload of gemstones out of a safety deposit box and back out of the country. And this old lady across the street recognizes him and starts screaming. She's old, she can't really run after him, and besides what the hell would she do? Tackle him? These are the streets of New York, so people only half pay attention to her hysterics. But there are many, many other Jews on the street, in the shops, everywhere; and he knows there will be others who know him. He knows the crowd will wash over him if he doesn't get away. This is exactly what he was afraid would happen, and he had to come anyway. Well -- of course he does get away -- the spell is broken when the old lady, seeing the crowd-inertia she faces, staggers into the street, desperate to catch the fleeing ex-Nazi, and is knocked down by a car. The crowd reforms around her. All I could think was, did she ever find out what happens to Szell, the torturer? He dies at the end of the novel; but the old lady; did she live to hear about it? It gives me the shudders to think she might not have, that she might have died thinking that she could do nothing, that 'The White Angel', the 'monster' escaped.
Heh! Definitely. I think the whole world is like that, always, every day. You see what you want to see. Everybody's like that, even people who are really trying to see everything, or to seek out strange things. It's like the old anecdote about the guy who's only attracted to one-legged women. When his conversational partner says, "Even in a big city, you must have a difficult time finding them," the guy's shocked; he says they're
everywhere, he has to beat 'em off with a stick.
A 'magpie world' suggests to me a gatherum of all kinds of goodies that's somehow found a home. I like the effect -- the mix of cultures and characters, and the trace of other comics that pops up from time to time. Makes it all very lived-in, especially since you hold back from exposition of exactly how such-and-such is the case.
That’s when I need to go on to a different town, a different group of people. Jaeger himself has a perspective that will always interest me, but even he has to have his limits. Other points of view are needed.
printed version will never be exactly what you intended, that is what the audience will get to see. The great thing is when you see the audience going off on their own tangents; when your translated daydream is engaging their own inner eye.
They'd ramble about what they saw -- the character goes here and does this and then this and that happens and then this, so, so, what am I missing, 'cause I don't get it! And he'd say, "Nothing... really, nothing! You got it. There's nothing more to get. Honestly, it's a very straightforward story." I don't know how that director reacted to that. Probably sanguinely. When I get that response to FINDER, I resolve to try to focus a bit more... there needs to be a clear
thread of story for the reader to hang onto, and you can't tell too much in a purely visual way. AEON FLUX was told in pure visuals, no dialogue. Most people don't trust what they see. They have to have captions, or some character to tell them (however obliquely) what's going on. This isn't stupidity or insensitivity; it's just the way we're educated. Illustrations in books are largely irrelevant. They may evoke a feeling, but they contain no information you can't get from the story. You don't have to pay attention to them even if you are lucky enough to get them. People are used to that. Now -- I'd like the readers of FINDER to get used to having to pay attention to what's presented visually, to learn to trust images without words, but I don't want to trample them with it. Shooting so far over their heads that I leave jet contrails isn't art, and it isn't communication.
Magic is the root of ritual. Ritual is what you get when mysticism evolves into custom. Mysticism isn't usually anything but crap when explained to another person; it's intensely personal, elusive, and ephemeral. But the mystical experience is the only thing that imbues ritual with meaning -- either a customary act shared by many people or a new thing created by the individual. In the fourteenth issue of FINDER, Jaeger is idly tossing a set of coloured dice, using a fortune-teller's method of divination. When asked what he's doing he says he's thinking. He doesn't think of the dice as really telling him his future, or deciding for him what he should do. But what the dice represent, the combinations in which they fall, these may help him consider other sides of his situation. He doesn't have anyone he is willing to tell all about what's been going on. He has only himself to reflect upon. The dice are not part of an external reality, but an internal one. It's still magic; it just isn't special effects.
There are patterns in all of us like the grain in wood or stone. We can't change them; but if we're good carvers we can change what we make of them.
