Crenshaw's Books & Decks

This was the first graphic books by Canadian renowned cartoonist Bryan Lee O'Malley, the author of the Scott Pilgrim series, who wrote it when he was 24 years of age. 

I have many expectations about this short novel. Firstly, the ratings are over the top on Amazon and Goodreads, and, secondly, I love Scott Pilgrim. Unfortunately, this books falls a bit short, even though there are glimpses of the best O'Malley.

Drawn in a lovely black and white with doll-ish characters, Lost at Sea tells the story of the unplanned road trip, and the musings of Raleigh, a gloomy girl who finds herself in the middle of nowhere in a car with a girl and two guys she barely knows. She is the daughter of divorced parents, not very talkative, and she doesn't feel much either. She thinks that she lost her soul somewhere, and that a cat took it. In fact she sees cats everywhere, even when she sleeps. 

The book is good at capturing how some teens transition into adulthood: how they talk, how they behave, which sort of worries and angst they have, how even the smallest thing is analysed microscopically in their head in search for meaning, to find a connection with the world out there, to fit, to belong. The romantic part also shows the infatuation teens go through, where everything feels so profound and deep, but that is never the case when one looks back. Fortunately for the reader, the book has a sense of humour, which makes the bunch of narrative and character clichés a bit more palatable.

We all have seen and/or read a bunch of coming-of-age movies, books and comics. For any new story to work, it has to go where others have not, to be genuine and authentic but also original and innovative.. Unfortunately, this is not the case of Lost at Sea. In fact, I felt that the novel ended when it had started to get interesting, and the vacuous pseudo-philosophical approach was forgotten and the unknown, the world of  wonder and the unreal appeared: the constant presence of cats, the photos found in the wall of the hotel, are wonderful exploratory narrative element that are just sketched and never developed. Thanks gosh, Scott Pilgrim came out to appease our hunger for something new in the world of teen comics, and came out with a gong. One has also to understand that this is the work of a very young artist, trying to find his voice, so in that regard, reading this book one comes to appreciate how a mediocre first novel can help an artist to clear his vision to produce something as good as Scott Pilgrim. 

I think this might be a very lovely book if you are 13-16 and you haven't read much literature. If you have, well, you might find it a bit irritating.  

I read the book in an electronic edition for Comixology. The rendering is fabulous and uses Comixology versatility at its best. A truly wonderful reading experience.