Tina is a large woman. She wears enormous glasses, has warts and bad teeth. Martin, a painter, has the horn for her, bad. He has no idea why.

"It's like a grotesqueness I can't help but find really beautiful," suggests Dave Cooper, the Ottawa artist who created them both in his celebrated comic series Ripple. "The biggest inspiration I get is going to the mall and looking at all the white trash. It just blows my mind."

Dave has been drawing since he was 11. He worked professionally through the 1980s, and finally became a comic legend during the 1990s, when he had his epiphanies at the mall, found his voice and created mini opuses with names like Suckle and Crumple (which was about a helpless young man gradually realising a secret cult of lesbians were about to eliminate the male race).