The Drowning Reflection
(Digital)
That title is extreme poetic drift. In reality, this is just what happens when you come of age reading Wetworks.
I was 14 when Image Comics was founded. One of the neighbor boys who lived on the street behind me lent me a few issues of Spawn (which, in retrospect, is kind of a gross comic to start reading when you're a 14 year old girl-shaped human; but wait, it gets worse!) and it was the first time I’d ever read an actual comic book. From Spawn I learned about Cerebus (See? Worse*). When I was 16, I learned that if you go to a comic book store, they'll just let you wander around and look at things and then put all the comics you want in a bag for you to pick up once per month. Because I was a teenager of taste, and because my wanna-be punk teen friends thought the comic store was dumb so I was rushed, I just picked out the shiniest shit on the shelves.
Hence: Wetworks. Not the most nuanced title in comics history, but if you wanna see extremely shiny violence, it’s the best bet. Teen me thought Whilce Portacio was a god among men. Adult me is still pretty fond of him.
I love comics, but I’m not very good at drawing them°. I’m also not good at collecting them, actually. I often buy things just because they look cool. I swear I’m not a shallow person and there are some things I do or love truly because of their meaning! I promise I contain untold depths! But not when it comes to shiny things and comic books. And when those two topics merge, my capacity for mindless, mouth-gaping adoration is of divine proportions. I’m fine with that. It feels nice to love things.
* Cerebus is written by Dave Sim, who is famous for writing, drawing, and publishing the longest running independent comic in history. He’s also infamous for hating women so much that an issue of Cerebus included a plot to kill all the women, except the hot ones, who were to be kept in a fucking zoo and it WAS NOT the most misogynistic shit he had written or would go on to write.
° Being not very good at drawing comics has never stopped me from drawing comics. I only pull it off when they’re little three-panel guys, and even that doesn’t have a high success rate. I don’t care.