Ross Campbell aims for the Suicide Girls demographic with this tale of a hot, bald, tattooed, punker bisexual amputee whose biggest problem isn't her missing leg, it's her deadbeat ex-boyfriend.

176 pages B&W; $9.99

(W / A: Ross Campbell)

The first few pages of Water Baby are just chilling. A woman talks to her friend on the beach. Goes in the water with her surfboard. Falls off. There's a shark. It gets closer. It opens its mouth. It goes for her leg. From the book's back-cover blurb, we knew it was coming, and here it is, right at the start - the shark bites her leg off. She's lying on the beach with one whole leg and one ragged thing that used to be a leg, her lifeblood leaching out onto the sand.

We understand several things. We are in the hands of a comics writer/artist who does suspense well. You almost want to cry "No!" as the Great White clamps its jaws onto Brody's body.

Also, the man can draw. Ross Campbell's renderings of shark-things that coalesce in the subsequent nightmares of our amputee are elegant, tight, and horrific. His characters, starting with Brody, are the focus here, not any sort of clockwork plot. When he draws Brody belching with a foul roar after eating fried shrimp and garlic fries, you almost feel nauseated. When he draws the jealous expression on the face of Brody's best bud Louisa as she watches Brody fall asleep in the back seat of a car against the shoulder of an asshole ex-boyfriend, you recognize that look of envy.

The plot, such as it is, imagines Brody, Louisa, and the aforementioned asshole, Jake, driving all the way up the Eastern seaboard to return Jake to his father's home. It's not a journey any of them particularly wants to be making. It's just that Jake has proven once again to be a total freeloader, sleeping on Brody's sofa, eating her food, paying not a lick of rent, and, the final straw, getting drunk and puking quite liberally around the living room before passing out in his own sick.

Brody has some serious hygiene problems (belching, nosepicking, not showering, and on and on), but this is too much for even her. In a burst of anger she herds the vomit-stained Jake and Louisa into a car for a completely unplanned, lengthy car trip to be rid of him.

Along the way, there's a hot little female con artist / hitchhiker, drawn with all the lewd skills Campbell brings to bear (which, among other barely clad chicks, did make me wonder about DC's new Minx line of GNs—are they being marketed to teen girls, to the Suicide Girl demographic that Campbell apparently thrives on drawing, or to some intersection of the two? See his site, http://www.greenoblivion.com/, for more of his obsession).

And that's about it. Brody's nightmare-filled nights are staggered against the increasingly miserable days of her get-rid-of-Jake quest. You feel a bit like a cameraman on the TV show COPS must, endlessly following semi-intelligent people making bad decisions.

And yet, these are very young adults (16? 18? 20? Somewhere in there, I guess). Making bad decisions is their way of life, right? And a teenage amputee fresh from a shark attack, that much more so, maybe. It's Campbell's grace that he finds, with perfect pitch, moments between characters that ring clearly in the midst of this stumble up the coast. Brody is afraid to rise from the slippery bathtub, so she calls Louisa in to help her. Jake, pretending to want to help, enters the bathroom just to get a peek at his hot, bald, tattooed, punker bisexual amputee ex-girlfriend's naked bod. Lechery, meet altruism. Brody knows Jake is worthless, but she just needs some affection somehow. So even as she drives his sorry ass from Florida to New York, she lets herself wonder if there isn't a nugget of worth inside this lout. Later, a little girl's eyes practically pop out of her head as she stares away at Brody's stump on the beach. Brody makes an ugly face back at her. It's these little moments that carry the book, and teen readers should respond to them.

The missteps here include a main character that's hard to love. One of Brody's typical antics, squatting down to pee in the middle of a rest-stop parking lot, heedless of who might walk by, does not endear her to the reader. Then there's the end of the book, very much a whimper and not a bang.

Campbell has got to be an oddity as a male writer capable of rendering effective, sensitive moments between bisexual punker and goth chicks in words and pictures. If he winds up being considered too hot for Minx, he should still have a long career mining his chosen vein, anomie among the Suicide-Girl set, for another deep-pocketed publisher. | Byron Kerman

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