KEY WEST BED & BREAKFAST, Key West Lodging and Accommodation Guide: Florida Traveling Guides: Water Baby (Minx)

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
With her deadbeat boyfriend back in town, it doesn't take Brody long to realize that a shark bite might just have been the best part of her summer.

Brody is an unstoppable surfer girl who conquers the waves . . . until she meets her match: A giant shark that bites off her leg and changes her life forever. To make things worse, hallucinations and nightmares plague her, and just when Brody thought it was safe to go back in the water, her deadbeat shark of an ex-boyfriend, Jake, returns. Determined to make her life awesome again, Brody takes off on a furious road trip of vengeance, dragging her friend Louise and Jake along for the ride.

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars

Nice Little Slice November 1, 2008
Loved it. Ross Campbell pencils a sour yet savory slice of american pie. See inside the world of a couple of hot surfer chicks after one of them loses a leg in a shark attack! Imaginative yet rooted in the mundane world of monetary monotony. The art is dope. The girls are cute, and I found it to be a perfect read sitting outside my local coffee shop today eating a cheesy tomato sandwhich and sipping some oolong tea. Great cover too. Fans of Local,American Virgin or Brian Wood should dig. Like my cheesy tomato..... Mmm Mmm Good!

2 out of 5 stars

flawed, but entertaining July 30, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful

Like the other Minx comics, "Water Baby" features an unconventional and fairly strong heroine, whose unique experiences (in this case, being partially eaten b a shark) and takes on life create a singular world. Unlike the others I've read (though I haven't read all of them), "Water Baby"'s story is meandering and seems to lack some basic storytelling elements, like a climax or a solid resolution. The characters are basic at best, and lack much backstory. This wasn't always a problem, although I personally wondered why someone as fiery as Brody was ever attracted to someone as slimy as Jake in the first place.

The main issue I took with this book was actually the artwork. While Campbell has a firm grasp on female anatomy--sometimes too firm a grasp--his male characters are poorly drawn. The character of Jake, for instance, is blocky and flat, with stiff and poorly executed positioning. The female characters, on the other hand, are much more natural seeming and far less awkward. That being said, it seems as though Campbell is far less interested in creating male characters than he is with creating female characters. The females, Brody, Louisa and Chrissie, are rendered with utmost care, with shading and many a detail, while Jake's bod is mostly delineated with flat straight lines, and his shading is minimal. Whiel Jake's characterization could also be called "flat," the difference in his stylization only serves to undermine the comic's artistic integrity.

Even though they are tough, dirty and decidedly unfeminine in the conventional sense, Campbell still manages to focus what is in my opinion far too much attention on their bodies, featuring most of them in skimpy clothing, and zooming in on their breasts, leaving them bra-less and unnaturally perky. In the car scenes, for example, the characters of Brody and Louisa are both shown with their seatbelts neatly bisecting their breasts, causing them to bulge outwards. Reading it, it seemed to me to be more of a statement about the type of woman Campbell finds sexually attractive than a testament to the personalities of his characters. Even their sexualities seem to be created for a voyeuristic and male gaze.

Writing-wise, the story starts out strong, but somewhere along the way it gets lost and eventually sort of peters out. The story of Brody's attack by the shark, the loss of her leg and her physical and emotional recovery is far more interesting than the plotline involving ex-boyfriend Jake. She has several inventive and nicely disturbing dreams involving shark-human hybrids and such. It would have been nice to have seen the shark dreams and the recover process figure in more prominently, but it seems to get lost in the end.

It's not a bad book, just not the most well-thought-out one I've read. Of the Minx comics, I preferred the Plain Janes and Kimmie66, mainly because of their more solid storylines. That being said, "Water Baby" is an entertaining read, if a flawed one. To me, it was an attempt at something without the knowledge of how to become that something, and written without the patience or care to figure it out.

2 out of 5 stars

Water Baby Sunk July 16, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful

I'm a big fan of Campbell's distubing zombie story, Abandoned, and his mysteriously haunting Wet Moon. Water Baby left me quite bored. Campbell's artwork is great. His figure work has a presence and weight to it. His gray tones add dimension. However, the story seemed to meander and finally go nowhere. The Minx line of graphic novels seem to be aimed at teens and twenty-somethings. I guess I may be too old to fully appreciate the complexities of this story.