FINDER: Talisman

The three issues collected here have been nominated for a handful of Eisner Awards. They've earned it; McNeil's voice is genuinely original, bursting with fresh ideas on every page. This story is about Marcie, a young girl who loses a beloved storybook, tries and fails to find the book and, struggling with the pain of losing those stories, becomes—or tries to become—a writer. What makes the tale come alive is the ceaselessly inventive social and personal background—a deft mix of family conflict, youthful introspection and canny social observations—against which McNeil tells of an alien world very much like our own. Everything is high-tech, but there's a little bit of magic, too. Reading printed books is "a rather archaic skill, like penmanship," now replaced by skull computers, literally plugged into jacks in the scalp. People are raised in social clans and movies include "mood tracks" that viewers can wire directly into their brains to intensely experience cinematic visuals with all their senses and emotions. Ultimately, this wonderful book is about the mesmerizing power of storytelling itself. McNeil's crosshatched black-and-white artwork is impressively facile, lovely and evocative, capturing the way people's bodies change over time and segueing smoothly through Marcie's fantasies of writing and return to reality. McNeil has a keen eye (and ear) for human interactions and acutely captures the inner lives of her characters. In a notes section at the end, she cheerfully describes how she drew or conceived many of the pages. (Nov.)