One Fine Finder!

Carla Speed McNeil

by Anna Jellinek and Jennifer M. Contino

Carla Speed McNeil is one of the most creative people involved in the production of comics. Her series Finder is one of the most intriguing and challenging reads on the market today. Besides being a fantastic storyteller, McNeil is also gifted artistically. Even if you have trouble understanding all the hidden context and meanings behind Finder, you have to admit the comic sure is pretty to look at . McNeil’s got a lot of things coming up on her creative plate and Sequential Tart was anxious to talk to her about what’s next for herself and Finder.

Sequential Tart: If you were missing and your face were on a milk carton what would the description of you be?

Carl Speed McNeil: [laughs] Missing and listed on a milk carton...?

ST: It could happen….

CSM: Right, ok…Uh, 5'7", brown and blue, white female early thirties, about a size fourteen. Mild Southern accent, becomes more pronounced when among other Southerners. Last seen clutching ink-filled Best Western ashtray and whining about deadlines. Prefers to sit on the floor when working.

ST: Have you always been a creative soul? What are some of the earliest things you can recall making/creating?

CSM: Well, leaving aside the slippery concept of soul, I'd say yes. I've been getting attention by drawing since I was small enough to be bored in church. One of my earliest memories is of my mother exclaiming over some potted plant I was drawing. I could hear a different note in her voice; it wasn't just the polite "Isn't that NICE" Mom-tone that all kids know well. She was actually impressed. That's such a drug, oh yeah. Everybody who craves to do this for a living will find a memory like that if they look for it.

ST: Who or what are some of your creative influences?

CSM: National Geographic was my Bible. Ditto the big set of Encyclopedias (hopelessly out of date) that my mother kept in the pantry. I still read the Dictionary for fun, and I really should've learned Greek and Latin when I had the chance. I can never come up with a really representative list of books that have influenced me when asked, because it's really the ongoing rush of reading material that keeps my engine running. But I reread To Kill A Mockingbird roughly once a year; it's the perfect American gothic. Chandler and Hammett too; I can't write like them but they still electrify me. Octavia Butler. Sherman Alexie. Harriet The Spy. Travel books. Carl Sagan, dead visionary. Orson Scott Card and Carl Hiaasen. Francesca Lia Block and Caroline Cooney. Terry Pratchett and Kipling. Shelby Foote and Twain. Ira Levin.

Then there are the moviemakers: Preston Sturges and Howard Hawke and Hitchcock and Roman Polanski and the Coen Brothers and William Goldman. I can enlarge this list, but it's the thought that matters.

ST: Were you the only comic book fan in your house or did you discover comics through another family member's love of the hobby?

CSM: I didn't even read comics till I was thirteen or fourteen. I was pretty much the only one, though of course there were always the newspaper comics. My dad taught me to read with those.

ST: What made you at 13 or 14 start reading comics?

CSM: Sheer voracity. I've always read anything I could get my hands on. The stuff in the boxes at the flea market was priced pretty cheap, I could get a pile of gooey old comics and a stack of waterlogged paperbacks every Saturday - and that was to supplement the library run.

ST: Whom, if anyone, was the comic book character you identified the most with or felt the most empathy for?

CSM: Which one did *I* identify with? Unh... good question. If you mean which one made me say "that's ME", none. If you mean which one did I want to be like, hmm... dunno. I mostly read the horrors. I was buying the ECs out of waterlogged boxes at the local flea market, there was no comic shop in my town. The only new comic I read was House of Mystery, I had this perverse crush on Cain. I went through my X-Men phase while Paul Smith was drawing it, and when he left I lost interest in it. 'Course, right around then, Alan Moore was doing Swamp Thing, and then I found Cerebus #52 and Elfquest #13 in the same box at the aforementioned flea market, and there was no going back after that.

ST: Which comics were your favorites and why?

CSM: Oh, the horrors, because they pulled no punches. Gawd, they were disgusting! But the old issues of House of Mystery had a weird Twilight Zone quality about them that I loved, a sense of fantasy. Swamp Thing, definitely, Alan Moore's stuff was so new and convincing. Like I say, I had my X-Men phase, I loved Paul Smith's art - so clean, a lovely sense of design, and everybody looked different. They were individuals, each with his or her own posture and gestures. Sienkiewicz on New Mutants for the same reason. Cerebus for pacing and dialect and Sim's laser-keen composition of conversation. Love and Rockets, I think anybody can see those two in my art. Journey. Journey was a passion of mine. Nexus. There's still nobody who can touch Steve Rude for the classical Greek ideal human form. Those are the early ones - there are so many more now. Little stroll down Amnesia Lane.

ST: When did you first learn of independent comics?

CSM: Pretty early, not long after I discovered comics in general. Pacific Comics was still in business back then, and I ordered piles of back-issues from them. I'd get these bigass packages of comics - Rocketeer, Elfquest, Normalman - and I'd just sop them up a series at a time and come up with this cosmic hangover. I didn't have many other comics to compare them to, but they were INTENSE.

ST: What did you notice about those that were different from mainstream comics?

CSM: No ads in the middle of the story. That was a blessing. I have a very hard time reading mainstream books because of all the ads. I tear 'em out whenever I can - but mostly I just don't get 'em. If I want mainstreams, I wait for the trades.

I think the first thing that struck me about a black-and-white was in Cerebus #52. The countess. I honestly could not tell at first whether she was male or female. She's slim and boyish and does NOT have those ballooney boobs more typical of comic-book goils. I liked the theatrical sense in Cerebus, and the pacing. The simple act of having characters 'offscreen' speak was a big deal-seemed like a big deal.

ST: What inspired Finder and did you always see it as a comic book or did you have other plans for the series in its initial stages?

CSM: When I found independent comics, I knew comics were my best bet. I had this rather vague and half-considered agenda in my head, a checklist of skills that I needed to acquire to do comics. So in school, I worked hard on figure-drawing courses and slacked on sculpture. I slacked on other things I might have benefited from, though - creative writing and color theory being at the top of the list.

I knew that I wanted to draw, and that single images in a gallery setting would never satisfy me. Comics were my only option, since I had no interest in filmmaking.

Finder was inspired by a lot of things. Instrumental among these was Cat Boy, my friend who would come by, poke through my piles of drawings, and was my first audience. He was like a kid who wanted a story told to him, he wouldn't let me stop or put it off.

ST: So you have the idea for Finder, how did it go from a cool concept to a finished comic book?

CSM: I spent a year writing down every idea I had mulched away in my head since age 6. After that time, I looked at the huge pile of sketches and notes I'd amassed (it was about a foot high!) and said, "Okay, what the hell. I will never learn how to write if I don't start. Tomorrow is page 1." And Dave Sim was doing his soapbox rants about how anybody can do this, and that the important thing was to DO THE WORK, and a description of tools and paper and such. I went out and got 'em and got started with a handful of characters and no idea what the story should be, which is painfully obvious now. I had to learn on the fly, or I'd never learn at all.

So... I had most of the pages for #1, and SPX came along, and there I met Dave and Gerhard and Mike Cohen (Strange Attractors, Mythography, and the upcoming Forbidden Book), who later introduced me to a whole heapin' helpin' of friendly indy folks and to the good folks at Diamond and Capital City.

I did #1 as an ashcan, went to my first San Diego, and walked my legs off handing them out to pros whose work I loved. Same time next year I had three ashcans. Fall of that year, I had my 'real' issue #1 and heart palpitations over how few it had sold. The rest you know.

ST: What made you continue on after selling so few issues? I know a lot of other people who might have just thrown in the towel....

CSM: Stubbornness. Yeah, it popped my ego a good one to see how low was the point from which I had to start climbing. But I really never considered quitting THAT fast. When I was still talking about getting started, my family listened to my plan, nodded sagely, and then said, "Can you give it whatever it takes for five years? Eat the ramen, live in the tiny apartment, do without, and work your ass off for five years? Can you stand to LOSE MONEY for that long?" FIVE YEARS, I squeal. "Yeah, you gotta give any small business five years. You can't say you gave it a good shot if you don't. If it isn't panning out after five, you do something else." What you have to do is figure out how - if you can't afford the revolving cash outlay to do a bi-monthly book, maybe you can do it on-line. Or maybe as ashcans until you've got enough material (and readers) to do a trade paperback. But first and foremost, you have to do the work - frankly, for those five years, the work was my only entertainment. I had no money, so I didn't dare get bored - I worked.

ST: Before self-publishing Finder, had you tried to propose the series to any of the established comics publishers?

CSM: Well, I got a rejection letter from Caliber without actually having submitted anything to them. I wasn't really shopping for a publisher, I was pretty sure I could handle self-publishing. All my family are small business owners one way or another, and they encouraged me to go that way. Robb Horan of Sirius did talk to me about publishing Finder but nothing came of it.

ST: I’ve heard you refer to Finder as Aboriginal SF. What is Aboriginal SF?

CSM: Ah, that's an old term from the early days of science fiction, and it referred to sci-fi that wasn't primarily about colonizing the moon. Let's call it Weird Alien Races fiction. We're children of the space race, we're used to think of space travel and robots and silver suits as being the touchstones of science fiction. When fiction speculates about anthropology, zoology, psychology, ecology, sociology, and other, fuzzier sciences, it becomes aboriginal SF.

ST: So, how does Aboriginal SF affect your creation of Finder?

CSM: How does it affect... umm. Well, there are a lot of 'weird alien cultures' in Finder. Abo-SF is basically fiction based upon anthropology and cultural study, which anybody can see is a main focus in Finder. All the clans, the different cities, the tribal people - they all provide cultural context for the background. I don't let the fact that lots of my weird aliens are humans bother me.

ST: You also describe Finder as "soft sci-fi"…

CSM: 'Soft' sci-fi deals with the 'soft' sciences. The 'hard' sciences are those that are based on solid observable data, such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, and astronomy. The soft sciences are those that are partly based on things that are infuriatingly open to conjecture: cultural anthropology, psychology, sociology. The soft sciences have their bedrock of reproducible results, but that which is easy to nail down isn't the whole picture. Finder deals with these fuzzier disciplines, more or less because I don't have the math to pursue the others.

ST: What is Finder?

CSM: This is tough question to answer because I'm still in the early stages of figuring this out. I had no clue what I was doing when I started the book. The only thing that gives me the confidence to shove the book in people's faces, no matter how many mistakes or missed bets there are in the material, is that I know I've learned and made progress. I think of myself as being in my silent-film era.

What I wanted when I got started was a world big enough for me to tell any kind of story I wanted. I hoped that if I could do that, time and experience would teach me what themes were important to me. That'll be great ten years from now when I KNOW, but it's kinda lousy now, because I don't know how to describe my own work (and I feel pompous as hell when I try).

Things that are kinda starting to take shape are gender confusion, particularly as displayed by Lynne, the middle kid from Finder 1-14; cultural clash, that is to say, when people are willing to fight over what's proper even though they have no idea WHY it's proper. Two men say they're Jesus; one of them must be wrong. Survivalism, that's a big part of Jaeger, the current main character. The relationship between fantasy and reality, how hard it is to make that convincing. How every person is a little world all to themselves. And a lot of other vague stuff like that. The concept of the title, the 'finder', is open enough to describe any protagonist. It means something specific to Jaeger: it's a medicine society to which he belongs, a cabal of scouts who advise and run messages to the chiefs of his tribe. But in a larger sense 'finder' means a certain approach to life, the way we all try to find or make patterns out of perhaps random events, make stories out of them, how we live by them. Whew, that's lofty. It's a detective/anthropologist mindset.

ST: Jaeger reminds me SO much of bit and pieces of other comics characters -70s Green Arrow, 80s Wolverine, and I'd say Spider Jerusalem, but Finder debut almost a year before Transmet did….

CSM: Well, I hardly remember what he was when I was very young. Kind of an invisible friend. Since then, he's grown out of Mad Max and Wolverine and weird relatives and friends of mine. I don't mind comparing Jaeger to Spider; Hunter Thompson went into the making of both of them.

Fictional heroes aside, I have a lot of hunters and outdoorsmen in the family. Jaeger got his eyebrows from an uncle of mine, who two years ago at a family reunion caught a hummingbird in his bare hand. The man's in his seventies, and he's still that fast. Gentle, too; he brought the hummingbird in the house to show his wife, then let it go unharmed. She said its beak was soft and flexible, and she'd always expected a hummingbird's beak to be sharp.

When you know people like this, it's impossible not to write about them.

ST: You know a lot of people like your characters?

CSM: All the sides of these people that are not me come from people I know. The characters come from me, but they're not characters until they've absorbed things from other people. There is a guy who gave Brigham his face and his temper and his drive, but that guy is sane and balanced. He thought it was quite hilarious to find himself 'playing' a psychotic, like an actor who plays villains. There's one guy who contributes to Jaeger's reactions but doesn't look like him; this same guy contributes to the adult Lynne's looks but not so much to the way he thinks.

Oh, and the shtick with the boot-camp erection was a story a friend told me. Funniest part is, the guy that happened to is named Lance.

ST: Which sides of the people are you?

CSM: All the characters are partly me as I perceive myself (good parts and bad parts), partly what I'd like to be (good wishes and bad wishes), and partly what they have to be in response to each other. Once the first two parts of a character take shape, I apply what I've observed in real people who seem to be like that character. So they're all me, but there is no character who is all me or only me or who will react exactly as I would. They all have a little chunk of me in them, even if it's just in opposition. Jaeger is not me; there are four or five guys who regularly contribute to him. He is, to some extent, a wish-fulfillment character for me, and by necessity some of his facial expressions are mine. Lynne as a kid is partly me and partly several truly devious people I know; Lynne as a youth is now absorbing a lot of a very good friend of mine. It's very fluid. Lynne is not me in the sense that I was not a boy raised as a girl. That's just the way I felt, not my reality. Rachel is not me; she is the goofy, giggly teenager that I never could have been, the kind of girl I loathed when I was young - the kind of girl I never had any perspective on until I was well out of my teens. Brigham is not me; but I know how Mr. Hand turns into Mr. Fist. Not that I know what to do with it once it does, but just the same...

ST: What's a "Sin Eater" and how did Jaeger become one?

CSM: A sin-eater is one who purifies the dying so they can go on unencumbered. In some societies, this is only done for people who are being sacrificed, so that they can bring a message to the gods. In others, anybody who can pay for it wants to be purified on their deathbeds. This was still done in the Allegheny mountains in the early part of this century. The sin-eater was a pariah, somebody no-one wanted; nobody else would take the job. Food would be laid out on the shrouded corpse at the wake, and the sin-eater would eat as much of the food as he could. Sometimes he would be allowed to take the food away, sometimes not - it depends on how poor the community was. That's the mild form of sin-eating, practiced on everyday people. When someone is being sent as a messenger to the Infinite, the sin-eater's duty is a lot more gruesome. Jaeger became a sin-eater because that was the only job available to him among his mother's people, the Ascians. He wasn't able to find his mother's family, has no idea who they were, but he's as sure as he can be that she was Ascian. The Ascians are nomads, like Beduins or Lakota or Mongols. They have a very rigidly defined social system, and it matters very much which family you belong to. Nobody wanted to adopt him, and he could keep up with them - it was only a matter of time before he became a sin-eater. It's the kind of thing that happens by default.

ST: How does being a Sin Eater contradict his life as a Finder?

CSM: As a sin-eater, he's the lowest of the low, no status at all. The Finders are a medicine society - that is, a secret society. The Finders are very high status, but nobody's supposed to know who they are. So it's all very Clark Kent. He has a very hard time reconciling these two aspects of his life among his own people, and that's most of the reason he stays away from them so much.

ST: SO, if it someone did discover that he was a "Finder" what would happen?

CSM: Oh, it already has happened. That's why he's not with his original family group anymore. There are more secret societies among Ascians than you can shake a stick at, and the member who is uncovered usually leaves. He (sometimes she) will join some other group of Ascians, moving as far away from the original tribe as is necessary. Picture a whole city of spies and ninja, rumors abounding, all muttering behind their hands to each other, not knowing the absolute truth about ANYTHING. They're strange people. They're tent nomads - their layered secrecy is their only privacy. Practically speaking, it's also an aid to exogamy. It get people moving from tribe to tribe, so there's less inbreeding.

ST: Jaeger travels a lot so he doesn't have many close friends, but he does have kind of an extended family of sorts. How did he come to know Emma Grosvenor and her children?

CSM: Emma was the wife of his superior officer when he was in the army. Back before this guy was an officer, he was Jaeger's drill instructor. More than that, this guy - Brigham Grosvenor - rescued him from prison. This army sometimes sifts a few men out of local detention facilities if there is sufficient need (and a good chance they'll be killed anyway). Jaeger was going good and bonkers from the confinement, and he felt he owed Brigham everything for getting him out. This was a very complicated relationship, given that Brigham sort of adopted Jaeger to sidestep a pissing contest of potentially vast proportions. In the midst of all this were Emma and her three kids, who adopted Jaeger in their own ways. Then Brigham went nuts all on his own. And that was the first big story of Finder, more or less; Jaeger trying to figure out where his duty to all of these people lay, and strangling on his leash more often than not.

ST: I'm fascinated with all the different clans that are involved in the world of Finder. I bet you've barely scratched the surface though!

CSM: The clans came from my fascination with facial features. I love spotting faces that 'go together' and speculating on whether their families might have come from the same part of the world... for the same reason, I 'collect' last names. When I start seeing the same faces over and over again, I start drawing that face, and eventually it evolves into a clan. The clans are usually the ruling classes of any given city, and I guess that comes from my upbringing; my family's not in the least aristocratic, but you're very aware of the 'old families' when you grow up in the New Orleans vicinity.

The clans in Finder depart from reality pretty briskly after that point, though - real 'clans' in our world may be insular, the family resemblance may be very easy to spot, but in Finder the clans are all very careful to marry internally. They're all working to conform to a specific look, which they all believe is that of some distant ancestor. Within a clan, all members look as much alike as purebred dogs. Full membership in one's own clan depends on a series of tests and inspections at various ages - just having the right pedigree isn't enough. The clans are pretty strange to outsiders, but since they've got all the money, they can do as they like. The city of Anvard, in which Sin-Eater is set, is unusual in that it isn't dominated by only one or two clans.

The understory of Sin-Eater is based on cultural clash. Brigham (Jaeger's former superior officer) and Emma (Brigham's ex-wife) are of radically different clans. They broke their societies' rules by marrying, and unlike many people who do so, they couldn't make it work. Their ordinary troubles turned into serious mental problems, exacerbated by the fact that Brigham was assigned to help settle a war zone and brought his family with him. His clan wanted him and his new wife out of the town. His clan, the Medawars, are mostly fighters and doctors. They make up the city's standing army and police force. They're also imperialists -when they're called out to help some outlying settlement's difficulties with their neighbors, they stay and take over. Brigham took his wife and their cross-clan kids and went into a battle zone. Emma's clan, the Llaveracs, are mostly show-business types and artists. She's unusual in that she's a botanist. She'd have preferred to work seriously in a nice clean lab somewhere with half a dozen degrees, but nobody expected 'one of those screaming queens' to want to do that kind of work, so she works as a gardener and landscape artist. Once she married, she was to have worked growing medicinal plants and improving agricultural yields.

The problem is their kids. The oldest (Rachel) and youngest (Marcie) have far less to worry about than Lynne (the middle kid) because they're girls. See, all the members of Emma's clan LOOK female, whatever their actual gender. They're not hermaphrodites; they're just all very feminine. They prefer to avoid specifically masculine names and clothing. Emma saw nothing wrong with raising her son as a girl. Brigham did. Lynne still has to wrestle with this; he has no idea what his mother's genes will do to him when he hits puberty.

There are a lot more clans, naturally, but those are the important two in Sin-Eater. Most of the people in Finder don't even belong to formal clans, but the clans' influence is felt by everyone.

ST: What's some of the challenges you face when working on Finder?

CSM: Mostly trying to get ahead. Finding more time to work means better work. More research, better photo reference, full scripts instead of jotted-down outlines, and all that adds up to storylines that hold together better. I have come to grips with the fact that most people don't enjoy being confused as much as I do, so I have to find a way to give them a story that can be enjoyed on the surface as well as pored over and figured out. I like mystery - I don't want the stories to be too simple. But I don't want to drive people nuts with frustration because I'm not making the story 'pay off'.

ST: You've got two tradepaperbacks out collecting the Finder saga, right? What are some of the extras that you included in the TPBs?

CSM: In both trades, there are extensive notes. I spent too much time in school, I footnote everything. Actually, it was just a way to get out all the material that would slow the story down even more. I got the idea from Alan Moore's From Hell - the notes in From Hell are as fascinating (and well-written) as is the melodrama.

In the first trade, there's an eight-page gallery section, portraits of the main characters. In the second, there's a nine-page story, Counting Coup, which was written and drawn especially for that book. There are portraits in the second trade as well, but I used them to separate chapters rather than collect them in the back of the book. And fancy new color covers, naturally. I would have liked to reproduce the original covers of the issues in each trade, but I couldn't afford to print them in color, and the black-and-white art just isn't the same. Maybe in the super-duper hardcover I'm daydreaming of printing someday there will be a small color section.

ST: I'm always curious about the work process creators utilize. How do you create an issue of Finder?

CSM: Let's see... first I have hysterics over the last issue's deadline. I usually get my best ideas when the pressure is really on to do something else. I jot down my notes, which will make absolutely no sense to me later, and then I lose them. I finish up the current issue. I try to remember what gibberish I put in the solicitation for the distributors. (That's my other big BIG goal: to get backed up to the point where I KNOW what's in an issue BEFORE I advertise it! Gah!)

I do an outline and brainstorm, panicking all the while about how long it's taking to figure out all the missing pieces. Lately I have indeed been able to write a full script, and the effect it has had on my work has been nothing less than phenomenal. Everybody's got a different way of doing things, and everybody's got to figure out what works for them - for me, having a full script is wonderful. After that, it's down to page a day, page a day. I can't pencil a full issue from beginning to end and then ink and then letter. That causes me INCREDIBLE stress.

I have to get started on the day's page by three o'-clock, otherwise I'll be up till 2 AM. The morning is taken up by ATOS (all-the-other-stuff). If I get done early, I can goof off, have dinner with friends, read, do whatever. If I don't, I can't. Everybody thinks how great it would be to get up anytime you want - which is one of MY favorite things, mind you, but they don't consider that no matter when you get up, you have to stay up till that day's work is done, period. Once you start to fall behind, it's very hard to run faster than the treadmill. That's why it's best for me to do that page a day - I can say to myself, "That page is done, I don't have to worry about it anymore."

I usually work to the sound of a movie. I can't stand to have any noise when I'm writing, but I like the sound of people talking when I'm drawing. That means movies - tapes or DVDs - because regular TV is too broken up by commercials. I can get a lot done in two-hour blocks. Fifteen-minute blocks shorten my attention span too much, as does scrabbling for the remote to mute the %^&* car ads. I also find I enjoy movies more by not watching TV, because I don't see the trailers and the hype-ads which a) often spoil the best parts and b) give you weird ideas about the story.

Let's see... I work on thin (2-ply) Bristol, smooth finish. I lay out a page, big panel here, small panel there; then I do my rough pencils on separate sheets of typing paper. I slap the Bristol onto a light table (I made one out of a box, some Plexiglass, and two flourescent light sticks), on which I lightly transfer the rough pencils. I letter with Sakura disposable tech pens - they're not as black as the bottled ink I use, but they're so much cheaper than Rotrings and other 'real' tech pens that I just don't care anymore. I do most of my inking with a brush - Sceptre Gold #0. It's a combination of sable and synthetic fibers. It's soft enough to hold a lot of ink, and springy enough to give me a lot of control.

I use a flat ashtray as an inkstone. I hate dipping a brush into a narrow-necked ink bottle, because I can never get a feel for where the level of the ink is and so usually get ink halfway up the barrel of the brush. I dump a little ink into the shallow ashtray, dip my brush, and remove excess ink on the ashtray's lip. I keep a cup of water and some paper towels handy, and get the extra ink out of the brush at the end of each tier of panels. I do all the crosshatching with a fine-tipped Sakura (I go through a couple of those per issue). I touch up the art with a brush and white Gouache (opaque watercolor).

Oh, and I work smaller than standard. I lay out an 8" X 12" page on an 11" X 14" sheet of paper. My cross-hatching goes faster, looks tighter, and reproduces better when I work at this size.

Let's see... somewhere near the end of the issue, I start wondering what the hell I'm going to do for a cover. I do a bunch of ideas until one appeals to me. Then I do a full-size pencil drawing, tape it to my light table, and break out the dreaded stinky Prismacolor markers and the watercolors and the colored pencils. The watercolors are mostly for graded backgrounds, I suck at watercolors. I've taken to doing the outlines of the figures (what I would ink in Higgins Black Magic ink if it were an interior page) with colored inks and gouache. Highlights and suchlike are colored pencil and more gouache. Then I gotta scrabble around for the cover overlays - logos, price box, etc - pick a color swatch for those things, then do the inner covers and the back cover.

Last is the text page. I try to keep typesetting to a minimum because fooling with the computer makes me crazy, especially at the end of a deadline. I freak out about the next issue, slap address and page-number labels on the backs of all the artwork, make last-minute corrections and hope like hell I spotted every mistake (ho-ho-ho) and off it goes to the printer. It takes me about five or six weeks to do an average issue. What do I do in between? Ah, side projects... overflow from issues that take longer than six weeks... and trying to get the schedule backed up.

ST: If there were to be a movie of Finder, whom would you chose to play Jaeger?

CSM: Oh, if somebody came ditty-bopping along with a fat bag o' money with no strings attached, and an option contract that said they could do whatever they liked with the story in the movie, and I could go on doing whatever I wanted with the story in the book, sure - I'd giggle all the way to the bank. I'd do some more trade paperbacks, stuff like that.

But there IS nobody who looks like Jaeger, not the way he looks to me. Same for all of them. They could not have found a better actor to play Hannibal Lecter than Anthony Hopkins - for my money, he's one of the finest actors the movies have ever had. He took the role and made it his own, which is necessary for him and for the success of the movie adaptation. Even though he was fabulous, he changes the way you see Lecter. The impression you had of Lecter from the novel is not the same as what you see in the movie. Maybe it's even better, who knows? Both the movie and the book were excellent. But can you remember your picture of Lecter as he was before you ever saw Hopkins play Lecter? I think not.

It's the same for all my characters, not just Jaeger. They sort of amalgamate together from all the things I take in, and they do change, depending on what I put in my head. But to have an actor play them would make them too 'finished' in my head, too complete. I'll tell ya this: if there is a Finder movie, I hope it's good, because I'll never be able to draw the characters in it again. I'll have to move on. Even that's not necessarily a bad thing, but I'm not ready to lose the ones I have now.

ST: What's coming up for Finder?

CSM: Next up is a story about Jaeger's history of fistfighting. He's grown up pretty rough, and had to learn the hard way how NOT to get into fights. Seems simple, but it'll be my first attempt to make a stand-alone issue. The point of Fight Scene is this: the most important fights of his life are the ones that never happened.

After that, I've got a lot of possibilities: one story will be based in a Matrix-like fantasy game that people play in their sleep. Another goes back to Emma's kid Lynne, devious little beast that he is, and his love of playing soccer in the girls' school he attends. Another deals with Jaeger and his slightly spooky sense of smell; the question is, what would it take to get a bunch of hardheaded Medawar detectives accept his help in hunting down a killer? Still another goes back to Vary, of the Finder spinoff Mystery Date, and an engraver she takes up with. That story would be titled The Artist's ' Model. Yet another goes back to Ollie, a side character from Mystery Date, and would examine the nature of the animal-headed people in Finder. Then there's this one I've wanted to do for a long time, Hitchcock's Notorious told from the point of view of the man, so you'd have a man who marries this hysterical girl who thinks he's trying to kill her. Then there's this bit with Emma's oldest kid...

The important question is not 'Where do you get your ideas?' The biggie is 'What the hell do you do with them when you get them??"

ST: What projects, non Finder, are you working on?

CSM: The munificent Mr. Warren Ellis has been good enough to assign me two pages of the next big Transmetropolitan book, Filth Of The City. Gotta do those this week, ee-yikes. After that I'll be doing an eight-page story written by my good buddy Vince Sneed (Forty Winks is his regular book) scheduled to run in a benefit book called Silent Angels, from Peregrine Entertainment. I'm kickin' around ideas with Steve Lieber for a story to run in Mike Cohen's new project, Forbidden Book. And, of course, freakin' out about my next issue. Work's what's kept me happy.

Light Speed Press

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