Finder Library v 1, by Carla Speed McNeil
Finder Library v 1, by Carla Speed McNeil
I wanted something like City of Diamond, and this is it!
This is a science fiction comic set in a sort of post-post-apocalyptic future - the world has suffered some sort of sharp technological descent and the survivors have reformed a basically stable but systemically unfair society. They are kinda lackadaisically trying to rebuild, in between genetically engineering themselves and building evil theme parks. Most of the action takes place in an ancient domed city called Anvard, inhabited by fairly technologically advanced people who nonetheless can't figure out exactly what the dome's made of or why there's no night inside of it. The ruling classes consist of the members of heavily genetically-engineered collectives called Houses, whose members are chosen according to a very specific physical and emotional aesthetic.
The nominal protagonist is Jaeger, a nomad from outside the city who has a secret calling as a "Finder" - someone who finds important things for people without any reward. He's in a relationship with a formerly upper-class woman named Emma, formerly of house Llaverac and recently escaped from an abusive marriage with a man of another caste. Emma spends half her time in a complex dreamworld engineered to protect her from the trauma of her marriage. She has three daughters, the eldest of whom, Rachel, has a crush on Jaeger and the youngest of whom, Marcie, wants him to be her father. The middle daughter, Lynne, is in fact a boy raised as a girl, and has reason to think of Jaeger as a traitor to their family.
Those two paragraphs sound like they ought to sum up the plot, but they don't, because there are a couple million other things going on. The worldbuilding is extremely, ridiculously complex, and I had to flip back and forth a lot to figure out what was going on. Lynne's biological gender doesn't come up in the text until eight issues in, and it's not because it was supposed to be a secret, it's just that McNeil didn't find space to mention it until then. She needed to fit in all these functional oracles kept in museums, tribes of sentient bipedal lion-women with semi-sentient quadrupedal mates, and homages to Osamu Tezuka's Ode to Kirihito. The woman's busy, okay? The lengthy footnotes for each chapter are just as likely to go off on a tangent about psychoanalysis as they are to actually explain what's going on. You just have to pay attention and pick it up. There will be a quiz.
The problem with making comics with this level of visual complexity is that it takes a lot of time and energy, if you don't have a pile of assistants like a Shounen Jump artist. The speed at which McNeil is developing this world in her head seems to be outpacing the speed at which she's able to get it down on paper. (Kubo Tite needs to send her some of his dudes, it's not like he's doing anything important with them.) I obviously do not complain about the result, but it's not something you want to read for the first time when you're tired.
This post was cross-posted from Dreamwidth. Please comment there using OpenID. (Comments:
)
I wanted something like City of Diamond, and this is it!
This is a science fiction comic set in a sort of post-post-apocalyptic future - the world has suffered some sort of sharp technological descent and the survivors have reformed a basically stable but systemically unfair society. They are kinda lackadaisically trying to rebuild, in between genetically engineering themselves and building evil theme parks. Most of the action takes place in an ancient domed city called Anvard, inhabited by fairly technologically advanced people who nonetheless can't figure out exactly what the dome's made of or why there's no night inside of it. The ruling classes consist of the members of heavily genetically-engineered collectives called Houses, whose members are chosen according to a very specific physical and emotional aesthetic.
The nominal protagonist is Jaeger, a nomad from outside the city who has a secret calling as a "Finder" - someone who finds important things for people without any reward. He's in a relationship with a formerly upper-class woman named Emma, formerly of house Llaverac and recently escaped from an abusive marriage with a man of another caste. Emma spends half her time in a complex dreamworld engineered to protect her from the trauma of her marriage. She has three daughters, the eldest of whom, Rachel, has a crush on Jaeger and the youngest of whom, Marcie, wants him to be her father. The middle daughter, Lynne, is in fact a boy raised as a girl, and has reason to think of Jaeger as a traitor to their family.
Those two paragraphs sound like they ought to sum up the plot, but they don't, because there are a couple million other things going on. The worldbuilding is extremely, ridiculously complex, and I had to flip back and forth a lot to figure out what was going on. Lynne's biological gender doesn't come up in the text until eight issues in, and it's not because it was supposed to be a secret, it's just that McNeil didn't find space to mention it until then. She needed to fit in all these functional oracles kept in museums, tribes of sentient bipedal lion-women with semi-sentient quadrupedal mates, and homages to Osamu Tezuka's Ode to Kirihito. The woman's busy, okay? The lengthy footnotes for each chapter are just as likely to go off on a tangent about psychoanalysis as they are to actually explain what's going on. You just have to pay attention and pick it up. There will be a quiz.
The problem with making comics with this level of visual complexity is that it takes a lot of time and energy, if you don't have a pile of assistants like a Shounen Jump artist. The speed at which McNeil is developing this world in her head seems to be outpacing the speed at which she's able to get it down on paper. (Kubo Tite needs to send her some of his dudes, it's not like he's doing anything important with them.) I obviously do not complain about the result, but it's not something you want to read for the first time when you're tired.
This post was cross-posted from Dreamwidth. Please comment there using OpenID. (Comments:
)