Self-publishing is frowned on in the mainstream publishing world, seen as second best compared to having the imprint of a respectable publisher on your book.  Well, there are less respectable publishers about as the conglomerates have grown, and maybe digital printing on demand is set to change the way the market works.  In comics though, being the master of your own destiny as creator and publisher is a route that’s been taken with varying degrees of success by creators including Dave Sim (Cerebus), Paul Grist (Kane) and Nabiel Kanan (Exit).  A more recent recruit to their ranks is writer and artist Carla Speed McNeil, creator of Finder.

In each case, the creators mentioned are notably idiosyncratic talents, whose work does not readily sit in the comics mainstream, whether the one represented by superhero titles, or the equally fantastic and stylised manga scene.  To inhabit the mainstream you need to fit a recognisable niche, and Carla Speed McNeil’s talent and imagination are simply too far-reaching to be contained by a genre tickbox.  She describes her work as ‘aboriginal sf’, a description which establishes an appropriate distance between her work and that of science fiction tales with more familiar trappings of starspanning space vessels and ray guns.

Finder features a society comprised of different clans, who interact in a world that has some degree of overlap with our own.  Many of the clans are pretty insular, so it helps that the titular finder of the series is an outcast wanderer called Jaeger, who gets to see more of the place he lives than most as he completes curious errands for a variety of people who employ his services.  Being a finder is a complex business, and gives Jaeger motivation beyond sharing itchy feet with his clan brethren to keep on the move.  Which is convenient for coming up with stories, but — as ever in Finder — feels like that’s just the way things are.

Carla Speed McNeil is a creative fountain with an interesting angle on everything from Hitchcock films to sexuality, fortune telling to the detective story, stopping by at such themes as the appropriation of culture by commerce and the effects of domestic abuse.  All of which risks making her sound like a distant polymath, but for the evident spiritedness of her stories.  She is a highly skilled writer, and her art brings her world and characters to life very well, if unconventionally: it’s as if you’re getting a peek into Carla’s mind, which in truth is where all this happens.

I did an interview with Carla Speed McNeil some years ago.  It was conducted by email, and edited to bring some semblance of order to the delightful mix of tangents that we pursued.  Her lively mind is constantly exploring new possibilities, and it’s from that fertile mixture that the adventures of Jaeger and the other characters emerge.  Not that adventures is the best word to describe some of Carla’s best work: of the sequence of collected Finder stories, Talisman is a beautiful depiction of the power of story to a child; Dream Sequence is a poetic exploration of virtual reality that also functions as a metaphor for the relationship between creator and audience; and Five Crazy Women portrays some of Jaeger’s friends and lovers, and is collected with a superb single issue dissection of male attitudes to women as Jaeger catches up with an old friend in a bar.

Take a look at Carla’s website, and see which of the stories particularly appeals to you: she has the first chapters of most of her trade paperbacks online, and is now putting her work up there first rather than publishing it in individual issue format.  Maybe that will have some effect on the pace and structure of her graphic novels in future, though it’s hard to imagine how Carla’s sophistication as a comics creator could improve much.  But, people were probably thinking that about Alan Moore when he was working on Miracleman…