Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Your weekend reading assignment

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Mike Peterson Published: February 25, 2012 1 minute 4 comments

The Lost Side of Suburbia is a comic because it's at GoComics and … well, no other reason. Actually, it's a serialized, illustrated story. Or, rather, it's a series of serialized, illustrated stories.

And it's brilliant.

But don't click that link yet, because you've got a little catching up to do first.

The current story is so good that, as I've gotten sucked into it, I've been thinking, "I wish I'd posted this when it began. As soon as this wraps up and a new one starts, I'm definitely going to let people know they need to start reading it."

Only the story has now been going since last summer, and it's getting stranger and more compulsively involving. I don't know when it's going to end and I'd just as soon it didn't.

Which is a pretty good reason to just throw in the towel and send you, Dear Reader, back to the beginning, which you will find here, so you can get up to speed and enjoy the rest as it unfolds.

I don't want to include a lot of spoilers, but here are the first couple of pages of a story that some smart publisher, possibly the cartoonist, Kory Merritt, himself, is going to certainly release in book form:

The boys begin to forge a hesitant friendship, with the uptight Rufus not too thrilled about having disruptive, obnoxious Biff come over to his house and invade his life.

But when life begins to get strange, maybe having a strange friend isn't the worst thing in the world. Here's a page from later in the story, as the boys ponder an encounter with a schoolyard ruffian …

Which is kind of creepy and wierd, but only just that.

Where it gets really creepy and wierd is a bit later, when the child nobody can remember is Rufus's little sister, who, one morning, simply isn't there anymore. And nobody in Rufus's family even remembers that he had a little sister.

Here's the starting point. It's the weekend and you have time to do a little reading.

And, Kory, wherever you are, whoever you are, I hope you have an advanced enough version of InDesign or QuarkXpress that creating epubs is easy for you, because this thing has definitely got legs and needs to find a wider audience.

Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.