BY JENNIFER M. CONTINO Ross Campbell's Water Baby is a surfer girl who got attacked by a shark when she was trying to catch a wave. Losing a leg to the beast has been a big adjustment for Brody, but she's trying hard to get on with her life, even if her worthless boyfriend has shown up at her doorstep again and wants to go back to playing house. Campbell's created a relatable tale that, surfer girl or not, you're sure to enjoy reading. He told us what it was like working with Minx, how that was different from TOKYOPOP, and teased his next project.
THE PULSE: When I heard the title "Water Baby" I thought of that old '70s movie that mixed live action with cartoons and was about a boy who discovered a magical place under the water, but I'm guessing your slice-of-lifer has nothing to do with the High Cockalorum, right?
ROSS CAMPBELL: that sounds like a pretty good movie, I don’t think I've heard of it! The name comes from two things: one is from Native American folklore, child-like creatures that live in rivers and lakes and who will pull you in and drown you. The other is from the practice of water birth, where women give birth in a tub of water, and when the baby is born it can breathe underwater through the umbilical cord and has a weird, natural swimming ability.
THE PULSE: We read in the newspapers every once in a while or see on TV a surfer who runs into a vicious shark and lives to tell, albeit most times with some part of their anatomy missing. How influenced or inspired were you by real life surfer girl Bethany Hamilton, who, at age 13, lost her arm to a shark; when you were working on this tale?
CAMPBELL: I'd heard of Bethany Hamilton, yeah, that was part of what got me thinking about the story (that and I wanted to do a comic with a shark in it and girls surfing, a good combo), but I knew I wanted to have the character lose a leg rather than an arm. I couldn’t find that much about Bethany’s experiences aside from basic interviews, so I had to do research elsewhere. I actually tried contacting a couple transfemoral/above-the-knee amputees in hopes of hearing some of their stories, but I never heard back. I guess I wouldn’t have replied to me, either.
THE PULSE: What inspired the characteristics of your lead Brody? Was she based on anyone in your life or an amalgam of people in your life?
CAMPBELL: some of the gross stuff Brody does is loosely based on a few girls I've had in my life over the years. I've known a handful of grubby, letting-it-all-hang-out, skanky, unshowered, nasty, crass, jerk-ass, nose-picking girls who played important roles in my life in the past, the kind of girl who shows up at your door and the only thing you can say is "try some deodorant" and then in response she wipes a booger on your leg. The book was originally going to be much raunchier and grosser with much more profanity and overall vulgarity, it was going to be me writing about these girls from my life, and there's still a lot of that in the book, but it did get toned down a lot. I guess it's good to see that people still seem to be repulsed by the characters. But aside from her specific vulgarities, most of Brody’s personality is made up from scratch. I find that a good mix of both make for the best characters.
THE PULSE: Brody really seems like a tough as nails type of gal, why is she letting her worthless ex-boyfriend Jake take advantage of her hospitality?
CAMPBELL: I'll leave that one up to the readers!
THE PULSE: How is Brody different from the typical weak woman who needs a guy around to make her feel worth that we usually see letting any and every parasite take advantage of? She doesn't come off as that type when you first meet her in Water Baby, but then she does kind of let Jake just walk all over her ....
CAMPBELL: hmm, I don’t think I should answer that one, either, I'd rather the readers draw their own conclusions and interpretations of Brody’s actions.
THE PULSE: Seeing Brody cut off all her hair and tattoo her body after she recovered from her shark attack kind of was like an empowering type of moment in the book. Do you think that's kind of a typical reaction from someone who has gone through such a trauma?
CAMPBELL: I'm not sure, I think everyone reacts to trauma differently, but yeah, some people definitely change their physical appearances drastically when they go through emotional trials or when they’re determined to start a new phase in their lives. I think that holds true for Brody, too, and shaving her head was also some kind of “fuck yeah” moment after her stump has healed and she’s gotten her new prosthetic leg. I think the tattoos are more her being excited about turning 18 (which occurred sometime in the year-or-so interim between the opening shark attack and the rest of the story), which is another type of transformation, reaching such a pivotal age. Looking back I kind of wish I gave her more shark-related tattoos, besides the shark jaws on her butt, to tie the tattoos into her missing leg more. Oh well. Next volume? Hehheh. I think if I had a run-in with a shark like that and I got a tattoo, I'd have to get some kind of shark thing.
THE PULSE: They say, "opposites attract" so what are the most opposite qualities of Brody and Jake that made them find one another in the first place?
CAMPBELL: I'm not sure Brody and Jake are all that opposite at all, I think they’re really similar in very fundamental ways and maybe that’s why they can never get along. I think their constant push and pull is indicative of that; they can never get along because they both want and dislike similar things, they’re both selfish and boorish. I actually had a big sprawling history for Brody and Jake that didn’t make it into the book, all sorts of make-up/break-up stuff and how they keep driving each other insane but keep going back to one another.
THE PULSE: What influenced you the most when you were deciding artistically how to present Water Baby?
CAMPBELL: I don’t know if I was influenced by anything specific. visually, I guess I drew the book with my typical style, whatever incarnation or phase it was going through at the time without any conscious changes; my style usually evolves on its own and I start drawing things differently whether I realize it or not. I try to make every character I draw look different from each other, but I was extra conscious with how to design Brody and Louisa, I wanted them to be really different physically from any character in my Wet Moon series or that I'd drawn before. I don’t know if I succeeded or not.
THE PULSE: I know you've worked on a lot of different characters in comics in your career so far, but how was working with your leads in Water Babies different from Hopeless Savages, The Abandoned or Spooked?
CAMPBELL: I think Brody and Louisa have a similar dynamic to Cleo and Trilby from Wet Moon, but with a more twisted, kind of ambiguously aggressive bent, so I tried to play that up which was fun. I like the dynamic of Louisa being simultaneously repulsed by Brody while also being her best friend. and I hadn’t written anyone as nasty as Brody is, so that was fun, thinking of disgusting things for her to do. I like drawing and writing girls who play a sport/sports or are physically active in some way, and I've never really gotten much chance to have characters like that in previous books for whatever reasons, so having Louisa was refreshing. her fashion style is pretty sporty which was a nice change from my usual stuff, and even though she’s never shown actually doing anything except surfing, I had a lot of fun drawing all her equipment and trophies in her bedroom. if there’s ever a Water Baby 2, it will be mostly about her.
Jake was a lot of fun to write, too, I liked writing his kind of hipster doofus slacker attitude, and him being good-naturedly oblivious to everyone else’s feelings. and I think most selfish characters in my other books are really spoiled and whiny, but Jake isn’t like that at all. and he was also fun because I liked writing when he has those rare moments of sensitivity or thoughtfulness, I like that duality. I think male characters in my other books are typically “nice guys” (with exception of Slicer in Wet Moon), whereas Jake is sort of nice but mostly he’s a douchebag. I should write more douchebag guys.
I think another way the characters are different from my other stuff is that they aren’t very romantic. there’s so much romance in my other comics, people always getting together, but nobody gets together in Water Baby (whoops, spoilers), and I can’t really imagine any of them doing so beyond maybe a brief, casual make-out or something. to me they all seem very averse to romance, but at the same time there’s definitely some stuff lurking under the surface, but stuff that the characters might be loath to acknowledge.
THE PULSE: How has working with the Minx publishers been different than your experiences with TOKYOPOP?
CAMPBELL: Hoo boy, where to begin on that one, haha. I won’t get into much of the details here but I had a pretty crummy experience with TOKYOPOP, which is continuing to this day despite having done The Abandoned three years ago. the individual people at TOKYOPOP are fine, but as a company, they’re not so great, and they bungled up a lot of things on my book like some horrendous layout and design mistakes. DC has been great, my editor there is awesome and everything was a blast working with her and doing the book. I went through two editors at TOKYOPOP, both of whom got fired for various reasons, so I didn’t really get to know either of them at all. one of them tried to get me to draw more “manga-like” and other little things like that, so that sucked. nothing like that at DC, though. I'll admit I wish I could’ve used the F-word in Water Baby, that’s no big deal, but aside from that Minx and TOKYOPOP both were very accommodating,
I feel like in some ways I got away with a lot with Water Baby and The Abandoned, which is satisfying. I think the main difference between the two publishers for me was how closely DC worked with me on the post-production stuff, they were great and didn’t do any crazy muck ups, and if they had I know they would’ve run it past me first, whereas TOKYOPOP showed me proofs, then after I approved it they went in and did all this terrible stuff to the book without me knowing. with DC, I was with the post-production stuff every step of the way, I was into that. I also got to write my own back cover synopsis, while with TOKYOPOP they wouldn’t let me and they wrote their own, which of course turned out to describe things that never happen in the story. it was almost like they hadn’t even read the book, it reads like the synopsis to a different story, yet there it is on the back. anyway, before I succumb and get into everything else that happened to The Abandoned: DC good, TOKYOPOP not so good.
THE PULSE: What kind of feedback have you gotten on Water Baby?
CAMPBELL: Some positive reviews have started showing up, but almost all the advance reviews were horrendously negative. which is cool, I don’t have a problem with it, I even welcome the bad reviews because it’s just two sides of the same coin and I like to hear what different sorts of readers think and why they hate it or like it. and yeah, my stuff isn’t for everybody, so it never surprises me or upsets me when somebody totally hates it. can’t please everyone, right? my friend Dan really loved it, though, if that means anything, ha.
THE PULSE: What other projects -- in or out of comics -- are you working on?
CAMPBELL: Right now I’m working on volume 4 of Wet Moon, which will be out in November from the fine folks at Oni Press. I'm also working on a new zombie book, unrelated to The Abandoned, for a publisher I'm probably supposed to leave unnamed, and I have a couple pitches in at Dark Horse that hopefully will pan out. one is an awesome angsty superhero morality play thing which will be the best thing I've ever done, and the other is a Godzilla-style giant monster series about Australian mutants and teenage orphan hobo street gangs living in the ruins of a monster-flattened city. I'm hoping for one of those in 2009. I'm also thinking about getting some music computer programs and making songs, probably a soundtrack to my self-published Mountain Girl comics.
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