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The second wave of Minx titles continues
with Ross Campbell's Water Baby. In many ways,
this is one of the strangest books the imprint has produced
to date. It's got some of the best individual scenes
the imprint has produced to date. And yet, and yet...
Here's the outline. Teenage surfer
Brody loses her leg in a shark attack. While she's
still recovering, and plagued by recurring shark dreams,
obnoxious ex-boyfriend Jake shows up to visit. For a
few days. Or weeks. Eventually, Brody packs him
into a car (along with long-suffering best friend Louisa)
and sets out to drive him home and get rid of him. Cue
road trip.
That's the concept. But put like
that, it makes the book sound a lot more plot-driven than it
actually is.
It's really a character-driven book,
which slowly explores the awkward love-hate triangle between
Brody, Louisa and Jake. There are no big
confrontations where anyone has blinding realisations,
merely small, semi-revealing moments that are open to
interpretation. Dotted throughout the issue are
Brody's shark dreams, surreal sequences which Campbell also
allows to be mildly cryptic.
Let's start with the positive.
Campbell's a great artist, willing (and able) to use subtle
expression to hint at what his characters are feeling below
the surface. The personalities are well defined and
clearly well thought through. The opening shark attack
sequence is paced brilliantly, and does one of the best jobs
of building menace that I've seen in comics. The dream
scenes are visually inventive and compellingly surreal.
That's a decent list of good things.
And before I move on to consider where it doesn't quite
work, let's be absolutely, abundantly clear about this.
There's a lot of very, very good stuff in Water Baby.
Okay? Right, let's move on.
There are two problems here. One,
aside from Louisa, the characters are irritating. I
just don't much like them, and at the end of the day, I
don't greatly care what happens to them. Oh, and they
laugh at their own jokes. Incessantly.
Two, the plot falls apart towards the
end. Now, your typical road trip story goes something
like this. Two or three characters go on a trip, they
encounter stuff on the way, they learn something, their
relationship is changed by the experience, the end. In
this case, it would usually be "our relationship is
self-destructive and I have got over the loss of my leg."
It's a classic old formula and it usually works.
But what we have here is a story where
nobody seems to learn anything along the way, and nobody is
changed by the experience. There's no character arc,
there's no development, there's no real sense that any of
this particularly matters. What we have is a bunch of
characters going around in emotional circles. There's
a grand gesture in the closing pages which attempts to serve
as an ending, but it isn't a culmination of anything.
Perhaps Campbell was going for a
traditional road trip plot and missed the mark by a mile.
Perhaps he was deliberately backing off from traditional
story structure in the name of realism. Perhaps we're
even meant to see the ending as downbeat and vaguely
meaningless, because we have more insight than Brody does - which would take
the story into odd territory for a young adult novel, but
you never know. But whatever the reasons, he ends up spending the
second half of his book studying his characters rather than
moving them anywhere - well, except physically. The
story peters out and sputters to a halt.
So, this comic is less than the sum of
its parts. And that's frustrating, because it has some
really excellent parts. Most readers, I suspect, will
find the ending weirdly hollow and the story unsatisfying.
But if you can live with the minimal non-plot - a big if,
I'm warning you - then there's plenty of interest in this
book.
Rating: B-
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