FINDER is the most unique science fiction comic series currently being published. Writer-artist Carla Speed McNeil uses the well-meaning-but-amoral trickster Jaeger, the Finder of the title, to explore themes as diverse as tribal customs, memory, identity, gender, creativity, sex, and the unpredictability and messiness of emotional relationships.
TALISMAN, the fourth book in the series, centers on Marcie, the youngest daughter of the family that Jaeger is involved with. At the age of six, Marcie becomes entranced by a book that Jaeger bought her as a gift. She is utterly fascinated by the spell it casts as he reads to her. When the book is lost, Marcie spends years, clear into her teens, searching for it, trying to recapture the sense of wonder that so enraptured her during childhood. She also begins to discover, painfully and full of doubt, how she might translate her own traumatic family life into a personal mythology, a fiction that grants her release from her own pain. She discovers how to write stories.
TALISMAN is a science fictional allegory about reading, about that special, unique book that enchanted us as children, that lingers like a wraith in the recesses of memory, fuelling our imagination and creativity and our need to make sense of our lives through stories. It captures the sense of discovery and loss we experience when that first special book is taken away from us, and how we cope with that, and move on.
Adi Tantimedh is a screenwriter and filmmaker who writes comics when he has the time. He has recently completed JLA: The Age of Wonder for DC Comics, and written and directed Open House, a short film for Studio FP in Italy. His current projects include the forthcoming Blackshirt for Moonstone Books, Anna Passenger, a novel being serialised on Opi8.com, and various film and television projects.
