It just—radically reframed the way I thought of pretty much everything. The way I approached hobbies. My willingness and ability to experiment and learn. What I gave myself permission to try, and to enjoy and find value in.
Also, the character in that panel, Lynn Grosvenor, is my favorite character in the whole series and wonderfully gendercomplicated in ways that are both closely linked to the world of the stories and deeply relatable if you are me.
Ha! Just said this the other day at fencing! After a weekend of helping my brother move and basically no sleep I was exhausted and knew I was in no shape to be fencing. But... anything worth doing is worth doing badly.
Probably, with the qualifier that I am very aware that me loving something does not mean that it will be everyone's bag.
It's a sprawling, multigenre series of stories set in a really stunningly well-built world.
Ironically, part of what I love most about Finder is that it's incredibly hard to pin down or describe succinctly. Its creator calls it "aboriginal science fiction," which is probably the best genre umbrella for it, but it's got fingers in a whoooole lot of pies.
One of the coolest things about Finder is the endnotes: in addition to commenting and dropping tidbits about the world and story, Speed exhaustively catalogues references and influences, which is incredibly rare and incredibly valuable.
A second vote for giving it a go. Great art, great characters and lots of jumping on points and standalone stories if you just want to dip your toe in first. Plus Carla Speed McNeil is an absolutely lovely person too.
ooooohhhh it’s her! She’s been sort of in my orbit for a long while, like she’s friends with a few friends of mine, and in the same corners of Comicsdom that I’m (increasingly inexplicably) connected to, but I’ve never actually read her work.
It’s a single-creator sci-fi comic by someone who has the large-scale sense of how things interact needed to do good worldbuilding, and also a strong sense of how people behave, and also the writing and artistic chops to pull off subtle character moments.
It involves some of the best, most meticulous, and wildest worldbuilding I have ever encountered, paired with just blindingly good story and characters.
I may be off topic, but my writing buddy says she wants to fail, over and over again, until she's a really good writer. It's one of the bravest things I've ever heard.
I've heard that line elsewhere, but it's good.
I'm average at a bunch of things that I love but it beats not doing them at all.
I make a (modest) living from what I'm best at, which isn't a passion, but more of a random specialized skill.
I used a reading order that you gave on Tumblr a while ago and began with Talisman, then read from the beginning, and it found some of my favorite stories. Talisman in particular blew my mind.
and
"The difference between and amateur and a professional… a professional believes if a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well. An amateur believes if a job is worth doing, it very well may be worth doing badly."
Robert Littell, The Amateur (1981)
