JohnLees
Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 11:45 PM
Hello again Clubbers! The subject of this meeting is one of the most interesting, distinctive creative voices to emerge in the comics world in recent years: Canadian cartoonist Jeff Lemire. I first became aware of Jeff Lemire with the launch of a new Vertigo series called Sweet Tooth last year. Some strong reviews and the allure of a cheap price tag on issue #1 made me give the series a try, and I was immediately struck by how totally different this comic was to anything else in the mainstream comic book market. If you can remember my Top Ten Comics of the Decade feature back in Meeting #20, you’ll recall that I ranked Sweet Tooth at number 5 on my list after only 4 issues, so big was its impact on me. And now, with the series recently reaching issue #13, Sweet Tooth remains one of the most consistently brilliant ongoing titles currently on the stands, up there with The Walking Dead, Scalped and Batman and Robin.
I’ll talk more about Sweet Tooth later, but my enjoyment of that series prompted me to - pretty much on a whim during a visit to a bookstore – buy The Nobody and The Complete Essex County, the works Lemire made his name on before landing his own Vertigo ongoing. And it was with reading these that I truly came to appreciate Lemire’s unique creative voice, as I realized that Lemire hadn’t just made a great comic (with Sweet Tooth), but rather had formed his own brand of comics, his own little world within the medium that spanned across genres while retaining many core themes and ideas, and developing its own distinct visual aesthetic. So I thought it would be a worthwhile entry in Comic Book Club to study Lemire’s back catalogue, to identify the key recurring themes and motifs and see what carries through from Lemire’s early indie work into his arrival in the mainstream market. Also, we’ll look at how much of his stories’ effect and meaning are generated by his writing, and how much comes from his art, or indeed whether it’s even possible to distinguish Jeff Lemire the writer from Jeff Lemire the artist rather than accepting them as a single cohesive whole.
As a starting point, we’ll use Essex County, the comic that Lemire first made his name on. First, an apology. Upon the inclusion of The Complete Essex County on the reading list, you may have gone out to buy the graphic novel, only to find yourself faced an almighty, 500+ page mammoth text which, in itself, is bigger than some whole reading lists I’ve compiled for previous meetings. To explain, I felt Essex County was too important a book in Lemire’s bibliography to leave out from any discussion of him, and to include just a single volume of the trilogy would be to miss out on the whole story. And in order to get a sense of Lemire’s evolution as a creator, I felt it necessary to include other works by him rather than solely focusing on Essex County. Besides, I soared through my reading of the book in three sittings – one for each volume of the trilogy – so I didn’t see the reading as being overly time-consuming.
Now, many of the elements that have come to define Jeff Lemire as a creator in the eyes of comic readers have their roots in Essex County. Which is rather appropriate, considering how central the motif of roots is to the story’s meaning: they’re featured right on the cover, with our protagonists from each of the stories tellingly standing on top of a vast network of roots that dominates the page. The visual of the tree is also featured on the blurb and the contents page. The very first image on the first page of Book One: Tales from the Farm is a full-page picture of a cornfield. Young Lester seeks refuge down by the creek, in a makeshift fort built amongst the trees, and at the end hangs up the cape and mask that represent his childhood preoccupations on a tree. In Book Two: Ghost Stories, a move from the farmstead to the big city triggers the gradual withering of Lou’s soul, as demonstrated by Lou’s narration from pages 242-244:
It’s funny, when I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to get off the farm… move to the big city and play hockey. And here I was, but without hockey… and without my youth. They say the city gets in your blood, but that’s crap. The city doesn’t become part of you… you become part of it. It soaks you up bit by bit, year after year. Until you’re just another tiny part of its system… Pumping through its veins, lost in its arteries. And, the longer I stayed, the less I felt like myself… My hearing wasn’t the only thing I was losing… In those days, all I thought about was leaving Toronto. But I’d given up that option long before. My path was set now. The city had me trapped in its net… All I wanted was to go home… to Essex County… to the farm…
In Book Three: The Country Nurse, the opening page features repeated shots of a tree branch, which remains the perch of the pivotal black crow throughout. And when the orphanage burns down, it is to the woods where Sister Margaret and the children flee for refuge. Even in the supplementary material, we see how Eddie Elephant-Ears finds comfort and some semblance of the boy he once was by climbing a tree. Trees and vegetation are constantly hovering on the periphery throughout Essex County, casting a shadow over proceedings.
All this culminates with the reveal of the most important tree of all to the story on page 447: the family tree. It is here that we grasp the full scope of how each of the stories we’ve read are linked, the deep, rooted connection each of these characters have, even if they’re unaware of it. And as the trilogy comes to a close, the double-page spread on pages 454 and 455 underlines the conclusion that, more than any individual character, this is a story of a place, of Essex County, and how much a place can define a person, and shape the lives of the generations that follow. All through the trilogy, we get a sense of history repeating itself. We see it in the central role hockey plays, not just in generations of the same family playing the game professionally, but in how we see kids happily playing the game on the iced-over lake in the present day, just as they were in the 1940s, and also in 1917. And we also get glimpses of it in the ever-present crow, as watchful today as he was in 1917, and in the image of the boy in the flowing makeshift cape cropping up with Lester Papineau in the present day and with Laurence Lebeuf in 1917. In a story so focused on the varying forms of isolation felt by each of its protagonists, this resounding endnote of shared experience manages to be both comforting – in that we can see these characters are not as alone as they think – and tragic – in that many of the characters themselves still fail to realize it.
When I asked my friend – Project Fanboy member, and regular Comic Book Club contributor, Jamie Fairlie – what he thought of Essex County, he remarked that, while it was a great book, he found reading it to be an incredibly depressing experience. Not because of any particularly awful individual incident, he remarked, but because the whole story is laced with this constant feeling of melancholy that became almost unbearable. Much of this melancholy is generated through Lemire’s art. This is done through the heartbreaking imagery he evokes – such as Lou’s face in the moon on page 199, watching down as a younger version of himself is about to make the biggest mistake of his life, or Lou floating under the water on page 126, tears drifting out of his eyes upwards as he gazes on at the childhood versions of himself and his brother. Both visualize the idea of Lou as a helpless observer of his own life, helpless to change anything, desperate but unable to be connected with the life he had before he was alone. But the effect is also created by the very mechanics of Lemire’s art style – the gaunt, yet expressive faces and beady, haunted eyes of his characters, and the expansive emptiness of his settings, as much (if not moreso) in the city as in the country.
It’s not just cartoonists like Lemire that think out their comic stories visually. As a wannabe comic writer myself – albeit one who can’t draw for toffee – I know that I at least think in images as I write a comic script. I’ll visualize a panel in my head, and the panel description I write is my best attempt to paint a picture of what I have in my head with words. When I pass that script on to an artist, often I get something remarkably like what I imagined, and other times it’s markedly different – and in these cases usually an improvement. But still, in creating a comic this way, in collaboration with another creator, my vision as a writer is filtered through my collaborator’s vision as an artist, and the end product is something of an amalgamation of both. And as such, our respective identities can become muddled, to the point where it’s hard to tell where the contribution of one begins and the contribution of the other ends. Just look at writers and artists who frequently collaborate, to the point where we often think of them as almost a single entity. If you forgive the possibly clumsy analogy, we often think of Grant Morrison’s thoughts spoken in Frank Quitely’s voice, or Brian Michael Bendis’ thoughts spoken in Alex Maleev’s voice, or Ed Brubaker’s thoughts spoken in Sean Phillips’ voice: you get the picture, that so much of how we define and respond to a writer’s work comes when viewed through the prism of the artist’s interpretation of it, and so we are almost partaking in an interpretation of an interpretation. But with a cartoonist like Lemire, the thoughts are spoken in his own voice, and as such we must view the aesthetic of Essex County as every bit as integral to the story’s identity at its initial, conceptual core as the narrative accompanying it. As such, we can assume that the mode of storytelling and the ideas explored are as much informed by the visuals as the look of the book is informed by the plot. Essex County is unfiltered Jeff Lemire, and forms the roots of what can be unquestioningly defined as a “Jeff Lemire comic”.
Dwelling on such ideas of authorship brings to mind my studies on auteur theory, and questions on if a film director could take a story originally created by someone else as a novel, and in adapting it, make it unequivocally theirs. Jeff Lemire had a chance to flex these “comic auteur” muscles with his first Vertigo work, The Nobody. The best evidence I can personally submit to affirm the idea that, in this comic book retelling of The Invisible Man, Lemire has made the story his own is that it wasn’t until 39 pages into the graphic novel that it actually hit me this was a retelling of the H.G. Wells classic. This is because, despite all the hallmarks of that story carried over into this one – a mysterious, bandaged man named Griffen (as opposed to Griffin) arrives in a small town and secludes himself away in the local inn – The Nobody is also immersed in the Lemire aesthetic, with the gaunt faces and the sparse locales, and in ideas of isolation, estranged parents and small town life that characterized Essex County.
Indeed, The Nobody carries many parallels to Essex County, even going so far as to revisit the haunting image of the protagonist floating underwater, tormented by images of their past reaching out at them. But Lemire isn’t simply repeating himself, but rather could be said to be building on some of the ideas established in his earlier work, as is suggested by Vickie’s narration on page 42:
When I was nine, the year before my mom left, my dad took us to the city for a weekend. We stayed in a big hotel downtown. I remember staring out the window at the street below. I’d never seen anything like it in my life! There were so many people… so much going on at once! I loved it. When we came back to Large Mouth, everything seemed so different. It felt so small and boring. Mom took off that fall. I wonder now if it was the trip. Was she as restless after seeing the city as I am now? Is that why she left us? Did she need… more?
This makes an interesting counterpoint to the previous quote from Lou’s narration. In that excerpt, Lou was championing the familial embrace of the country over the cold disconnect of the big city, but here we experience Vickie yearning for the bustle and life of the big city over the suffocating stasis of small town life. Far from championing the rural over the urban, Lemire is demonstrating that discontent comes from within. As Griffen says to Vickie, “We always seem to want what we don’t have.” This concept of discontent from within becomes increasingly significant as The Nobody continues, and its distinction from The Invisible Man becomes more clear-cut. In The Invisible Man, Griffin does indeed emerge as the antagonist, a dangerous menace who must be stopped. But in The Nobody, the threat comes not from the external presence of John Griffen, but from the internal, small-minded prejudices of the Large Mouth populace. Once their paranoia and hysteria results in the apparent death of Griffen, their suspicions then shift to the reclusive Mr. Marvel, with the true ugliness of their mindset revealed (“You black bastard!!”) as he too becomes the victim of their violence.
One of Lemire’s most prominent recurring themes – the feeling of being different, the experience of isolation, and the desire for a sense of belonging – is obviously expressed in the invisible outsider John Griffen. But it is arguably expressed even stronger through our young narrator, Vickie. This is really her story – her admission on page 123, “I’m… I’m nobody,” suggests that she could even be the true title character – and the arc of John Griffen serves as a conduit to bring her own dissatisfaction to light, and accompanied by the return of the butterfly (and likely her recollection of Griffen’s comments on how they are able to completely change who they are – something she also desires to do) it is Vickie’s conclusion that ends the story:
I guess Griffen helped me see through everything… through everyone.
And this brings us back to Sweet Tooth. After dipping his toe into the Vertigo waters with The Nobody, Sweet Tooth represented Lemire’s arrival in the mainstream and exposure to a broader audience. It also represents a different kind of storytelling discipline for Lemire, as whereas Essex County and The Nobody were more contained stories, Sweet Tooth is a serialized narrative, which impacts the way it is structured and read. By taking a closer look at Out of the Deep Woods, the graphic novel collecting the first five issues of Sweet Tooth, we can discuss how much of Lemire’s authorship carries over into this new creative environment.
Visually, there is a degree of separation between Sweet Tooth and its predecessors. The look is somewhat more polished and refined, with more detailed characters and settings. The most striking difference of all is the inclusion of full color, an element of the book provided not by Lemire himself, but by colorist Jose Villarrubia. The muddy, washed-out colors feel faithful to the tone evoked by the images, but for the first time our interpretation of Lemire’s work is filtered through the interpretation of another creator, creating a level of distillation. But despite these changes, the basic aesthetic of the series feels familiar: the haunted faces, the desolate landscapes. Though not exactly the same, Lemire’s visual imprint remains intact.
On the surface, the story itself appears to be a radical departure from the intimate small-town dramas Lemire had built his reputation on. Out of the Deep Woods introduces us to Gus, a 9 year old boy with deer-like ears and antlers growing from his head. It turns out Gus is an animal/human hybrid, a new species that emerged in the wake of a global pandemic that has wiped out most of the world’s population. Gus lives in seclusion with his father in a small cabin in the woods, but when his father succumbs to the disease and dies, Gus is left alone. Then the mysterious Mr. Jeppard arrives, promising to guide Gus to a safe haven for hybrids called The Reserve, and takes Gus away from his home and out into the post-apocalyptic world Gus has been shielded from his whole life. Yes, it might seem different from the grounded reality of Essex County, but when you really look at the plot, familiar elements begin to pop up.
Ideas such as isolation, the clash between rural and urban, and the yearning for an absent father figure are here played out on a grander scale, with higher stakes. Rather than simply feeling as if he doesn’t belong, Gus has literally been kept separated from the outside world for his whole life, and is physically and genetically different from the human characters he encounters throughout this first volume. Here, the danger of the big city manifests itself in the form of piles of rotting corpses, and Gus has been told all his life that “Outside of the trees is fire and hell, so we’ve gotta stay here, where it’s safe.” Note again the connection between trees and family and home. Essex County featured a father who was never part of his child’s life growing to regret it and trying to belatedly establish a connection with his son, while The Nobody had a daughter losing faith in her father after seeing the bad things he was capable of. In Sweet Tooth, Gus has to watch his father rot away and die, and bury him. The powerful image on page 15 of Gus standing between the graves of his parents, having just buried his father, is a literal depiction of what Lemire’s other young protagonists have symbolically gone through.
This last idea touches on one of the central themes of Sweet Tooth, one also touched on in Lemire’s other works: the loss of innocence. Gus’ arc in Out of the Deep Woods is propelled forward by a series of choices and decisions he makes that eat away at his innocence. The first, and most pivotal, of these is his decision to leave his home in the woods with Mr. Jeppard. It’s driven by an understandable human instinct, one shared by Lemire’s other protagonists – “I don’t wanna be alone no more.” – but it is a turning point for him for which there is no going back. The more he is out in the world, the more death and violence he witnesses. His guardian and companion on his journey is Mr. Jeppard, a brutal, thuggish man who Gus clings to as a surrogate father figure, unaware of Jeppard’s plans to betray and abandon him. Soon, Gus is not just surviving acts of bloodshed, but is instigating them himself. In the sequence at the brothel, Jeppard is ready to leave, but it is Gus that convinces him to stay and stop the husband and wife that are holding the prostitutes captive from “hurting those ladies”… then watches on wide-eyed as both are murdered.
The conclusion it seems we are to draw is that going out into the wider world has changed Gus, inevitably and irrevocably. A particularly potent depiction of just how much the world has changed Gus comes in this dream sequence:
Here, we see Gus’ guilt over having gone against his father’s wishes and against what he has been told God wants him to do. But we also see Gus’ father – and the simplistic notions of right and wrong instilled in Gus that he represents – rot away before us as Gus challenges him and speaks up for himself. But ultimately, by breaking free from his father’s influence, Gus has been left feeling lost, directionless and alone, as we can see in the last panel.
The final blow to Gus’ innocence comes in the closing pages of Out of the Deep Woods. The idea that there is no Preserve – or at least, that “The Preserve” is far from a safe haven - has been heavily telegraphed for us readers throughout the course of the story. But this does not make the confirmation of Jeppard’s deceit any less painful. If anything, it makes it more painful, particularly as we see how heroically Gus depicts Jeppard in his narration:
Me and the Big Man are riding fast. Real fast… faster than I’ve ever gone before… like we ain’t ever gonna stop. Mr. Jeppard says this is it… the way to The Preserve. Says you gotta pass through this valley to get to a place called Colorado, says lots of bad men sit and wait for animal kids like me to come, so they can steal us before we get there. But the Big Man ain’t gonna ever let them take me. It all seems impossible, like we ain’t got a chance of getting away from these men… but I take one look at the Big Man… at them cold hard eyes from my dreams… and I think maybe, just maybe, we’re gonna make it.
This extract highlights one of the most striking features of Out of the Deep Woods. This is a very grim, dark, violent story, but it is juxtaposed with the narration of a child, who often presents the events happening in the style of a fairy tale or a story-book, thus creating an interesting tension between actual events and how Gus is viewing them. The above narration, for example, is placed over Jeppard in a messy, gruesome close-quarters gunfight with scavengers, involving plenty of splattered brains. Compare this, from the opening pages of the concluding chapter, with the closing pages of the concluding chapter. No action or heroics from Jeppard here. He just stands there, stone-faced, as a tearful Gus is dragged away by Abbot’s men, screaming for Jeppard’s help. Tellingly, there is no narration here, and if memory serves me correct, Gus’ narration has not came back into the series since. Gus’ childlike narration was perhaps a way of cushioning himself (and maybe even us) from the horror all around him, and of preserving the last vestiges of his innocence. But with Jeppard’s betrayal, and the loss of his idea of The Preserve and the hope it brought him, Gus has had his innocence taken from him. His experience doesn’t feel like a fairy tale or a story-book to him anymore, because those have heroes, and a happy ending.
This year at both the Eisner Awards and the Harvey Awards, Sweet Tooth was nominated for the Best New Series award, but lost out to Chew. Now, Chew is another series I love, and that itself is an award-worthy book, but this year I have to say the more deserving winner in my mind would have been Sweet Tooth. Like Chew, it has an original story and a distinctive art style, but Sweet Tooth has that darker edge to it, and more emotion in the telling of the story, that I think will give it more enduring appeal in the long term. One of the things I most admire about Sweet Tooth is what I also admire about Essex County and The Nobody. At a glance, these are not original stories: a family drama, a retelling of The Invisible Man and a post-apocalyptic saga. But each manages to feel unique, by the sheer virtue of them being the creations of Jeff Lemire, who brings a language and aesthetic totally his own to each story that sets them apart from ostensibly similar tales. Essex County, The Nobody and Sweet Tooth are all instantly identifiable as Jeff Lemire comics.
As Lemire’s career progresses, and his growing profile leads to him getting more work writing for the DC Universe proper, I’m interested to see to what extent his superhero work can maintain this feel of a Jeff Lemire comic. I recently bought Brightest Day: The Atom Special, and yes, it’s very different from any of Lemire’s other work. It was jarring at first to see Lemire write a script without drawing the actual comic, as this looks nothing like anything else I’ve read by Lemire. But still, in this ostensibly typical superhero yarn, Lemire manages to slip in some of his recurring themes: we get flashbacks to a young Ray Palmer as an alienated boy, unable to fit in with his family, visited on occasion by an “uncle” who could be his real father. And I look forward to the upcoming Superboy, a superhero series with a small-town setting and a protagonist with father issues that make it a great fit for Lemire. But what has actually impressed me most about what I’ve read of Lemire’s work on The Atom and Superboy is that he isn’t trying to radically alter these characters to make their stories into something more like a “Jeff Lemire comic”, but rather he is adapting his own writing style into a type of storytelling that feels wonderfully fun and Silver Age. However, I saw this picture on Jeff Lemire’s Facebook wall the other day:
Martian Manhunter, drawn by Jeff Lemire? This made me think a Martian Manhunter mini-series written and drawn by Lemire could be a dream project of mine I’d love to see come to pass. It doesn’t even have to be in-continuity, I just want it to happen. An outsider from another world who has lost everyone he ever knew being brought to Earth, and struggling to find his place amongst a different species? Sounds like the makings of a great Jeff Lemire comic to me.
Meeting #35
In the next meeting, the villains take centre stage! One of my favorite aspects of superhero comics has always been the supervillains, and I am usually interested to read stories where the bad guys get a chance to play the leading role. I’ve picked out a few examples of this, and in studying them, we can examine how effective villains are as protagonists, and what balance a writer has to strike between getting us into their heads while still keeping their villainy intact.
RECOMMENDED READING:
The Killing Joke
Alan Moore and Brian Bolland
Lex Luthor: Man of Steel
Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo
Loki
Robert Rodi and Esad Ribic
Meeting #36
Scott Pilgrim VS the World
Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Sadness
Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together
Scott Pilgrim VS the Universe
Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour
I’ll talk more about Sweet Tooth later, but my enjoyment of that series prompted me to - pretty much on a whim during a visit to a bookstore – buy The Nobody and The Complete Essex County, the works Lemire made his name on before landing his own Vertigo ongoing. And it was with reading these that I truly came to appreciate Lemire’s unique creative voice, as I realized that Lemire hadn’t just made a great comic (with Sweet Tooth), but rather had formed his own brand of comics, his own little world within the medium that spanned across genres while retaining many core themes and ideas, and developing its own distinct visual aesthetic. So I thought it would be a worthwhile entry in Comic Book Club to study Lemire’s back catalogue, to identify the key recurring themes and motifs and see what carries through from Lemire’s early indie work into his arrival in the mainstream market. Also, we’ll look at how much of his stories’ effect and meaning are generated by his writing, and how much comes from his art, or indeed whether it’s even possible to distinguish Jeff Lemire the writer from Jeff Lemire the artist rather than accepting them as a single cohesive whole.
As a starting point, we’ll use Essex County, the comic that Lemire first made his name on. First, an apology. Upon the inclusion of The Complete Essex County on the reading list, you may have gone out to buy the graphic novel, only to find yourself faced an almighty, 500+ page mammoth text which, in itself, is bigger than some whole reading lists I’ve compiled for previous meetings. To explain, I felt Essex County was too important a book in Lemire’s bibliography to leave out from any discussion of him, and to include just a single volume of the trilogy would be to miss out on the whole story. And in order to get a sense of Lemire’s evolution as a creator, I felt it necessary to include other works by him rather than solely focusing on Essex County. Besides, I soared through my reading of the book in three sittings – one for each volume of the trilogy – so I didn’t see the reading as being overly time-consuming.
Now, many of the elements that have come to define Jeff Lemire as a creator in the eyes of comic readers have their roots in Essex County. Which is rather appropriate, considering how central the motif of roots is to the story’s meaning: they’re featured right on the cover, with our protagonists from each of the stories tellingly standing on top of a vast network of roots that dominates the page. The visual of the tree is also featured on the blurb and the contents page. The very first image on the first page of Book One: Tales from the Farm is a full-page picture of a cornfield. Young Lester seeks refuge down by the creek, in a makeshift fort built amongst the trees, and at the end hangs up the cape and mask that represent his childhood preoccupations on a tree. In Book Two: Ghost Stories, a move from the farmstead to the big city triggers the gradual withering of Lou’s soul, as demonstrated by Lou’s narration from pages 242-244:
It’s funny, when I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to get off the farm… move to the big city and play hockey. And here I was, but without hockey… and without my youth. They say the city gets in your blood, but that’s crap. The city doesn’t become part of you… you become part of it. It soaks you up bit by bit, year after year. Until you’re just another tiny part of its system… Pumping through its veins, lost in its arteries. And, the longer I stayed, the less I felt like myself… My hearing wasn’t the only thing I was losing… In those days, all I thought about was leaving Toronto. But I’d given up that option long before. My path was set now. The city had me trapped in its net… All I wanted was to go home… to Essex County… to the farm…
In Book Three: The Country Nurse, the opening page features repeated shots of a tree branch, which remains the perch of the pivotal black crow throughout. And when the orphanage burns down, it is to the woods where Sister Margaret and the children flee for refuge. Even in the supplementary material, we see how Eddie Elephant-Ears finds comfort and some semblance of the boy he once was by climbing a tree. Trees and vegetation are constantly hovering on the periphery throughout Essex County, casting a shadow over proceedings.
All this culminates with the reveal of the most important tree of all to the story on page 447: the family tree. It is here that we grasp the full scope of how each of the stories we’ve read are linked, the deep, rooted connection each of these characters have, even if they’re unaware of it. And as the trilogy comes to a close, the double-page spread on pages 454 and 455 underlines the conclusion that, more than any individual character, this is a story of a place, of Essex County, and how much a place can define a person, and shape the lives of the generations that follow. All through the trilogy, we get a sense of history repeating itself. We see it in the central role hockey plays, not just in generations of the same family playing the game professionally, but in how we see kids happily playing the game on the iced-over lake in the present day, just as they were in the 1940s, and also in 1917. And we also get glimpses of it in the ever-present crow, as watchful today as he was in 1917, and in the image of the boy in the flowing makeshift cape cropping up with Lester Papineau in the present day and with Laurence Lebeuf in 1917. In a story so focused on the varying forms of isolation felt by each of its protagonists, this resounding endnote of shared experience manages to be both comforting – in that we can see these characters are not as alone as they think – and tragic – in that many of the characters themselves still fail to realize it.
When I asked my friend – Project Fanboy member, and regular Comic Book Club contributor, Jamie Fairlie – what he thought of Essex County, he remarked that, while it was a great book, he found reading it to be an incredibly depressing experience. Not because of any particularly awful individual incident, he remarked, but because the whole story is laced with this constant feeling of melancholy that became almost unbearable. Much of this melancholy is generated through Lemire’s art. This is done through the heartbreaking imagery he evokes – such as Lou’s face in the moon on page 199, watching down as a younger version of himself is about to make the biggest mistake of his life, or Lou floating under the water on page 126, tears drifting out of his eyes upwards as he gazes on at the childhood versions of himself and his brother. Both visualize the idea of Lou as a helpless observer of his own life, helpless to change anything, desperate but unable to be connected with the life he had before he was alone. But the effect is also created by the very mechanics of Lemire’s art style – the gaunt, yet expressive faces and beady, haunted eyes of his characters, and the expansive emptiness of his settings, as much (if not moreso) in the city as in the country.
It’s not just cartoonists like Lemire that think out their comic stories visually. As a wannabe comic writer myself – albeit one who can’t draw for toffee – I know that I at least think in images as I write a comic script. I’ll visualize a panel in my head, and the panel description I write is my best attempt to paint a picture of what I have in my head with words. When I pass that script on to an artist, often I get something remarkably like what I imagined, and other times it’s markedly different – and in these cases usually an improvement. But still, in creating a comic this way, in collaboration with another creator, my vision as a writer is filtered through my collaborator’s vision as an artist, and the end product is something of an amalgamation of both. And as such, our respective identities can become muddled, to the point where it’s hard to tell where the contribution of one begins and the contribution of the other ends. Just look at writers and artists who frequently collaborate, to the point where we often think of them as almost a single entity. If you forgive the possibly clumsy analogy, we often think of Grant Morrison’s thoughts spoken in Frank Quitely’s voice, or Brian Michael Bendis’ thoughts spoken in Alex Maleev’s voice, or Ed Brubaker’s thoughts spoken in Sean Phillips’ voice: you get the picture, that so much of how we define and respond to a writer’s work comes when viewed through the prism of the artist’s interpretation of it, and so we are almost partaking in an interpretation of an interpretation. But with a cartoonist like Lemire, the thoughts are spoken in his own voice, and as such we must view the aesthetic of Essex County as every bit as integral to the story’s identity at its initial, conceptual core as the narrative accompanying it. As such, we can assume that the mode of storytelling and the ideas explored are as much informed by the visuals as the look of the book is informed by the plot. Essex County is unfiltered Jeff Lemire, and forms the roots of what can be unquestioningly defined as a “Jeff Lemire comic”.
Dwelling on such ideas of authorship brings to mind my studies on auteur theory, and questions on if a film director could take a story originally created by someone else as a novel, and in adapting it, make it unequivocally theirs. Jeff Lemire had a chance to flex these “comic auteur” muscles with his first Vertigo work, The Nobody. The best evidence I can personally submit to affirm the idea that, in this comic book retelling of The Invisible Man, Lemire has made the story his own is that it wasn’t until 39 pages into the graphic novel that it actually hit me this was a retelling of the H.G. Wells classic. This is because, despite all the hallmarks of that story carried over into this one – a mysterious, bandaged man named Griffen (as opposed to Griffin) arrives in a small town and secludes himself away in the local inn – The Nobody is also immersed in the Lemire aesthetic, with the gaunt faces and the sparse locales, and in ideas of isolation, estranged parents and small town life that characterized Essex County.
Indeed, The Nobody carries many parallels to Essex County, even going so far as to revisit the haunting image of the protagonist floating underwater, tormented by images of their past reaching out at them. But Lemire isn’t simply repeating himself, but rather could be said to be building on some of the ideas established in his earlier work, as is suggested by Vickie’s narration on page 42:
When I was nine, the year before my mom left, my dad took us to the city for a weekend. We stayed in a big hotel downtown. I remember staring out the window at the street below. I’d never seen anything like it in my life! There were so many people… so much going on at once! I loved it. When we came back to Large Mouth, everything seemed so different. It felt so small and boring. Mom took off that fall. I wonder now if it was the trip. Was she as restless after seeing the city as I am now? Is that why she left us? Did she need… more?
This makes an interesting counterpoint to the previous quote from Lou’s narration. In that excerpt, Lou was championing the familial embrace of the country over the cold disconnect of the big city, but here we experience Vickie yearning for the bustle and life of the big city over the suffocating stasis of small town life. Far from championing the rural over the urban, Lemire is demonstrating that discontent comes from within. As Griffen says to Vickie, “We always seem to want what we don’t have.” This concept of discontent from within becomes increasingly significant as The Nobody continues, and its distinction from The Invisible Man becomes more clear-cut. In The Invisible Man, Griffin does indeed emerge as the antagonist, a dangerous menace who must be stopped. But in The Nobody, the threat comes not from the external presence of John Griffen, but from the internal, small-minded prejudices of the Large Mouth populace. Once their paranoia and hysteria results in the apparent death of Griffen, their suspicions then shift to the reclusive Mr. Marvel, with the true ugliness of their mindset revealed (“You black bastard!!”) as he too becomes the victim of their violence.
One of Lemire’s most prominent recurring themes – the feeling of being different, the experience of isolation, and the desire for a sense of belonging – is obviously expressed in the invisible outsider John Griffen. But it is arguably expressed even stronger through our young narrator, Vickie. This is really her story – her admission on page 123, “I’m… I’m nobody,” suggests that she could even be the true title character – and the arc of John Griffen serves as a conduit to bring her own dissatisfaction to light, and accompanied by the return of the butterfly (and likely her recollection of Griffen’s comments on how they are able to completely change who they are – something she also desires to do) it is Vickie’s conclusion that ends the story:
I guess Griffen helped me see through everything… through everyone.
And this brings us back to Sweet Tooth. After dipping his toe into the Vertigo waters with The Nobody, Sweet Tooth represented Lemire’s arrival in the mainstream and exposure to a broader audience. It also represents a different kind of storytelling discipline for Lemire, as whereas Essex County and The Nobody were more contained stories, Sweet Tooth is a serialized narrative, which impacts the way it is structured and read. By taking a closer look at Out of the Deep Woods, the graphic novel collecting the first five issues of Sweet Tooth, we can discuss how much of Lemire’s authorship carries over into this new creative environment.
Visually, there is a degree of separation between Sweet Tooth and its predecessors. The look is somewhat more polished and refined, with more detailed characters and settings. The most striking difference of all is the inclusion of full color, an element of the book provided not by Lemire himself, but by colorist Jose Villarrubia. The muddy, washed-out colors feel faithful to the tone evoked by the images, but for the first time our interpretation of Lemire’s work is filtered through the interpretation of another creator, creating a level of distillation. But despite these changes, the basic aesthetic of the series feels familiar: the haunted faces, the desolate landscapes. Though not exactly the same, Lemire’s visual imprint remains intact.
On the surface, the story itself appears to be a radical departure from the intimate small-town dramas Lemire had built his reputation on. Out of the Deep Woods introduces us to Gus, a 9 year old boy with deer-like ears and antlers growing from his head. It turns out Gus is an animal/human hybrid, a new species that emerged in the wake of a global pandemic that has wiped out most of the world’s population. Gus lives in seclusion with his father in a small cabin in the woods, but when his father succumbs to the disease and dies, Gus is left alone. Then the mysterious Mr. Jeppard arrives, promising to guide Gus to a safe haven for hybrids called The Reserve, and takes Gus away from his home and out into the post-apocalyptic world Gus has been shielded from his whole life. Yes, it might seem different from the grounded reality of Essex County, but when you really look at the plot, familiar elements begin to pop up.
Ideas such as isolation, the clash between rural and urban, and the yearning for an absent father figure are here played out on a grander scale, with higher stakes. Rather than simply feeling as if he doesn’t belong, Gus has literally been kept separated from the outside world for his whole life, and is physically and genetically different from the human characters he encounters throughout this first volume. Here, the danger of the big city manifests itself in the form of piles of rotting corpses, and Gus has been told all his life that “Outside of the trees is fire and hell, so we’ve gotta stay here, where it’s safe.” Note again the connection between trees and family and home. Essex County featured a father who was never part of his child’s life growing to regret it and trying to belatedly establish a connection with his son, while The Nobody had a daughter losing faith in her father after seeing the bad things he was capable of. In Sweet Tooth, Gus has to watch his father rot away and die, and bury him. The powerful image on page 15 of Gus standing between the graves of his parents, having just buried his father, is a literal depiction of what Lemire’s other young protagonists have symbolically gone through.
This last idea touches on one of the central themes of Sweet Tooth, one also touched on in Lemire’s other works: the loss of innocence. Gus’ arc in Out of the Deep Woods is propelled forward by a series of choices and decisions he makes that eat away at his innocence. The first, and most pivotal, of these is his decision to leave his home in the woods with Mr. Jeppard. It’s driven by an understandable human instinct, one shared by Lemire’s other protagonists – “I don’t wanna be alone no more.” – but it is a turning point for him for which there is no going back. The more he is out in the world, the more death and violence he witnesses. His guardian and companion on his journey is Mr. Jeppard, a brutal, thuggish man who Gus clings to as a surrogate father figure, unaware of Jeppard’s plans to betray and abandon him. Soon, Gus is not just surviving acts of bloodshed, but is instigating them himself. In the sequence at the brothel, Jeppard is ready to leave, but it is Gus that convinces him to stay and stop the husband and wife that are holding the prostitutes captive from “hurting those ladies”… then watches on wide-eyed as both are murdered.
The conclusion it seems we are to draw is that going out into the wider world has changed Gus, inevitably and irrevocably. A particularly potent depiction of just how much the world has changed Gus comes in this dream sequence:
Here, we see Gus’ guilt over having gone against his father’s wishes and against what he has been told God wants him to do. But we also see Gus’ father – and the simplistic notions of right and wrong instilled in Gus that he represents – rot away before us as Gus challenges him and speaks up for himself. But ultimately, by breaking free from his father’s influence, Gus has been left feeling lost, directionless and alone, as we can see in the last panel.
The final blow to Gus’ innocence comes in the closing pages of Out of the Deep Woods. The idea that there is no Preserve – or at least, that “The Preserve” is far from a safe haven - has been heavily telegraphed for us readers throughout the course of the story. But this does not make the confirmation of Jeppard’s deceit any less painful. If anything, it makes it more painful, particularly as we see how heroically Gus depicts Jeppard in his narration:
Me and the Big Man are riding fast. Real fast… faster than I’ve ever gone before… like we ain’t ever gonna stop. Mr. Jeppard says this is it… the way to The Preserve. Says you gotta pass through this valley to get to a place called Colorado, says lots of bad men sit and wait for animal kids like me to come, so they can steal us before we get there. But the Big Man ain’t gonna ever let them take me. It all seems impossible, like we ain’t got a chance of getting away from these men… but I take one look at the Big Man… at them cold hard eyes from my dreams… and I think maybe, just maybe, we’re gonna make it.
This extract highlights one of the most striking features of Out of the Deep Woods. This is a very grim, dark, violent story, but it is juxtaposed with the narration of a child, who often presents the events happening in the style of a fairy tale or a story-book, thus creating an interesting tension between actual events and how Gus is viewing them. The above narration, for example, is placed over Jeppard in a messy, gruesome close-quarters gunfight with scavengers, involving plenty of splattered brains. Compare this, from the opening pages of the concluding chapter, with the closing pages of the concluding chapter. No action or heroics from Jeppard here. He just stands there, stone-faced, as a tearful Gus is dragged away by Abbot’s men, screaming for Jeppard’s help. Tellingly, there is no narration here, and if memory serves me correct, Gus’ narration has not came back into the series since. Gus’ childlike narration was perhaps a way of cushioning himself (and maybe even us) from the horror all around him, and of preserving the last vestiges of his innocence. But with Jeppard’s betrayal, and the loss of his idea of The Preserve and the hope it brought him, Gus has had his innocence taken from him. His experience doesn’t feel like a fairy tale or a story-book to him anymore, because those have heroes, and a happy ending.
This year at both the Eisner Awards and the Harvey Awards, Sweet Tooth was nominated for the Best New Series award, but lost out to Chew. Now, Chew is another series I love, and that itself is an award-worthy book, but this year I have to say the more deserving winner in my mind would have been Sweet Tooth. Like Chew, it has an original story and a distinctive art style, but Sweet Tooth has that darker edge to it, and more emotion in the telling of the story, that I think will give it more enduring appeal in the long term. One of the things I most admire about Sweet Tooth is what I also admire about Essex County and The Nobody. At a glance, these are not original stories: a family drama, a retelling of The Invisible Man and a post-apocalyptic saga. But each manages to feel unique, by the sheer virtue of them being the creations of Jeff Lemire, who brings a language and aesthetic totally his own to each story that sets them apart from ostensibly similar tales. Essex County, The Nobody and Sweet Tooth are all instantly identifiable as Jeff Lemire comics.
As Lemire’s career progresses, and his growing profile leads to him getting more work writing for the DC Universe proper, I’m interested to see to what extent his superhero work can maintain this feel of a Jeff Lemire comic. I recently bought Brightest Day: The Atom Special, and yes, it’s very different from any of Lemire’s other work. It was jarring at first to see Lemire write a script without drawing the actual comic, as this looks nothing like anything else I’ve read by Lemire. But still, in this ostensibly typical superhero yarn, Lemire manages to slip in some of his recurring themes: we get flashbacks to a young Ray Palmer as an alienated boy, unable to fit in with his family, visited on occasion by an “uncle” who could be his real father. And I look forward to the upcoming Superboy, a superhero series with a small-town setting and a protagonist with father issues that make it a great fit for Lemire. But what has actually impressed me most about what I’ve read of Lemire’s work on The Atom and Superboy is that he isn’t trying to radically alter these characters to make their stories into something more like a “Jeff Lemire comic”, but rather he is adapting his own writing style into a type of storytelling that feels wonderfully fun and Silver Age. However, I saw this picture on Jeff Lemire’s Facebook wall the other day:
Martian Manhunter, drawn by Jeff Lemire? This made me think a Martian Manhunter mini-series written and drawn by Lemire could be a dream project of mine I’d love to see come to pass. It doesn’t even have to be in-continuity, I just want it to happen. An outsider from another world who has lost everyone he ever knew being brought to Earth, and struggling to find his place amongst a different species? Sounds like the makings of a great Jeff Lemire comic to me.
Meeting #35
In the next meeting, the villains take centre stage! One of my favorite aspects of superhero comics has always been the supervillains, and I am usually interested to read stories where the bad guys get a chance to play the leading role. I’ve picked out a few examples of this, and in studying them, we can examine how effective villains are as protagonists, and what balance a writer has to strike between getting us into their heads while still keeping their villainy intact.
RECOMMENDED READING:
The Killing Joke
Alan Moore and Brian Bolland
Lex Luthor: Man of Steel
Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo
Loki
Robert Rodi and Esad Ribic
Meeting #36
Scott Pilgrim VS the World
Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Sadness
Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together
Scott Pilgrim VS the Universe
Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour