Ross Campbell, Water Baby (DC Comics/Minx, 2008). Paperback. $9.99.
By Alex Boney
I
should admit up front that, of the many reasons why I
bought Ross Campbell’s Water Baby, the primary reason is that the
Discovery Channel’s Shark Week is one of my favorite weeks
of the year. The channel’s advertising was getting me
pumped for a week-long festival of big, menacing fish, and
the cover of Water
Baby grabbed my
interest immediately. The timing of this book’s release was
impeccable. That said, the novel doesn’t have much to do
with sharks. A shark attack does serve as the book’s
initial conceit (and the main character shares a name with
the Amity Island police chief from Peter Benchley’s
Jaws), but the story is more about how a
shark-attack survivor copes with the aftermath. I knew this
going in, of course. I read the blurb on the back of the
book and thumbed through it before I bought it, so I knew
what to expect. My overall disappointment with
Water Baby
isn’t because there aren’t
enough sharks in it; rather, it’s because the first half of
the book set up human hopes and expectations that aren’t
fulfilled.
Water
Baby is about a
surf-punk Florida girl named Brody who, while surfing one
day, has her left leg bitten off just above the knee by a
great white shark. The attack takes place early in the
novel, and the event is every bit as jarring as it sounds
in description. As Brody is recovering from the attack with
the help of close friend Louisa, an ex-boyfriend named Jake
comes to see her and ends up staying in her house. When
Jake overstays his welcome, Brody decides it’s time to take
him back to his home in New York. The second half of the
novel is about the road trip that Brody, Louisa, and Jake
take up the east coast.
If most of this sounds like the plot is designed for and
pinpointed toward teenage girls, that’s because it is.
Minx, DC Comics’ newest imprint, was formed with the
primary intention of providing a westernized, comics-based
alternative to manga and young-adult fiction. (For more on
the Minx project, see the interview links at the end of
this review.) Water Baby has all the requisite elements that make
it an effective and appropriate addition to the Minx
lineup: a rebellious young female protagonist, a loyal (if
enabling) BFF, and an oblivious, leeching ex-boyfriend who
only seems to complicate an already emotionally-difficult
situation.
While I recognize that I’m not the target audience
for Water
Baby, it’s hard
for me to imagine who could find this particular book’s
characters appealing. Jake isn’t rendered with much depth
at all and comes across as a cardboard component character
type. To be fair, he is realistic to some degree; I know
people like Jake. But aloof, empty people don’t necessarily
make for interesting story material. Readers might be able
to relate to Brody’s rebellious, fuck-the-world attitude,
but it’s hard to read her crude and self-destructive
behavior as appealing. Actually, this provides one of the
most interesting dynamics of the book: If Brody hadn’t been
attacked by a shark, I have to wonder if she would be a
sympathetic or compelling character at all. Her closing
salvo against Jake initially comes across as strong and
defiant (as if she’s telling the shark that attacked her to
go to hell), but it can also be read as weak, cruel, and
pathetic.
I didn’t dislike Water Baby. After I put the book down, it was stuck
in my head for quite a while. For one thing, Campbell’s art
is phenomenal. His understanding and rendering of the human
body is quite advanced, and his use of gray-tones in the
black-and-white art adds visual depth to the characters and
settings. Although the road-trip second half of
Water Baby
doesn’t really go anywhere,
the first 75 pages of the book had me hooked. The
characters and plot elements were enough to pull me in, and
I wanted to see how Brody would cope with her attack. In
the first half of the book, Campbell presents frequent
dream sequences in which a shark (occasionally in humanoid
form) emerges from floors and walls to attack Brody or
Louisa. These scenes are visually and emotionally stunning,
and the parallels drawn between the shark and Jake are
interesting. Neither Jake nor the shark is necessarily
malicious. They do what they do to survive without much
thought of who gets hurt in the process. Brody is so
paralyzed and vulnerable after the shark attack that she
continues to allow Jake to hurt her without realizing
what’s happening.
Ultimately, Water
Baby is a story
about a young woman ending a state of destructive
stagnancy. The problem is that the protagonist is so
repulsive that, by the end of the book, the only person I
really want to see happy is her friend Louisa. Brody had
made such a mess of her life before the shark attack that
she begins the story at a disadvantage and doesn’t really
have much to fall back on even if she discards Jake. The
familiar lesson that “we can get through it all if we just
rely on our good friends who are always there for us” is
appealing to any young reader trying to find direction and
cope with difficulty, but it doesn’t fit a character who
seems so determined to repel everyone around her. If
Campbell writes a sequel, I hope it either focuses more on
Louisa or provides a clearer sense of growth and
redemption. Water
Baby isn’t a
failure as a whole, but it did leave me unconvinced and
bothered by the end. The book is interesting because of the
questions it asks and the challenges it presents, even if
the answers and solutions aren’t particularly satisfying.
For more on
Minx Comics:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/25/arts/design/25minx.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=92334