Tag Archives: Finder

“I am fond of hidden agendas:” Carla Speed McNeil on Wonder Woman

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This is the week my book, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism is released upon a waiting and/or unsuspecting world. I’ve got a number of posts to celebrate, all of which will be posted under the “Bound to Be Released” tag.

This is the first; an interview about Marston, Peter, gender, and feminism with Carla Speed McNeil, creator of Finder.
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Noah: Are you a Wonder Woman fan of longstanding? What did (or didn’t) attract you to the character?

Carla: I’m not. I’ve only recently become attracted to super-heroes, I never really understood them as a reader. I thought they were science fiction, and since science fiction progresses from unfolding concepts (at least, the kind I enjoy does), they didn’t seem to be very GOOD science fiction. I’m getting a better grasp on them now, and I find I like the ones that have a blasting-powder mix of realism and fantasy to them, that are weird and dreamlike in ways. The closer a look I take at Wonder Woman, the more she surprises me. She turns up everywhere. I never knew until this past summer that my older sister is a huge WW fan. She’s got the look, too, maybe I’ll use her as a model if I ever draw her.

I know you’re said you’re a fan of the Marston/Peter comics. What do you like about them? Do you have a favorite Wonder Woman comic from their run, or a favorite aspect of those comics?

I like their sheer absurdity. I like their playfulness. I like the fact that Diana is superlative in many ways but is also very, very human. She may be some breed of demigoddess, but she’s also full of passions and humor. The fact that the first thing I saw her do with her lasso was to compel a dignified older Amazon to stand on her head just delights me.
 

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She’s not above-it-all. It’s hard to write White Knights, because our definition of what constitutes a Galahad is so narrow. They’re not allowed to just do stupid things. Labeling nearly all human characteristics “flaws” and shaving them off of your paragons is like trying to make a cake having removed every ingredient.

Also, I am fond of hidden agendas. Not pamphleteering, but deeply-held beliefs and a desire to cast them into fiction. Dickens and Poe would never have written a line without them. Spider-man wouldn’t have been what he was, then or now, without Ditko, and Wonder Woman wouldn’t have existed without Marston’s agenda. He wasn’t unlike the Futurists.

There have, of course, been many other interpretations of Wonder Woman over her years. I plan on digging into them as well. But it’s wonderful to me that she has this time-of-legends quality to her early existence.

Your comic, Finder, plays with gender and drag in ways that are at least somewhat similar to what Marston and Peter are doing. How is your work similar to or different from theirs?

Wonder Woman is a “female man,” a woman from a world of women, living in “man’s world” where she exists as a cultural ambassador as well as an active, energetic person who doesn’t just stand on a box proselytizing. Although the campus evangelists would be pretty damned entertaining with her in the mix. It’s exactly the kind of thing I like to play with. I didn’t realize, when I designed Jaeger, my usual main character, how pretty I’d made him. Not until I realized that I can’t stand using any more than the least suggestion of modeling around his bottom lip, anyway– I step on my colorist all the time. “Don’t give him LIPS! I can’t take him seriously if he’s pouty!” Similarly, I created a “world of women” in the form of an extended family, a “clan,” in which all the members look vaguely like Marlene Dietrich. There are males in this family, but they all look like women too. There is a “world-of-men” clan in which there is a fairly strict division of labor; men are soldiers and cops, women are doctors and nurses. There is still another clan in which all members are attracted to their same sex, and are accustomed to marry only in same-sex pairs, making contractual arrangements for the conception, custody, and raising of children. The permutations are endless.
 

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from Carla Speed McNeil Finder: Voice

 
Marston’s idealized Themyscira was populated only by women. Given how much fun she has in man’s world, I can’t think that he thought separatism was the answer. I don’t know if other Amazons left the island to do the same, and if so, how many. I definitely need to get caught up.

Crotch Dance

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Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder:Voice starts with a beauty pageant — specifically, the Llaverac Clan Conformation Competition, as the text box/announcer tells us. The announcer goes on to explain that the girls are being judged to see if they fit the physical specifications of the Llaverac clan. The candidate being inspected (Jin St. John, we’re told) gets up close to the judges, thrusting her crotch in the face of one elderly woman, which is apparently in accord with contest traditions. Then, suddenly, a bulge appears in her panties. The elderly female judge recoils, and the announcer snickers, “I guess that’s why they call them ball gowns.”
 

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Obviously, Jin has a penis — or, you know, maybe not quite so obviously. I read the first volume of Finder a while back, and so had at least a vague memory that Llavarec gender isn’t always quite what it looks like, but still, I have to admit that I was not at first exactly sure what I was looking at in those images above. McNeil does provide some additional clues in the next pages for the slow of mind…which, as one of the slow of mind who sort of but maybe not quite got the dick joke, I appreciated.

Again, my confusion around the dick is a sign that I’m a little dense. But it’s also, I think, thematized by the comic. The Finder series is broadly cyberpunk, and one of the characteristics of cyberpunk is disorientation — a far future setting where social realities, and even physical characteristics, are so different from ours that it’s difficult to get your bearings. McNeil provides some notes at the back which help a bit…but even those end up often emphasizing the extent to which the world on view here is a mystery. “Can’t remember for the life of me which clan the dude in the suite represents,” is a not atypical author’s note — suggesting that even McNeil herself is not the master of, but rather a bemused tourist within, the world she has created.

In Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick argues that realist fiction is built around the manipulation of knowledge and lack of knowledge to create a kind of unspoken blackmail. The writer writes as if she knows everything in the world she has created, and the reader then pretends that she follows along, and knows everything as well. The reward for acquiescing to the author’s mastery is a sense of mastery for oneself — to acknowledge knowledge is to be the knower. There’s a complicity; a doubled pretense of knowingness.Sedgwick links this to the lines of force and knowledge around the closet, where what you know (i.e., who is gay) and what you don’t know (i.e., who is gay) become a matter of threat, mastery, power, and self-definition.

McNeil’s diffident stance towards her own work in her notes (emphasized again in a recent Facebook comment where she says ” I really had no idea what I was doing as a writer when I first began [Finder]”) seems like a rejection of Sedgwick’s formulation — a refusal of the pact of knowingness between writer and reader. And I think it is a rejection to some degree…though maybe, also, an investigation, or elaboration. Finder:Voice, in this reading, is deliberately about knowledge, about narrative, about the closet, and about the way people negotiate all those things, or try to.

The book’s protagonist, Rachel, is a Llaverac (and how do you pronounce that, anyway?) entered in the beauty pageant/conformation contest. Despite the fact that her father is not a Llaverac, she seems to be doing well, and seems like she has a chance to win, or at least make the cut to be accepted into Llaverac clan, with resulting honor, wealth, power, and the opportunity to share those things with her family. Before the final competition, though, she is robbed, and loses her hereditary clan ring — which means she’ll be disqualified unless she can get it back. The bulk of the story is devoted to her search for Jaegar, Rachel’s mother’s boyfriend, on whom Rachel has a longstanding crush, and who is an expert at finding lost items.

In his essay about Finder:Voice, Richard Cook points out that Jaeger functions in the Finder series in general as a hyperbolic lodestone of masculine competence and cool. The search for him, then, is in part a search for the penis or phallus. Rachel wants him in no small part because she wants to be him. She sees herself as incompetent; or as she puts it “I am weak, there is something basically unable in me.” Jaegar represents for Rachel not only her knight in shining armor, but her wish to become that knight. Part of her wants the ball gown — but part of wanting the ball gown is the hope that wearing it will mean she gets balls.
 

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Wanting the phallus seems, at least, fairly uncomplicated — who doesn’t want power? And yet, the bulk of Voice is dedicated to demonstrating that balls are elusive, and that even when you find them it’s not always exactly clear what you have, or how to use it. In fact, you could almost see the book as a series of more or less false or confusing revelations about genitals. There’s Jin’s suddenly visible penis at the book’s beginning, of course. Then Rachel’s mom Emma tells her that her non-Llaverac dad is not her real dad; instead she’s the daughter of a Llaverac, Lord Rodzhina.

Rachel tries to get help from Rodzhina, but he refuses her because he thinks she’s incompetent (no balls.) Then, Rachel tries to get her sister Lynn to help her find the lost ring; when Lynne refuses, Rachel tells everyone who will listen that Lynn has a penis — only to have them laugh at her, because, yeah, they already knew that.

Finally at the end of the book, Rachel is allowed into the competition after she blackmails Rodzhina by threatening to reveal that he is not a man at all (which means, tangentially, that he is not her father.) He’s often helped get girls through the competition by claiming they were his illegitimate children — but he hasn’t actually fathered any children since he’s a woman, and having this made public would therefore cause him embarrassment and difficulties.
 

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Rachel repeatedly fails, then, when she tries to manipulate knowledge about the penis. She only succeeds when she has knowledge about where the penis isn’t. This is mirrored in her search for the-penis-that-is-Jaegar; it’s only when she gives up on finding him that she manages to make progress.
 

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Said progress involves stumbling into a drunken orgy with a bunch of Ascians (a marginalized ethnic group, to which Jaegar belongs) and having them hand over an alternate ring — not hers, but someone else’s. She succeeds, then, by basically losing all knowledge of everything, even (especially?) her body — she blacks out, and doesn’t even seem to be entirely sure whether she had sex or not (at the end of the comic she’s wondering worriedly what she’ll do if she misses her next period.)

So…I don’t think Rachel’s choices are exactly supposed to be normative. This isn’t necessarily a celebration of zen and the art of being fucked senseless (and/or dickless). Rather, it seems like it’s a meditation on the way that gender and knowledge wrap around each other — and on the way that following those wrappings around is a big part of what it means to grow up, or to survive growing up. Rachel succeeds in the beauty pageant — succeeds at becoming a woman — by using tactics traditionally associated with women. These include (as Richard Cook says), gossip, and (as Richard doesn’t quite say) trading on her body in order to gain allies and power and knowledge. (At the end of the book she says, ‘all my life i wanted to be able to do things, fix things, make things happen, without feeling like a conniving whore” — but of course her victory at the end, which gives her power and the ability to do things and fix things, arguably comes about because she’s been a very accomplished conniving whore.) Yet Rachel also succeeds, again, by recognizing where the penis isn’t — and by figuring out that the people who claim to have power over her are as phallusless as she is. And, in turn, understanding that maybe means she’s not so phallusless; she gets to put her finger through that ring, after all.

Lord Rod (which is an interesting name) gives Rachel a speech about fake books, and about how a truly accurate, undetectable fake can be more valuable than the real thing. Judith Butler, in her discussions of gender, says something similar — there is no original of gender, she contends, so copies of gender which show their copiedness, like drag, are more valuable, or truer than the “real” thing.

Rod is himself in doubled drag — a woman who looks like a woman disguised as a man who looks like a woman. And what about Rachel? Is she a woman pretending to be a woman? Is she faking having a phallus or faking not having one? And is she more valuable as a fake or as the real thing? If there’s an answer here, it seems like it’s neither that the phallus is truth nor that the phallus is false nor that there is no phallus, but some indeterminate, situational amalgam of all those things. Do we know Rod has no penis? Do we know Rachel has none? Only because McNeil tells us so. Drawings are what we say they are; their gender is made of knowledge, not bodies. Like ours, maybe, though it’s hard to know for sure. Once the story starts and the future turns to past, how can you tell the dancer from the dance?
 
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Jaegerless

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Back in July, Noah complained that the lead character of Finder, a man named Jaeger, was a “drearily familiar archetype — the tortured tough-but-tender loner with heart-of, whose masculine ability to withstand pain functions as an excuse to subject him to hyperbolic and repetitive sensual violence, just as his mysterious outsider status turns him into a perpetually sexy invader of the quiet homes.” Noah will be glad to hear that that Jaeger never actually appears in Finder: Voice. On the other hand, he’ll be less than thrilled to hear that Jaeger is the driving force behind the plot and the preoccupation of the lead character, Rachel Grosvenor.

Backing up a bit, Finder is a comic series set in a far-flung future where humanity survived a global calamity and built a new civilization that’s quite different from our own. Most of the action takes place in the domed city of Anvard. The city is populated by a dozen or so clans that maintain strict genetic purity, so strict that members of the same clan are often indistinguishable from one another. There is also a pseudo-Native American race called the Ascians, who occasionally settle in Anvard, where they’re treated as second-class residents. Early chapters in Finder focused on Jaeger, a half-Ascian and the titular character, who specialized in finding lost things or people. Jaeger is the typical tough guy who can’t commit – he maintains an on-again, off-again relationship with Emma Grosvenor. Emma’s daughter Rachel has an unrequited crush on him as well.

Emma and Rachel are members of the Llaverac Clan. Llaveracs are composed entirely of beautiful blondes, and even the men are genetically altered to appear as women. In Finder: Voice, we learn that social rank among the Llaveracs is determined in a clan-wide beauty pageant, and the young women who place high in the competition are guaranteed a title, a house, and great wealth. Rachel naturally wants to win the pageant, not just for herself but so she can provide a comfortable life for her mother and sisters.

But things quickly go south for Rachel when she’s mugged and loses a precious heirloom that’s necessary to compete in the pageant. Rachel spends much of the story looking for Jaeger, hoping that he can use his tracking skills to help her find the heirloom. But it’s also clear that Rachel still has a crush on Jaeger, and she dreams that the manly-man will sweep her off her feet and save her from her crappy life.

At first glance, it is tempting to dismiss this as another retrograde fantasy where the young woman is saved by the dashing rogue. Except the dashing rogue never shows up. Rachel effectively saves herself and wins second place in the pageant without Jaeger’s help. And she does this through a distinctly female method: gossip, or more precisely the threat of gossip. Rachel learns a secret about a Llevarac clan elder and threatens to spill the beans unless she’s allowed to participate in the pageant.

So one could read Finder: Voice as a subversion of a male hero/female victim paradigm. But there are several complications to that interpretation. Rachel is stalked by one of Jaeger’s enemies for a good chunk of the story. And different men save her from physical harm on a couple of occasions. And there’s an unexpected plot development where Rachel participates in a drunken orgy with a group of Ascians (who subsequently move into her house).

Finder: Voice can be read as a story of female empowerment, but power is still envisioned as masculine (Jaeger). Rachel achieves great success in a girly way – a beauty pageant –  but she still has to be saved from death by a group of friendly Ascian men. In other words, Rachel is not Wonder Woman or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. At the end of the story, she is still physically weak and uncertain about her future. And unlike the supernaturally tough Jaeger, Rachel is pathetically human.

 And that’s probably why I enjoyed Finder: Voice far more than the earlier stories with Jaeger. In those, the reader is expected to identify and sympathize with Jaeger. But he is not an interesting character, given that he’s a pile of hyper-masculine cliches. But Jaeger is interesting as a pile of hyper-masculine cliches. Rachel wants Jaeger as a lover, but she also wants to be like Jaeger. She wants to be amazingly strong, hyper-competent, and emotionally untouchable. She wants to be Jaeger/Batman/Wolverine. She wants to be all those things that men are supposed to be, and she fails, largely because Jaeger is a preposterous role model. No one is that tough, competent, or untouchable. Instead, Rachel has to settle for being a human and a woman. She has to play by the rules of the Llaverac Clan. She has to be pretty and elegant for the sake of her family’s financial well-being. And she has to rely on others, because she will never have the brute strength to deal with every threat. Rachel is a character who is keenly aware of her limitations and obligations, and her successes are less about overcoming all obstacles than about achieving as much as one can within her limits.

For me, that’s more compelling than another story about a tough loner with a heart of gold.

Everybody’s Daydream, Everybody’s Finder

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Dreams seem like the most private of things, and yet in some ways they’re the parts of us that are least us. With consciousness sidelined, everything and everyone else takes their place in your head. Freud and Jung may not have been exactly right that you can unwind a person by unwinding their dreams, but I think they were correct to claim that dreams aren’t so much a window into the soul as a creepy acknowledgment that the soul you’d thought you’d kept in a safe place is always already in somebody else’s pocket.

In “Sin-Eater”, Carla Speed McNeil’s first sci-fi Finder story, one of the main characters is a woman named Emma. Emma regularly has elaborate, disassociative dreams in which she imagines herself a fabulous princess in a distant realm. Sometimes when she’s gone, she lies as if asleep; sometimes she continues on with her life raising her kids and making her gardening eco-art without thinking or feeling or remembering how she did it.

Emma’s fantasy world is, obviously, a metaphor or analog for McNeil’s world which, like Emma’s, is elaborate and fantastical — a cyberpunk fantasy bricolage filled with talking animals and prophecies and even a venereal fey plague that gives people fox heads. Emma, then, is McNeil; a builder constructing a solipsistic interior castle, worlds within worlds, with emotions flickering across the page like carefully limned expressions across a mirror, the edifice an exercise in joyfully/painfully misrecognizing the self in its all its iterated containers.

But at the same time as Emma spirals inward, she spirals outward as well. The woman with the fantasy-world inside her is not exactly an original idea. I thought immediately of Neil Gaiman’s A Game of YOu, which could well have been an inspiration for McNeil (the timing’s about right, and Gaiman pops up in the copious notes at least once.)

Slightly further afield, I was reminded of Anna Freud’s 1922 essay Beating Fantasies and Daydreams in which she analyzes the fantasies of “a girl of about fifteen.” The girl is, of course, Anna Freud herself, and she traces her own rich fantasy life to a daydream she had as a five or six year old involving an adult beating a boy. Following in her own father’s footsteps, she interpreted these dreams as fantasies about father love; the father was beating someone else, which meant, according to Freud, that “Father loves only me.”

The daydreams were highly sexual, and in a guilty effort to suppress them and simultaneously enjoy them, Freud elaborated long, intricate narratives and worlds. Here’s her discussion of her main hero (she refers to herself in the third person.)

One of these main figures is the noble youth whom the daydreamer has endowed with all possible good and attractive characteristics; the other one is the knight of the castle who is depicted as sinister and violent. The opposition between the two is further intensified by the addition of several incidents from their past family histories-so that the whole setting is one of apparently irreconcilable antagonism between one who is strong and mighty and another who is weak and in the power of the former….

All this takes place in vividly animated and dramatically moving scenes. In each the daydreamer experiences the full excitement of the threatened youth’s anxiety and fortitude. At the moment when the wrath and rage of the torturer are transformed into pity and benevolence-that is to say, at the climax of each scene-the excitement resolves itself into a feeling of happiness.

If you’ve read “Sin-Eater,” the connection between Anna Freud’s fantasies and McNeill’s fantasies should be apparent enough. Like Anna, McNeil’s story is obsessed with abuse — the main character, Jaeger, has a past which is basically one long series of fights, anchored by his decision to become a sin-eater, a sacrificial station that involves ritual beatings. As a sin-eater, Jaegar takes others’ wrath and rage and transforms it into pity and benevolence — a process aided by a mysterious healing ability which allows him to recover even from brain damage.

Moreover, “Sin-Eater,” like Anna Freud, has daddy issues up the wazoo. Emma’s former husband, Brig, psychologically abused her and her three children; Jaegar, who is Emma’s boyfriend, is a kind of substitute father figure — which is complicated by the fact that Brig served as a kind of substitute father figure for Jaegar himself. At one point, Jaegar actually builds a fake apartment for Brig to go to, fooling him into thinking his family is there rather than elsewhere. The displaced family obscures the fact that it’s not the wife and kids, but Brig and Jaegar who are constantly displaced, swapping one for another — as in this mirrored doubling.

Or another example:

In the notes, McNeil says that this character is an early prototype of Jaegar. This early form is nonhuman, obviously — but it also has a beard not unlike Brig’s. And this dual Jaegar/Brig character is definitely an ambivalent father figure; it dispenses wisdom, but it is also connected to the oracle, which on the previous pages made Rachel (Emma’s oldest daughter) reveal her deepest fear. Rachel says her worst fear is “better the devil that you know” — an ambiguous statement that might be a little clearer if she’d said “better the daddy that you know.” Or, to put it another way, her greatest fear is the oracle, who towers over her as if she’s a small child and to which she reacts with a mixture of awe, fear, and petulance.

Again, this frightening oracle transforms into the proto-Jaegar, just as Jaegar takes Brig’s place in the family. The shuttling of father figures in and out puts a different twist on Anna Freud’s interpretation of her dreams. For her, the beating figure is the father, and those beaten are rivals for his affection. But if the father figure can shift from one place to another, why couldn’t he be the beaten as well as the beater? Couldn’t the point be vengeance upon the father by the (daughter identifying with) the father, a bid not for the father’s favor but for an economy which would grant power over the father to force him to identify with the (beaten) daughter? Father, then, becomes beaten and beater, and the happiness is from switching him from one to another, so that each punishes and then is punished for punishing, a cycle in which the powerful are humbled and the humbled empowered, so daughter is ever daddy and daddy is ever daughter.

Certainly in Sin-Eater the fathers take a massive and almost unending whupping. Brig is tricked, crippled, and finally rendered a howling, slobbering shell of himself; his son Lynn (who sometimes identifies as a girl, and sometimes as a boy), even injects him with battery acid. Jaegar, as we’ve mentioned, is constantly getting beaten up, falling from windows, mutilating himself, letting others mutilate him, and then healing and coming back. Ultimately he takes responsibility for the sins of Brig as well…spiritually changing the bad father to the good father, who apologizes and atones. (Plus there is the added bonus that Rachel can flirt with Jaegar unashamedly; he’s not her “real” father, after all.)

Which is to say, though the different clans and the background notes and the make it feel like a personal construction, “Sin-Eater” ends up as something very like idfic, pulling its power from the same well of chastened Daddy-lover fantasies as something like Twilight.

No wonder, then, that Jaegar is himself in many ways a drearily familiar archetype — the tortured tough-but-tender loner with heart-of, whose masculine ability to withstand pain functions as an excuse to subject him to hyperbolic and repetitive sensual violence, just as his mysterious outsider status turns him into a perpetually sexy invader of the quiet homes. Rachel accuses him at the end of the book of running out on the family because he fears that if he becomes less mysterious, they will reject him. But surely it’s McNeil herself who wants the outsider to be an outsider — she’s the one who made him in all his fascinating outsiderness after all. He’s a hyperbolic caricature of the bad boy who can’t commit; he gets physically ill when he’s cooped up too long, and then has to masochistically damage himself to regain equilibrium. Constantly disappointing and atoning, he’s forever attractively distant and adorably sorry for his distance; always that elusive first love, never the boring…well, daddy.

McNeill’s dreams, then, like Emma’s, are of genre — the most secret recesses of her heart are tropes. McNeill certainly knows that; she includes many wry allusions to other cultural touchstones (the Peanuts reference is a favorite especially.) Which would be fine…if I hadn’t run out of patience with the elusive, invulnerable Wolverine and all his sexily ambivalent loner brethren some time back. I don’t want to love him; I don’t want to enjoy his torment; I just want him to go away. But there he is, the angsty grain of sand at the center of the gloriously dreaming bivalve. Alas, I’m afraid that particular irritant’s been scraping my psyche too long already for me to really appreciate the pearl, however lovely its fashioning.