Underwater (comics)

Underwater
Fully painted cover to issue #7 of Underwater
Publication information
Publisher	Drawn and Quarterly
Schedule	irregular
Format	Limited series
Genre	Alternative comics
Publication date	Aug 1994 – Oct 1997
No. of issues	11
Creative team
Created by	Chester Brown

Underwater was an alternative comic book by award-winning Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown that was published from 1994 until 1997, when the ambitious project was abandoned unfinished by its creator.

The story was unconventional in that it was told from the perspective of a child who is still acquiring language. The dialogue of the characters is encoded into a "language" that at first appears to be gibberish. As the child matures, the parts of the dialogue start to appear as normal, uncoded English.

The series was unpopular with readers, and Brown gave up on the series after three years, although he has said he may return to it someday.

The story starts with the birth of twin sisters Kupifam and Juz and was intended to follow Kupifam's life up to her death. In the story as finished, she is still left as a young child who is still acquiring language. The "story seems to weave together dreams[...]with events occurring in the external world[...]Virtually every panel exudes a dream-like quality." As the story was left incomplete with Kupifam still a child, it gave the impression that it was about "captur[ing] a state of infancy", but Brown insists it was "about more than just childhood."

In the story (as left incomplete), we see Kupifam and her twin being born, learning to walk and talk, beginning to learn to read, and start to attend school. There are frequent dream sequences, whose beginnings and ends are not clearly separated form the waking narrative, which, along with the artwork, gives the story a surreal feeling. In the cliffhanger that ends the last published issue, we see Kupifam being taken away in a car by her father, with the twins' sister Lafa helping.

The characters are drawn in a style largely inspired by cartoonists such as Frank King and Harold Gray. While they act like human characters, they are drawn in an bald, alien-like style, with exaggerated cartoon features and blank circles for eyes that are reminiscent of Gray's Little Orphan Annie comic strip.