(Fantagraphics Books) $4.95 each

Little is more privileged in American literature than the search for self, the more so when the self goes expat and looks back at her country from a comfortable distance. Kerouac, Burroughs, Bowles--part of the appeal is the chance to shed your ugly-American suit, to go native and see a side of life that tourists never see. Americans, even abroad, never lose the great dream of insiderness.

They also never really shed their American-ness, no matter how vigorously they try. Jessica Abel's wonderful La Perdida (a serial in four parts, with two already published and an extra scene online at www.artbabe.com) explores this kind of well-meaning pilgrimage while still noting how essentially wrongheaded it is. Carla, a young half-Mexican American, travels to Mexico City on a vaguely defined search for her roots; "Somehow I thought I would like them better than my Anglo ones," she says, and you like her right away. She shacks up with her sort-of ex-boyfriend Harry, who has committed himself to Burroughsian bohemian entitlement: He's rich and wants to be a writer ("I'm trying to capture my impressions of the city, of the people in writing," he says. "I still don't know what final form it's going to take"), but he never writes anything. He also doesn't know any Mexicans; his pompous (and hilarious) rationalization is that "it might sully my clear impressions. I think there's a purity to my approach."

Carla is uninterested in such a blinkered existence. She falls in with a group of Mexicans, sees every sight in the city, togs herself out in traditional Mexican clothing, and starts dating a Mexican boy. But what Abel understands--and communicates so well, with her deft, bright drawings and light-handed text (really, she's as good a writer as she is an artist)--is that Carla's version isn't much more honest than Harry's. When she visits Frida Kahlo's house, she can't reconcile the powerful female symbol she holds the artist to be with Kahlo's admiration for Stalin, and for that "fat frog" Diego Rivera. Her solution: "I sort of tried not to think about him too much."

Abel has compassionately put her finger on the problem of American identity: It's impossible to lose even if (especially if) you can't say exactly what it is. It certainly has something to do with wanting to be downwardly mobile--when Carla expresses a passionate wish to reject the advantages she was born with, her communist friend Memo has nothing but scorn for her idealism: "Why do you reject them? Are you stupid? You can live like a queen!" Memo takes her to task for everything--for living in a house that's too big, for pretending to be poor, for being blind to the privilege she automatically assumes as an American. At the end of Part Two, Carla breaks down, wondering what she can do to live honestly and authentically, and the answer is, of course, that she can't.

One of Abel's great talents is her ability to bestow dignity on characters who do the wrong thing for the right reasons. In her long-running Artbabe series, Abel's characters are always on the hunt--for love, for connection, for a sense of place. Here she's attempting something harder, a coming-of-age story in unfamiliar territory, an inner life struggling to find its way around in the outer world. La Perdida only seems simple; it's actually sharp, complex, and devastating.