Wet Moon Book 1: Feeble Wanderings

by Ross Campbell

Ross Campbell's books are bizarre.  I've enjoyed plenty of his other work, such as Water Baby, and The Abandoned, but had yet to try the work for which he is best known; Wet Moon.

This first volume is both mystifying and a little addictive.  Like the other books, it is centred around a group of female friends who are into the punk/indie scene, and have a pretty amorphous sense of their own sexuality.  Cleo Lovedrop (pictured) is the central character, and she's just about to start college along with her friends.  She moves into a new flat, although she doesn't meet her roommates right away, goes to a club, hangs out, and gets sad a lot.  That's about all that happens, except for the stuff I don't really understand.

There isn't much of a plot.  At one point, it looks like the series might be about figuring out who is putting up signs that say "Cleo eats it" all over the town, but that fizzles out.  Maybe it's about the strange guy that Cleo keeps seeing and then running away from.  Maybe it's about the mysterious Fern, an amputee with interesting piercings and a tendency to stand naked in a lake.

I suppose it's really about all of these things, and is more of a journal of Cleo's life than anything else.  There are hints that something big is going to happen, but it never does (which is kind of what late adolescence is like, isn't it?).  The ending to the volume feels a little arbitrary, like Campbell had decided that 156 pages is all that could be in the comic.  I feel like I'll need to read the rest of the series to come to a full understanding.

And I do really want to read the rest of it (I have the 2nd volume, but none of the later ones).  I found that it was hard to put this book down, as I got caught up in Cleo's life.  Campbell's art is beautiful, and he is just about the only artist in comics who draws realistic women, with a variety of body shapes and sizes (although I do wish he'd draw some who weren't so pierced).  It's hard to know from just this book if the rambling story is purposeful or just the way things ended up, but I'm definitely curious to find out more.