A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

King of the Cats involves Jaeger’s own people, the Ascians, with whom he has a very difficult relationship due to being both a Finder and a Sin-Eater, which in terms of respectability is the equivalent of being both an oncologist and a crack dealer, and the Nyima, who are bipedal lionesses; how they reproduce and exactly what their relationship is with what appear to be nonsentient regular lions is mysterious at the start (it's more complicated than "the lions are male and they fuck.") Both societies are involved in complicated negotiations at Munkytown, which is a satire of Disneyland.

I am not big on satires of Disneyland as it’s such an easy target and is essentially its own satire, and this book didn’t change my mind. The lion people were fascinating if you read the footnotes and almost completely incomprehensible if you didn’t. The negotiations were also pretty incomprehensible unless you read the footnotes, but only mildly interesting if you did. Great art, though. Also a hilarious bit where Jaeger deals with being chased by a mob by stripping, then fleeing when all the parents cover their children’s eyes.

Mystery Date features Jaeger only in brief cameo in which he has an unflattering moustache. The heroine is Vary Krishna, a student at both the university and of sex work, which in her case is a reasonably respectable and safe profession. She has massive crushes on two of her anthropology professors, one of whom is a sweet and lonely dinosaur-like being (a laeske), and one of whom is an extremely mysterious and cranky human man with prosthetic legs designed for a laeske who really does not appreciate his students making passes at him – yes, even if they’re as adorable and sexy as Vary. (Vary is extremely adorable and sexy.)

Vary’s story is partly about the experience of being a student crushing on an unavailable professor, partly about growing up, partly about culture clashes (she comes from an extremely rural background and the city is very foreign to her), and partly about the difficulty and rewards of relationships in general, in which there’s always culture clashes going on at an individual level even if there isn’t at a literal culture level. It’s funny and sweet. Also, her roomate is a humanoid Pomeranian in bondage gear.

Of all the Finder books I’ve read yet, King of the Cats has the most crucial plot information buried in the footnotes and not intelligible by just reading the story, while Mystery Date is almost entirely straightforward in terms of being able to get what you actually need to know just from reading the book. The only really important stuff in Mystery Date that’s hidden in footnotes are the solutions to some of the mysteries surrounding the professor, such as why his prosthetic legs weren’t designed for humans and why he wears a blindfold; the answers make perfect sense, but are much more mundane than I had imagined. That may well be the point as a lot of the story has to do with outsider/insider perspective, exotification vs. reality, etc.

In King of the Cats there’s elaborate and satisfying explanations of what’s going on in the plot in the footnotes, but for me, without the footnotes, the plot was basically “There’s a parody of Disneyland and Jaeger’s caught between two tribes. The lion people choose their new king somehow (how does that work???) (are we supposed to know who he is????) and the Ascian chief is trying to make peace with them and somehow this happens (maybe ???) (why???) (Is this good or bad for the Ascians???) (What did Jaeger have to do with it, if anything???)”

Apparently I mixed up the order a bit while reading; Dream Sequence comes in between these two books. I'll read that next. I suspect that this particular reading order flub is not crucial. The first collection has Sin-Eater, King of the Cats, and Talisman. The second has Dream Sequence, Mystery Date, The Rescuers, and Five Crazy Women. I bought the latter as at $8.95, it was a lot cheaper than buying three more individual volumes even though I already had Mystery Date.

Finder Library Volume 1

Finder : Sin-Eater, vol. 2

Finder is a fairly famous science fiction comic that was originally self-published, then moved to Dark Horse. I was reading it for while, then forgot to keep up, then decided I needed to re-read everything before reading the latest volume, didn’t get around to that, and then forgot about it, which is what inevitably happens with me and all long ongoing comic series no matter how much I like them. I am now re-reading in the hope of actually catching up with some of the new volumes.

The world is post-apocalyptic, with incredibly intricate cultural worldbuilding. If you enjoy that sort of thing, you will probably enjoy this comic. The first two volumes center around Jaeger, a Finder and Sin-Eater and wanderer and ex-soldier who comes from the desert to a domed city where he knows some people, including but not remotely limited to…

- the people who work in a bookshop, such as an elderly woman who does divination with rocks and an intelligent male lion-creature left there as a guard by one of the more humanoid lion-women.

- Brigham, a violent and unbalanced man from a clan with strictly defined male/female gender roles, who has just been released from prison and is about to go back to stalking his family.

- Emma, Brigham’s ex-wife, from a clan where everyone presents as female, who lives much of her life in a literal dreamworld, works as a landscape architect, and has an AI assistant who speaks in a phonetic French accent.

- Their three children, each with their own complex story. Gender roles and identity figure prominently in their lives, but how is too complicated and ambiguous to summarize.

The main plot in this volume is Jaeger’s attempts to protect Brigham’s ex-family from him, their attempts to move on from Brigham’s control, and the backstory of how and why the current situation came about. But the world and story have a very complex and largely unexplained background. For instance, as I was writing this I realized that I wasn’t sure whether Jaeger came to the city specifically to check up on the family because he knew Brigham was going to be released from prison, or whether that was coincidental, or whether he didn’t know but it wasn’t a coincidence but rather a way that his Finding abilities operate.

And that sums up my experience of the actual plot of this comic. I enjoyed it a lot, but I felt like at least half of it was going over my head. Far more than Sandman, which is ostensibly about dreams but is really much more about stories, reading this feels dreamlike. It’s fragmented, incredibly vivid, emotionally realistic in the weird way that emotions really are weird, and often inexplicable.

Possibly the most odd, quirky, and worldbuilding-intensive aspect of a very odd, quirky, and worldbuilding-intensive comic are the footnotes. There are pages and pages of them after the comic, explaining everything from the entire culture of the miniature dinosaur only ever seen in the background of one panel in one issue to Easter egg-type references to the motivation of major actions of main characters which are otherwise inexplicable.

The footnotes range from interesting throwaways to explanations of events essential to the plot. If you don’t read them, the stories are compelling but dreamlike, inexplicable; if you do read them, well, kind of the same but they at least make more sense. I’m honestly not sure whether placing crucial elements of the story in footnotes that not everyone will read is McNeil’s artistic intention, or if she’s just the sort of artist who knows her world and story so well that she tends to forget to actually write in big chunks of it. I suspect the latter, but maybe also the former.

I like the art a lot. McNeil obviously enjoys drawing Jaeger’s body hair, which is not something I normally find hot but I really do here. It’s an incredibly dense, lifelike world where even the random raving wolf-headed dude and the girl who trails him have their own very detailed backgrounds (only explained in footnotes, natch) and the art shows it.

This is a very cool series but you have to approach it on its own weird terms. Contains domestic violence, other violence, a teenage girl crushing on an adult man, and probably other warning-worthy elements I forgot about or missed.

Finder Volume 1