What if you created a biographical comic following one woman from her birth to her death? And because she obviously doesn’t understand language as a baby, all the dialogue will be gibberish at first?
Chester Brown does love to set a challenge for himself, but Underwater turned out a bridge too far. Autobiographical stories about learning to wank? Fine. Having a protagonist with Ronald Reagan for a penis? Great! Issues upon issues of indecipherable text? Not so much. The art may not have helped either, with all the characters bald and barely looking like human in that first issue. Underwater lasted eleven issues before he abandoned it for the easier challenge of creating a series about Canadian folk hero Louis Riel.
I only got this first issue, probably a year or two after it had been published (in 1994). In the mid-nineties I moved to Amsterdam to go to college there. Not unsurprisingly, that was also my taste in comics broadened out from just reading superheroes. Partially this was due to me subscribing to the Comix-L mailing list, but that’s a story for another time.
The nineties were also the “golden age” of Canadian autobiographical cartoonists: Julie Doucet, Seth, Joe Matt and Chester Brown and I started reading all of them. Yet, as it was for most people, Underwater was still a bit too avant garde for me…
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