The comic: Wet Moon
By: Ross Campbell
Type: Ongoing Graphic Novel Series (At the time of this spotlighting, it's up to Volume 4, so this really only covers volumes 1-4)
Content Rating: R, for language, drug use, frequent (but usually tasteful) partial nudity, occasional violence, and occasional (creatively censored or otherwise alluded to) sex.
Plot: Follows the lives and times of Cleo Lovedrop (pictured above) and her friends, accquaintances, family, and rivals as they deal with their freshman year of college. Wet Moon's overarching plot is very extended and will be hard to truly see until the series completes, I feel--it deals more in chunks of loosely connected, character-driven subplots. However, there's definitely some weeeeiird stuff going down in Wet Moon (the fictional Southern US college town that acts as the series' namesake), and lots of unanswered questions that pop up to slowly be answered, and speculated on until then...how did Fall's father die? What's up with random occasional dream-sequence cameos of characters as zombielike creatures? Why does Fern venture into the swamps late at night? Who is the identity of the local vigilante called "unknown?" What's with the strange art projects Malady's been so focused on? And most recently and distressingly, what on earth is Myrtle's PROBLEM?
Personal thoughts: Wet Moon is essentially a soap opera in comics form: there's tons of characters, it's all very drama-driven, and it's highly addictive, though I like to think it's more well-written than your typical soap. It's certainly not for everyone; many might find the psuedo-goth aesthetic that blankets a lot of the environments and outfit design a bit silly (I personally think Ross does a very good job with it). I'm also a big fan of the art style--Mr. Campbell treads a good line between realism and cartoon, and the ink-wash shading is simple but highly effective. His knowledge of human anatomy is very clearly top-notch. I also love how immensely varied his characters are in personality, appearance, behavior...everything, really. They all feel very human. Cleo's hard to sympathize with at first because she still has a lot of growing up to do, but she shows signs of slowly maturing. Mara starts out as a very two-dimensional Angry-All-The-Time character, but has especially in the last two volumes been getting truckloads of development (Volume three is almost devoted to her specifically) that make her into a much more well-rounded personality. Trilby's boisterous, teasing nature have begun to crack a bit and show her vulnerabilities. And the list goes on. Do be warned that the character design is sort of transient in the first couple volumes, they don't seem to get "locked" until volume three. So if a character shows up looking noticably different before then, just roll with it. It took me a little while to get into it, but once I finally did (somewhere around my second reading of Volume 2), I was hooked.
Holden Out.
1 comment:
this comic has been one of my faves for a while :> I need to get a copy of volume 4!
Post a Comment