Lost Girl
"Lost Girl" is a graphic novel written by Nabiel Kanan, first published in 1999 by NBM Publishing. The story follows a young girl named Beth as she navigates a summer vacation with her family, exploring themes of sexual awakening, boundary testing, and personal identity. The narrative opens with Beth encountering a mysterious girl, P.T.O., whose presence leads her to question her own desires and societal expectations. Throughout the plot, Beth grapples with her feelings of longing and rebellion, particularly as she witnesses and engages in experiences that challenge her innocence.
The artistic style of "Lost Girl" is characterized by clean black-and-white illustrations, emphasizing the emotional depth of the story over vibrant colors. The novel's structure, featuring a mix of grid and single-cell panels, enhances key moments, allowing readers to delve into Beth's psychological journey. Kanan's work is noted for addressing complex and sensitive issues, encouraging other creators in the comics field to tackle similar themes. Overall, "Lost Girl" serves as a poignant exploration of adolescence and the quest for self-discovery.
Lost Girl
AUTHOR: Kanan, Nabiel
ARTIST: Nabiel Kanan (illustrator)
PUBLISHER: NBM
FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1999
Publication History
Nabiel Kanan’s Lost Girl was first released as a graphic novelin 1999 by NBM Publishing. The same publishing house reissued the novel in 2001. Kanan had previously published Exit (1996) and followed up Lost Girl with the critically acclaimed The Birthday Riots (2001) and The Drowners (2006).
Plot
As Lost Girl opens, a girl stumbles aimlessly through the woods. The scene shifts to a family, traveling by car to a caravan site for a vacation. Lost, they stop; the parents leave the car to ask directions, while their older daughter, Beth, walks to the local supermarket for some batteries. Beth sees a strange girl sitting on the trunk of a car outside the store. Finding what she needs, Beth proceeds to the register but pauses to witness an encounter between the strange girl and a random man. The girl passes the man a note and leaves. The man, distracted, pays and leaves, throwing the note on the ground. Beth pays for her batteries and, outside, reads the note, signed by P.T.O., which says a naked girl is waiting in the alley for the man. Beth peeks around a corner into the alley and witnesses the strange girl and the random man having sex. The strange girl then steals the man’s car and speeds away. Beth returns to her family, and, after some time, they arrive at the caravan site. During the night, Beth awakens and sees the strange girl peering through a window in her room.
Beth’s family meets up with her friend Caitlin’s family the next morning. Caitlin brings some marijuana and hides it in Beth’s room. The two girls avoid spending the day with their families, saying they will relax at the beach. Caitlin does so, but Beth becomes distracted after seeing the strange girl, P.T.O. Beth follows her deep into the woods and sees her enter a house. After the girl leaves, Beth tries to enter the house but cannot. At the beach together the next day, Caitlin and Beth both find themselves attracted to a local named Paul, who invites them to a party that evening. Paul, interested in Beth, asks Caitlin to help the caterers set up the party while he and Beth leave together.
The next morning, Beth goes to the beach alone. The strange girl appears and tells Beth to follow her to see a patch of flowers in bloom. The strange girl has stolen Caitlin’s marijuana from the trailer. The girls agree to meet the next morning, and both smoke the marijuana. The strange girl returns on a horse, extends her hand, and pulls Beth onto the horse. They ride wildly along the beach and through the forest. The strange girl reveals she lives in a caravan at the site and that she has been looking after the house in the woods while the family to whom it belongs is away. Beth and the strange girl part ways, but not before the strange girl suggests they meet again before Beth returns home with her family. After the strange girl leaves, Beth notices a pair of glasses on the ground. She takes them with her and sees, to her dismay, the same glasses worn by the young girl featured on lost-child posters around their caravan site.
Beth fears that the lost child has been taken by the strange girl and hidden in the house in the woods. She dreams of people searching for the girl and the lost child banging on a door. The next day, though, Beth learns that the child has been found and is safe. Beth visits the house in the woods and learns that the family occupying it has not been away and that no one has been watching their home. Beth and her family leave the caravan site and return home. Beth’s mother asks her to sort through a trunk of old possessions. Beth looks to her open window, through which a series of butterflies enter her room. Meanwhile, Caitlin arrives and asks to see Beth. When Caitlin arrives in Beth’s room, Beth is nowhere to be found. The final cells of the story show Beth walking through the field of flowers she visited with the strange girl. The last scene shows the door that Beth has seen in her dreams; however, the door is now open.
Characters
•Beth, the main character, is well behaved and struggling with the process of maturation, both emotionally and physically.
•P.T.O., a.k.a. thestrange girl, is a character who causes Beth to have a self-awakening. Whether P.T.O. is a real character or a figment of Beth’s imagination remains unclear.
•Caitlin, Beth’s friend, is a rebellious teen who smokes marijuana and becomes jealous when a young man pays more attention to Beth than to her.
•Paul, a local young man, receives attention from both Beth and Caitlin. He favors Beth.
•Anne is Beth’s mother.
•Jack is Beth’s father.
•Sally is Beth’s younger sister.
Artistic Style
Kanan’s artistic style is clean and concise. The careful employment of vertical and horizontal hashing in most panels culminates in an effect that draws careful attention to the plot and the issues Kanan’s work explores. The absence of color requires readers to carefully analyze each panel to fully appreciate the nuances of Kanan’s illustrations, such as the arch of a character’s eyebrow or his or her stance in a given situation.
Most panels contain a grid that includes between six and ten cells; though, in some cases, the panel is one cell. Kanan employs this technique rarely in Lost Girl and does so to emphasize key moments in the story. Only seven pages serve as one-cell panels and capture the strange girl and random man have sex in the alley; Beth and the strange girl alone together on the beach; the strange girl arriving on a horse; Beth and the strange girl riding the horse together; Beth’s father asking her to pose on a donkey with her sister for a picture; the strange girl’s face; and finally, Beth standing alone on the beach before returning home with her family. Each of these moments is symbolic and crucial in demonstrating Beth’s coming-of-age while on a summer vacation with her family.
Themes
Written for a mature audience, Kanan’s Lost Girl explores themes typical of the bildungsroman genre: sexual awakening, testing boundaries, and developing a personal identity. One of the first topics Kanan explores openly in Lost Girl is sexual awakening. When Beth visits the supermarket, her attention is arrested by the strange girl sitting on the trunk of a car outside the store. Beth pays careful attention to the strange girl’s appearance, evidenced by the way in which Kanan structures the panel. In Beth’s first encounter with the strange girl Kanan explores the girl’s body in detail: one cell of the panel provides a view of the girl from behind, and the other two cells emphasize her shapely figure from the front, clothed in only a bikini and wearing a large, dangling cross necklace. The strange girl also smokes a cigarette, which, by the look on her face, intrigues Beth. Beth soon watches the strange girl engage in wild sex with the random man from the supermarket. When Beth and her family arrive at the caravan site, she watches longingly as a man and woman slightly older than her embrace and kiss. She later becomes interested in Paul, an older local boy who, Kanan implies, tries to seduce her. All of these instances combine to poignantly capture the longing for physical contact and pleasure felt by teens navigating the turbulence of puberty.
Another important theme clearly present in Lost Girl is testing boundaries. Beth challenges restrictions that have been established for her and takes opportunities to rebel. The most obvious occurrence of this boundary testing concerns Beth and the use of marijuana. Kanan establishes Beth as an innocent girl who follows the rules. When Caitlin arrives at Beth’s caravan and hides her marijuana in Beth’s room, Caitlin teases her for not knowing a slang term for marijuana. Caitlin then jokingly tells Beth’s parents that she came to buy drugs from Beth, a comment that makes Beth’s parents laugh since they assume their daughter would never experiment with drugs. Beth is irritated by her parents’ response. When she is alone with the strange girl on the beach, she seizes the opportunity to try the drug, likely to disprove the conceptions her friends and family have of her. Kanan reminds readers that simply assuming one will never test a boundary may be all that is necessary to persuade that person to do so.
The crux of Lost Girl is Beth’s struggle to develop her personal identity. The novel opens with a story line about a lost girl; this girl is a double for Beth, who is also lost figuratively. All protagonists in coming-of-age stories feel lost at some point and seek to establish their identities. The strange girl is also a doppelgänger for Beth; though she may be housed only in Beth’s imagination, she embodies Beth’s desires to separate herself from her family and to indulge in more adult behaviors, including sexual encounters and experimentation with illegal substances. Whether or not the strange girl exists, Beth is plagued by dreams about searching for the lost girl, which symbolize Beth’s own feelings about her identity. Kanan also shows Beth dreaming of a door, behind which is the lost girl, who pounds and shakes the door in the hope of being found. Significantly, the final illustration of the novel is the door, only it is open, but leading to darkness. Kanan suggests Beth has finally opened the door and found herself; however, she is plunged into darkness because the person she is becoming is one unfamiliar to both herself and to those who know her.
Impact
Kanan’s risky stories and willingness to confront sensitive issues in his works has made an impact in the comics field by encouraging other writers to explore similar issues unabashedly. His clean black-and-white illustrations remind readers and artists that the strength of a graphic novel emanates from the complexity and beauty of its story, not necessarily from splashes of color.
Further Reading
Clowes, Daniel. Ghost World (1997).
Kanan, Nabiel. Exit (1996).
Thompson, Craig. Blankets (2003).
Bibliography
Gravett, Paul. “Creator Profile: Nabiel Kanan.” Paul Gravett. http://www.paulgravett.com/index.php/profiles/creator/nabiel‗kanan.
“Lost Girl.” Review of Lost Girl, by Nabiel Kanan. Publishers Weekly, January 1, 2003. http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-56163-229-9.
Phipps, Keith. “Lost Girl.” Review of Lost Girl, by Nabiel Kanan. A.V. Club, March 29, 2002. http://www.avclub.com/articles/nabiel-kanan-lost-girl,6301.