Talisman (Finder)

Rating:
Summary: A serious and engaging comic book
Review: The -Finder- books previous to this one are excellent, but they tend to sprawl, letting their large cast run wild in a vast science-fiction landscape and leaving a lot to be deciphered, deducted, or guessed by the reader. In this book, however, the story is limited to one character, the narrator; it's shorter than the other collections and it has much more focus. That focus makes the book feel way more intimate and quite a bit more coherent. Marcie tells us the story of her life from early childhood, when a friend of her family read her a book she never forgot, to adulthood, as she struggles to weave a personal mythology out of half-remembered fairy tales and bad real-life memories. A side effect of the story's focus, intimacy, and simplicity is that it can feel confined and indulgent at times, lacking the drama and scope of the other -Finder- books, not to mention their much cooler and wholly unsentimental perspective. In -Talisman- we're stuck in the head of a protagonist whose troubled family life has left her both detached and self-absorbed, someone whose life takes place mainly in her mind. So if you're *not* the sort of person who holds books with some reverence, or who loves reading and writing and quests and magic, you might get impatient with this book; if you are, though, you'll probably adore it.

The thing I like best about this series (besides the complex and fascinating world it takes place in -- museums of pain, animal-headed people, tribes of people who all look creepily alike, dinosaur pack animals) is these weird little moments of humor and ingenuity it has. There's this one panel where Margie is musing via narrative caption about how as a writer she wants to convey "the weirdness of how the world is" (this is from memory), while behind her a man named Earl tries unsuccessfully to carry what looks like the rigid body of a dinosaur through a revolving door. (Well, you have to *see* it to get it; it's a comic book.)

One thing I sort of wish was omitted from these books is a long string of endnotes in the back of each collected volume, sort of a director's commentary that includes explanations of the stuff we might have missed. It's not that I don't love reading it -- sometimes I tuck my forefinger into the endnotes so I can read the story and notes at the same time -- but that's just the problem: it's too easy. It breaks the spell a little. Maybe I should just buy the individual comic books as they come out instead of waiting for the paperback, which comes with extras sort of like a DVD, but it bothers me.

Overall, definitely a comic to check out. Even if you've never read -Finder- but want to read the story of a kid searching for her lost book, pick it up. You don't really need the background details to appreciate it (like how exactly Marcie's father got to be the way he is, and how her brother was raised as a girl), although you'll be aware that you're missing a lot. -Talisman- is as serious and witty and dreamy as anything I've read lately.