Hendricks, Robert – The Disappearance of Gordon Page, Jr.

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The Disappearance of Gordon Page, Jr.

Hey look, Robert is getting into sequential stories! You may remember Robert from the fascinating “Stranger Two Stranger” series where he illustrates those “missed connection” ads on Craigslist, but (as he makes clear in the intro) he’s been wanting to branch out for a while and saw an opportunity to submit a story to an anthology. This story didn’t make the cut, but hey, that’s why mini comics exist! This is the story of a young man who was misdiagnosed at a young age as a schizophrenic and spent years basically living as a vegetable under the wrong medications. Eventually they figured out that he was autistic, he was placed on the correct medications and he disappeared. It’s a heartbreaking story, especially considering the fact that he was most likely trying to get back to his family (who put him in a home in Michigan before moving to Florida, which seems a little callous to me, but they’ve had to live with the guilt of it for 20 years and what do I know anyway). The truly tragic thing about missing persons stories is that if it’s older than a year or so (really, more like six months) then the chances that that person will ever be found are vanishingly small, and Gordon disappeared in 1991. Robert does list a phone number that you should use if you do know anything and hey, stranger things have happened. Judging this as his first (?) foray into sequential storytelling, he does a nice job of getting out all the facts of the story, with quotes from his family (based on an old episode of “Unsolved Mysteries”). It probably didn’t need to have roughly have of the pages as full page spreads when there are only 9 pages in the story, but that’s a minor complaint and it’s not like they were heroic posing pages; you still got snippets of information on them. It’s worth checking out, and I’m curious to see if Robert keeps these kinds of stories going or goes back to his previous series. Hey, there’s room enough for both! $1