When I was younger, my family went on a fair share of road trips. I don’t always know that it had more of a motive than that my father wanted to escape the city life and spend days on a lake fishing. It was “the simple life,” the one where you fed squirrels and made dinner over a stove. We had s’mores and around sunset sometimes watch the bats fly over the lake. I’m sure that if I was more like John Muir this experience would’ve opened an environmentalist side to me, driving me to visit every one of California’s amazing lakes and rivers.
Instead, I mostly remember those hours spent in the back of a car. Sometimes we listened to Louis Sachar's “Holes” on audiobook, or did our best to find games. Whatever it was, there was some comfort about being in the backseat of a car. I’ve found similar feelings about being on a train, head against the window, and looking out at the ever-changing landscape. I never had the drive to visit everything that piqued my interest, but for that moment my mind would open up. I would realize how many wonders this state had, how many I would unfortunately never see. But hey, I’ve spent hours on a boat on a lake doing who knows what.
I suppose in the modern age, a road trip is the most direct form of intimacy that one can face. There are hours in stagnation, the constant hum of tires on gravel numbing you. That’s a lot of time to be alone with your thoughts, maybe even music that you put on hoping to escape. There is no commitment to what is left behind and the ambiguity of what lays ahead doesn’t have enough to worry about yet. Your mind is going to drift, and hopefully, it will be at times a meditative and even fulfilling experience. It’s a chance to embrace the strange, so why not go deep?
That is why I first picked up “Lost at Sea” in 2010. As far as family vacations went, they had ended years ago before I entered high school. Bryan Lee O’Malley was about to team up with Edgar Wright for the cult classic Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) and I had clamored through them eagerly seeing what I’d argue is a quintessential Millennial narrative. I wanted more, and suddenly there was his first comic, comparatively modest in stature and featuring a story that wasn’t even a 10th as ambitious. “Lost at Sea” was about that time in a backseat on a road trip, in search of clarity both of geography but also the mind.
More than the Scott Pilgrim series, I’ve returned to “Lost at Sea” whenever I’ve needed centering. When I was younger, I dreamed of making it into a short film because I connected with it so much. There was power in how insular the journey was, managing to comment on something so emotional and spiritual, bringing in these insecurities of youth where the protagonist is on a car trip home with strangers she met by accident. In every way she doesn’t feel like she belongs and what will ultimately come to pass is the feeling that once she opens herself up, the world will begin to look like a friendlier place.
I’ve always empathized more with female protagonists more, and this was one of the essential texts of my early 20s. I was taken in by how much she worried about being unworthy of love, of desiring the validation of those around her. O’Malley had a gift for making her introversion compliment the others, talking nonstop in a car and singing loudly. There’s that Generation X/Canadian sarcasm that punctuates the awkward setbacks with excellent humor. When they discover that their journey from San Francisco to Canada finds them making a complete loop, it adds a surreal sense of dislocation. Where are they? What’s going on? Will they ever get home?
Upon rereading it in 2021 after turning 32, I felt like certain details became clearer. She was insecure for a handful of reasons that was not unlike my own journey. It’s one that you don’t fully understand until certain conclusions are made, maybe in adulthood though possibly sooner. This time around she came across as autistic finding difficulty communicating with the outside world. I for one am selective of what I tell strangers, afraid to reveal my true self to someone in fear that they will judge me poorly. At the time I was fresh out of high school and early in my college experience. Even if I had made friends, the performative nature of trying to be what others wanted only highlighted how much I connected with her.
To the outside characters, she is an anomaly. She is the quiet one who simply observes her surroundings and takes in the discomfort of extroversion. Had she disappeared, most of the outside narrative may not have been effected. It’s the type of aspect that O’Malley does very well and captures how difficult it is for autistic people to feel like they belong. Even when they receive compliments, there is difficult accepting it because they have become so used to being judged, needing to be perfect. With a scattershot brain, she takes the audience through a journey that gives depth to her own insecurities, at times driven from a divorced family and a father who doesn’t seem to love her as much.
Being 21 at the time, I admit that I was lost at sea in my own proverbial way. It, unfortunately, is how I may describe most of my 20s as I found my career failing to match what I had hoped. As it stands, my recent reconsideration around what type of writer I want to be makes me ask just what I’m doing with my life. To others I may be living a “successful” life in that I’m writing what I want, but in a capitalist society that equates success with financial sustainability, I’m doing it completely wrong. I experience imposter syndrome, sometimes feeling like an idiot for not being halfway to my goal as people a dozen years younger. There is the reality that I’m also proud of their accomplishments if just because I know how cathartic it must feel to follow your dream and be recognized for it.
Another thing that stands out about this read are details that I had ignored the previous times. Whereas you can argue that I interpreted her as a coded autistic character that displays signs ranging from wearing noise-canceling headphones to being hyper-aware of small details (i.e. the cats), there is one crux that fits the whole puzzle together. It isn’t a throwaway reference either. It genuinely explains the relationships in her life.
Early on in the story, she reveals that she was put into a gifted class. While there’s deflection and argument that it was poorly thrown together, it comes to symbolize something akin to her closest bonds.
Especially for the autistics who were diagnosed later in life, there is that trope that we are all “former gifted children.” While gifted as a term isn’t immediately suggesting neurodivergence, it’s easy to see the connection. It’s a polite alternative to words like touched or disabled, where you want to endear language to make somebody feel better. For all that I know O’Malley intended “gifted” more from the savant standpoint, of someone great at math or music. After all, autistics have special interests that they obsess over. While I don’t get the vibe that the protagonist has one that has given her an exemplary advantage, it still is something that is meaningful to her. Still, given that she believes that she has no soul (claiming her mother sold it for success), there is reason to argue that she is neurodivergent just by how much of an other she sees herself as, misunderstood even by her own family.
Most of all, the people she meets in the gifted class are the people she’s most obsessed with throughout the story. There’s her best friend who has disappeared over time. She has a boyfriend who also has gone away, leaving her with the concern that she in some ways pushed her apart. She notes how alive she feels when talking to them online – another autistic trait in that vocal conversation is much more difficult than written text. For the most part, the audience doesn’t get a lot of insight into these moments, but it’s clear that her world has a different way of connecting to others. It isn’t one achieved while sitting in the backseat of a car. There needs to be time to overthink every last thought.
Which is what “Lost at Sea” does best. It conveys the internal world of a woman with so much turmoil about her own identity. To the outside world, she is masking, eager to not draw attention to herself. Even as O’Malley incorporates perceptively supernatural elements the story is centered on her view of the world. At one point there is a diner stop where she sees a picture that looks just like her. It’s a mystery that’s never fully resolved but adds mystery to the bigger world. Even the use of cats as a concealer of her soul has a deep irony in that she is allergic to cats; itself an act that should be seen as affection but gives her insecurity as it draws the owners away from her.
As the old cliché goes: the journey is the friends we made along the way. On the first page, the people she is traveling with are strangers. There’s very little to connect them outside of a shared goal of returning home. For most of the first half, the journey is expository and in her head. It’s the feeling of having your head on the window and just reminiscing on everything that comes to mind, often not in order. It’s the intimacy that comes with eventual trust, of needing to be vulnerable. Even the end where she looks to the sky and imagines her loved ones looking at the same sky somehow gives her comfort. We may be alone for now in the universe, but somewhere and somehow we’ll be guided back to each other.
Growing older, the idea of road trips has become different as I put more agency in how things are planned. I’ve driven half a day by myself from Arizona to California and there’s something comforting about it, the freedom of being able to control your own path. In a sense, I feel lost, in need of finding something familiar, but there’s also something to seeing something new, giving you a chance to think about something else. I would love to have my own “Lost at Sea” with a group of friends, finding someone that I have a newfound bond with. By the end of O’Malley’s tale, they’re still not home, and yet the conflict is perfectly resolved. Who even wants to get home anymore? Why not just enjoy life with people who make you happy?
I love what O’Malley did with this comic and it’s among my favorite books. To me, he’s one of the few voices who understand Millennial existentialism a bit too well. While “Lost at Sea” lacks the depth of world-building of Scott Pilgrim, I think it’s much more emotionally satisfying. His tenderness accentuates the universal feeling of loneliness and gives it a clever spin. Considering that it’s turning 20 next year, I hope for some great retrospectives to be written or at least someone else to comment how personally it touches them. Between this and “Seconds” (which I hope to write about one day), he is one of my essential writers. He means the world to me and hope other people recognize his brilliance not only at writing fantasy but of the human condition inside of it.
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