Trish Out Of Water 1

Do you suppose those screens were meant to have scenes from the interior, and they just forgot?

FLOUNDERING

Oh, I so very wanted to like this comic! Nearly managed it, too.

I mean, they practically had me at the title. I love a good (or bad) pun, and I found the wordplay for the predicament of a young woman who feels perpetually out of her element endearing.

Then, there was the refreshing almost-normality of our heroine, visually. Yes, she’s implausibly gorgeous – she’s a comic book chick after all – but she’s wearing an adequate amount of reasonably practical clothing, sensible shoes, her breasts don’t defy gravity, and her eyes and lips are not enhanced to the point of monstrosity. Furthermore, she’s not so spineless that you can see her boobs and her butt in the same panel.

Coming from Aspen Comics, home of Fathom, Soulfire, and innumerable other implausibly-behootered, skimpily-clad womanoids doing their thing in string bikinis or wisps of seaweed and coral, this was practically equivalent to dressing like a nun! (And I don’t mean a “naughty nun”, either, but one of the real mean ones. With the hobnailed boots.)

The "alt.cover" doesn't give much away about the content, either; but it does at least say something other than, "Hey, here's a woman."

It starts with Trish Powell going about her everyday business, getting ready for school, listening to her parents arguing. Most of the issue passes in a pedestrian but passably entertaining manner as we meet Trish’s friends, get a sense for her “normal”, before that normal is irrevocably shattered by her discovery that every so often, when she feels a bit stressed, weird stuff starts to happen to her body (no, not “ladytrouble” – other weird stuff). She gets a bit wibbly and watery. Literally watery – her extremities start to liquefy.

So, far, so Buffy; despite the rather flat and repetitive artwork of Giuseppe Cafaro – who might have made the slightest attempt to differentiate between Trish and her Mom by something other than hair colour –  the story manages to keep your attention chugging along until the final few pages, when everything goes tits-up with a vengeance, not just for our heroine, but for the reader as well.

It’s at this point that Mr Hernandez manages to invoke not one, but two, of the most threadbare clichés in fiction.

First – Trish comes home to find her parents, about whom the creators have spent quite a lot of the issue trying to get us to give a damn, have been horribly slaughtered! Oh noes! Because, you know, dead plot props and vengeance catalysts are much more interesting than relationships with a supporting cast…

Meet the 'rents. Don't get too attached, now...

Then – Gasp-O-Rama – seeking consolation from this trauma, she runs to her so-very-patient and faithful boyfriend, only to discover that he’s shagging her best friend! Who’d’a thunk it?

Cue Trish’s Carrie moment, an incipient tidal wave, and my departure from the book – though I will leave it, and you, with the prediction that Mr. Hernandez, having trotted out two of fiction’s Big Clichés, will complete the trifecta with Our Heroine being revealed to be, oh, I don’t know, lost royalty or some such, and she has to, maybe, go back to her own realm and, gee, whaddya think, put on an implausibly fetishistic outfit of some kind? What are the odds?

I’m just guessing.

Prove me wrong, guys. Please, please prove me wrong.