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Notes -
Finder by Carla Speed McNeil is a distant-future graphic novel series. It features gorgeous black and white line art, transhumanism, and cultural commentary on a possible future of race, gender, and wealth. It has a focus on personal relationships within a society, and comes at anything political from oblique angles. The character art would make Walt Disney swoon with McNeil’s action lines and liveliness.
The eponymous Finder is a young man named Jaeger, of a lower caste ethnicity whose tribe has become involved with a lower upper-class household in one of the domed cities. He has a talent for finding what’s needed, but whether that’s a gift or a curse is left grey.
Cerebus the Aardvark by Dave Sim was a monumental undertaking, one of the first independent comics to hit 300 issues, contemporary in the 80’s with the TMNT and The Tick. It features insanely amazing black and white crosshatched backgrounds by Gerhard, and the character work by Sim is top notch with a caricaturist’s eye. His comic lettering is a phenomenon.
Cerebus himself starts as a funny-animal parody of Conan the Barbarian in the lost civilizations of ancient Europe, but things shift into a high gear when Cerebus gets involved with a mayor who looks a lot like Groucho Marx. It evolves into a poignant and piercing examination of second-wave feminism, the effects of church on society and vice versa, the nature of civilization, the ephemerality of sober and drugged spiritual experiences, alcoholism, masculinity, rapey incels before we had a name for it, being bros, and failed dreams. By the end we’ve met caricatures of dozens of twentieth-century celebrities and parodies of superheroes and sword-and-sorcery fantasy heroes, each one shaping how Cerebus is (or plays) the hero. Skip the text sections from issues 200-300 if you find them weird or boring, the author has something to say in them but most people won’t grok it.
In many ways, these series are diametric opposites, and visions of the future and the past respectively which will haunt you. To see if you want to read the whole series, read volume 3 of each: Finder, King of the Cats, and Cerebus, Church and State.
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