("A Fine And Pleasant Misery"), "Mosquito"

[fiefoe]

I thought that reading about being a long-suffering outdoorsman would be a lark before going on a trip to Yellowstone. Not quite.
Not that Patrick F. Manus isn't funny, or his misery isn't fine, but there's a fundamental disconnect that make me picture his adventures as brightly-colored cartoon episodes. My brain just refuses to understand why people choose to go out there for that in real life.

• For two or three hundredths of a second we passed the glowing cylinder back and forth between us, all the while calmly contemplating the best course of action.
• With a wave of his arm and the magic words "the car's just over that next rise" he can make the whole bunch of you vanish for three days.... (Once lost,) there is also a sense of general disorientation, the first symptom of which is confusion about which side of your head your face is on.
• Most of my panics have been of a solitary nature, but on several occasions I have organized and led group panics, one of which involved twenty-some people. In that instance a utility company took advantage of the swath we cut through the forest and built a power line along it.
  
• Each day you are lost should be recorded by carving a notch on some handy surface. (This procedure should be skipped by anyone lost at sea in a rubber life raft.)
  

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Dan James drew "Mosquito" with his left hand, but that probably isn't enough to explain my bafflement over this largely wordless graphic novel.