“…there were a lot of horrendously negative reviews [about Water Baby] in the beginning… Most of them felt not so much the material was too much, but that the characters were depicted way too sexualized. And I think I agree with them, actually. I think I went overboard on the female characters. I’d probably draw them totally differently now if I were to do the book again. I was really concerned and upset about it for a while, too, I thought maybe I’d made a huge blunder by drawing the girls the way I did, and that maybe I was just causing more damage by sexualizing teens along with the media and everything instead of it being me celebrating different body types and different types of beauty. Like, was I just adding to the cesspool I was trying to fight? That sort of thing. I still think it was a mistake but I feel a lot better about it now, and the pendulum has swung the other direction and the book’s gotten some great reviews since.”