By Brian Lee O’Malley (Oni Press)
ISBN: 978-0-932664-16-4 (PB); 978-1-62010-113-1 (10th Anniversary Edition HB)
You’ve no doubt heard that appallingly clichéd phrase “it’s about the journey”?
Well, sometimes it actually is.
This moody, enticingly sensitive and charming not-coming-of-age road-trip argosy is by Bryan Lee O’Malley, whose Scott Pilgrim tales of an adorable boy-idol idle slacker seemed to encapsulate the tone and tenor of the last-but-one generation to have invented sex and music and growing up confused…
Lost at Sea is a lovely languid and 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 & Ian. She only met them because dippy Stephanie never deletes any numbers from her phone 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 – these 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 really misses her best friend, who she hasn’t seen in four years, six months and 24 days. Raleigh 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.
Raleigh lost her soul in Ninth 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 & 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 far-distant perspective, the perfect description of that so-human rite of passage we all endured and mostly survived.
There was a 10th Anniversary edition, but as far as I can tell no digital edition (yet) but that’s still plenty to be going on with, right? Buy it for your teenagers, read it to rekindle your own memories and cherish it because it’s wonderful.
™ & © 2002, 2003, 2005, 2008 Bryan Lee O’Malley. All Rights Reserved.
Today in 1948, Doug Moench (Batman, Moon Knight, Planet of The Apes, Shang Chi, Master of Kung Fu) was born and we lost the amazing, under-adored Don Heck (Iron Man, Avengers, Batgirl, everybody) in 1995. Reading-wise, 1913 saw the launch of Gus Mager’s Hawkshaw the Detective in 1913, Marge’s Little Lulu in 1935 and Britain’s Lion weekly in 1952. It was also the last episode of Makoto Yukimura’s Planetes in 2004.