By Brian Lee O’Malley (Oni Press)
ISBN: 978-0-932664-16-4
You’ve no doubt heard that appallingly clichéd phrase “it’s about the journeyâ€?
Well, sometimes it actually is…
Having got that off my capacious chest, I can whole-heartedly recommend this moody, enticingly sensitive and charming not-coming-of-age road-trip argosy by Bryan Lee O’Malley, whose Manga-tinted Scott Pilgrim tales of an adorable boy-idol idle slacker seemed to encapsulate the tone and tenor of the most recent generation to have invented sex and music and growing up confused…
Lost at Sea is a lovely lyrical look at a self-confessed outsider, couched in terms of a quasi-mystical mystery and rendered in an utterly captivating, boldly simple style simultaneously redolent of childhood misgivings and anticipatory tales of horror and imagination.
High School senior Raleigh is a passenger in a car slowly meandering its way back to Vancouver from California. She doesn’t really know Stephanie or the boys Dave and Ian. She only met them because dippy Stephanie never deletes any numbers from her cellphone and pocket-dialled her by coincidental accident just moments after Raleigh missed her train home. She had been enduring an unfortunate visit with her dad and his latest woman near San Francisco…
As the Canadian kids had a car and were heading back north, somehow, although a social misfit and practical stranger, Raleigh ended up travelling homeward with them…
Even though they all go to the same school – Sturton Academy – the kids are not really like her. They weren’t hot-housed or sent to “gifted†classes and they still have their souls…
Raleigh lives with her mum and continually misses her best friend, who she hasn’t seen in four years, six months and 24 days. She also has a secret internet boyfriend in California, (the real reason for visiting Dad and his new lady) and is very confused and lonely after travelling to meet darling Stillman….
She lost her soul in 9th Grade when her mother sold it to Satan in return for being successful, but the girl can’t quite remember why it was put into a cat. Ever since then cats seem to crop up everywhere she goes, even following her, and she can’t tell if she’s crazy or imagining it all…
Naturally, Raleigh is violently allergic to cats…
However when she finally loosens up and tells Stephanie her satanic secret, the boisterous wild child admits to seeing them too and suggests they should catch them and see if they can be made to cough up that stolen soul.
Dave and Ian are game too…
Expressionistic, impressionistic, existential, self-absorbed, vastly compassionate, deeply introspective and phenomenally evocative of that monstrous ball of confusion that is the End of Adolescence, Lost at Sea is a graphic marvel which seems, from my admittedly now-distant perspective, the perfect description of that so-human rite of passage we all endured and mostly survived.
Buy it for your teenagers, read it to rekindle your own memories and cherish it because it’s wonderful…
â„¢ & © 2002, 2003, 2005, 2008 Bryan Lee O’Malley. All Rights Reserved.