McNeil mostly drew "Dream Sequence" in a swirling, elaborately crosshatched style, to mimic its chaotic stream-of-consciousness narrative. The seventh and most recent "Finder" collection, "The Rescuers," is thematically concerned with inflexible boundaries, and its layouts are brutally geometrical. Even so, every few pages McNeil pulls off some kind of visual tour de force: a ritual in which Ascian girls, drawn with flowing chiaroscuro, try to call on a benevolent spirit to possess them; a dark forest scene whose setting is nearly obliterated by charcoal smudges; and especially the story's conclusion, where the narrative literally implodes with a sequence in which panels following most of the plot threads get tinier and tinier until they're crushed into illegibility. (You can work out what's actually happened, but it's McNeil's way of drawing attention to the parts of her story that are more important.)

Constructed around a set of events loosely inspired by the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's baby, "The Rescuers" is named in tribute to the Margery Sharp book, or maybe the Disney movie, or both. It's a mystery story in which culture clash negates the possibility of the crime ever being solved; an upstairs-downstairs story in which the upper and lower classes in the same household have such different mind-sets that they can barely understand each other; a story about stolen children in which nobody gets rescued.

The setup is that the year-old son of a baron of one of the city of Anvard's lower-ranking clans has been kidnapped. As it turns out, kidnapping rich people is so common in Anvard that it's considered borderline legal, if troublesome, and the baron's wife sends out a televised message to the kidnapper, trying to micromanage the baby's care: "He must not be fed chicken, turkey, quetzal, or other bipeds, or risk developing allergies ... if he cries without his stuffed squid, I'm sure we can work something out." Jaeger, though, discovers that the situation is worse than it seems, and that even though he knows who the kidnapper is, local law leaves him powerless to do anything about it. Meanwhile, the baron's estate is being managed by a crew of nomadic Ascians, one of whom, a young woman named Lohena, has just given birth to twins -- a serious taboo in her tribe -- and is trying to figure out how to keep one of them from being put to death before her period of seclusion in the birth yurt ends.

The pieces are in place for something like a happy ending, but things don't really work that way in McNeil's cosmology. Instead, the grinding inability of the story's two central cultures to communicate means that things work out disastrously for everyone. "What kind of people are these??" one Ascian woman snaps about the nouveau riche clan she's serving. "That woman in there, she tried to feed the children animal milk!" The baron and his guests, meanwhile, can't stop condescending to the impoverished, half-starved Ascians: "Oh! How do these native girls stay so slim?" (In an earlier volume, "King of the Cats," a group of Ascians are offered sanctuary in Munkytown, a domed city that's a giant amusement park, as long as they agree to pitch their tents and perform in "Noble Savage Land.") And the ideological core of "The Rescuers" is an ongoing argument between Jaeger and a kitchen maid named Lydia about whether you can "pick and choose parts of a culture to tack on to your life."

"Finder: The Rescuers"

By Carla Speed McNeil
Lightspeed Press
152 pages

Why is that important? Because one major function of culture is determining who can be exiled or killed when resources can't support everyone. The idea of the painful division between the drowned and the saved recurs throughout "The Rescuers"; at the beginning of the story, a teenage Ascian boy has just shot a couple of male lizard-bird creatures that invade game birds' nests, and an older woman tells him that he's wasted his bullets: "If there are too many of anything, it's the girls you have to kill." The drowned ones aren't the same all over, though; there's no deeper chasm between cultures than their ideas of who deserves to be spared, and whose only hope is to be rescued from a wicker basket by someone from another tribe. McNeil's take on that conflict is framed as a science-fiction detective story, but its tone is as primal as folklore.

Douglas Wolk's writing on comics and graphic novels appears the first Friday of each month in Salon Books.

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