By Lisa Fary
I can’t help it. Before Missed Connections on Craigslist, there was the I Saw You’s in The Break, the Washington City Paper, the Tucson Weekly. What ever city I was in, even if just passing through, I’d get the local alt newsweekly and read those ads.
There have been different reasons over the years. In the beginning, I really hoped another FSU meal plan dweeb saw me in the cafeteria eating salad after salad while reading book after book. Or some artsy Washingtonian had seen me wandering the National Museum of Art during my AmeriCorps year.
Later, it became a writing exercise, recreating the moment that spawned the ad. Even later, in the middle of my worst relationship ever, I fell back to hoping I’d been seen, that someone other than the creep I was with had seen me for a split second and decided I was the one.
(Hint: if you’re reading the I Saw You’s for proof of self-worth and desirability because you’re not getting it from the one you’re with, you should probably leave. Thank you, Denise from the Mountain Oyster Club for pointing this out to my 23 year old self).
Now, even though I have my someone, I still get a charge reading Missed Connections. Like this one I saw a couple months after we moved to Philly:
Redhead w/ glasses, green dress @ La Colombe Saturday.
Neither of those girls was my girlfriend.
I’m pretty sure that was for me.
I Saw You is a comic anthology inspired by that guilty pleasure reading. It’s the imagined stories about the people who post those Missed Connections ads and the events that triggered them. They’re funny, they’re creepy, they’re desperate. Some comics outright poke fun and others get to the heart of the loneliness, the desire for companionship and the hope that there is someone out there for us.
I Saw You is funny, sad, and poignant. It’s a great read, even if you aren’t a Missed Connections aficionado.
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Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.
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Lisa Fary's earliest influences are Princess Leia, Rainbow Bright, Astronaut Barbie, and her 6th grade teacher, Ms. Palmer. She's angry that it's 2011 and she still doesn't have a hovercraft, but will accept a jetpack as consolation. That jetpack had better be pink with a rhinestone monogram. 
