CANR
VWORK TITLE:
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.jefflemire.com/
CITY: Toronto
STATE:
COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY: Canadian
LAST VOLUME: CANR 339
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born March 21, 1976, in Woodslee, Ontario, Canada; married Lesley-Anne Green (a sculptor); children: Gus.
EDUCATION:Attended film school in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, illustrator, and cartoonist. Has written for mainstream comics, including Green Arrow, Animal Man, Extraordinary X-Men, Justice League, andMoon Knight. Producer, Secret Path, 2016; executive producer, Essex County (TV miniseries), 2023.
AVOCATIONS:Hockey.
AWARDS:Xeric Grant for Lost Dogs, 2005; Doug Wright Award for Emerging Talent, 2008; Joe Shuster Award for Outstanding Canadian Comic Book Cartoonist, 2008; Alex Award, American Library Association, 2008; Joe Shuster Award, 2013, for “Sweet Tooth” and The Underwater Welder; Best New Series Prize, Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, 2017, for Black Hammer; best digital comic prize, Eisner Awards, 2022, for Snow Angels.
WRITINGS
Author of the Fanboy Fables and Jeff Lemire blogs. Also author of individual comics, including Ashtray #1, 2003; Ashtray #2, 2003; Beowulf #5, Speakeasy Comics, 2006; House of Mystery #18, DC Comics/Vertigo, 2009; Superboy #1, DC Comics, 2010. Author of serialized comic, The Fortress, 2006. Contributor to anthologies and compilations, including Noir Anthology, Dark Horse Comics, 2009; Awesomer: Indie Spinner Anthology 2, Top Shelf Productions, 2009; Dial H., Volume 2: Exchange, DC Comics, 2014; and Adventures of Superman, Volume 1, DC Comics, 2014.
Descender was optioned for a movie by Sony Pictures in 2015. Sweet Tooth was adapted as a television series for Netflix in 2021. Lemire’s “Essex County” graphic novel has been optioned by First Generation Films and is scheduled to air as a mini-series on the CBC beginning in 2023.
SIDELIGHTS
Writer, illustrator, and cartoonist Jeff Lemire was born in Woodslee, Ontario, Canada. He became interested in drawing and in comics when he was just a child, and he was particularly involved in reading superhero adventures, such as Legion of Superheroes by Paul Levitz and Keith Giffen, Teen Titans by George Perez and Marv Wolfman, and Crisis on Infinite Earths. As a teenager, he became interested in comic books published by Vertigo and began to delve into more independently produced books. Among his influences he cites a number of independent works from Europe and South America, and he has mentioned José Munoz, Alberto Breccia, and Hugo Pratt in particular as having influenced his own style of drawing. Domestically, he credits Alex Toth, Joe Kubert, and Carmine Infantino as major influences as well. As a writer, he also draws on the influences of numerous other writers that have gone before him, and he reads widely in an attempt to broaden his mind and his ideas. On the literary side of things, Lemire has credited writers and creators as diverse as John Steinbeck, Alan Moore, David Lynch, Nick Cave, Tom Waits, and Ian McEwan as having influenced his storytelling style.
Comics and Graphic Novels
Lemire’s first successful comic book is Lost Dogs, an extremely limited edition, self-published book that ultimately won him a Xeric Grant, as well as a great deal of attention. The book follows the adventures of Ulric, a giant of a man who is nevertheless a very gentle, family sort, content to live on his farm and work the land with his wife and daughter at the turn of the century in Europe. However, when he takes a trip into the city and is attacked, he finds himself injured and disoriented, with no idea where his family is. Now his intimidating size begins to cause him difficulties, as almost everyone he encounters during his struggle to return home is afraid of him. Lemire follows Ulric through his often painful journey and his struggles until he is at last reunited with the people he loves.
While Lemire has since gone on to write or contribute to several ongoing comics series, he is also the author of more experimental graphic novels. Notable works include the 2012 book The Underwater Welder and the 2014 Trillium: Volumes 1-8. In the latter, Lemire presents a sprawling tale set on Earth and in space. William is a British soldier battling posttraumatic stress in the early 1900s. Nika is a scientist living in the 2900s, a millennia after William has lived. She is searching for a cure to a sentient disease that has driven humankind from its home planet, and she discovers a secret temple that allows her to revise history. William has discovered the temple in his own space-time continuum, and the two form a psychic connection that transcends every known dimension. Letters from alien texts pepper the story, and the illustrations are largely watercolors (a departure from Lemire’s usual sketches). The layout is also experimental, and it tells two narratives, one read traditionally, and the other read by turning the book upside down. William’s and Nika’s stories play out across these dual narratives with parallel plots and recurring details.
Several critics praised Lemire’s experimental approach in Trillium, and a Publishers Weekly reviewer explained: “This book represents a challenge to other creators: the bar for creativity in comics continues to be raised.” An online Spire correspondent observed: “ Trillium is an experiment for Lemire, and it certainly shows. He’s playing with a genre he’s not been too involved with, even if aspects—isolation, romances—are ideas he’s turned to often in his previous work. There are parts of the experiment which offer huge rewards and are massively satisfying for the reader, just as there are sections which labour an idea and offer frustrations with the format. If you’ve not read any of his previous work, this is perhaps the book you should try first, as it’s more immediately inviting to readers than the deliberately blinded central viewpoint of ‘Sweet Tooth.’” Sean Edgar, writing on the Paste website, was even more impressed, asserting that Lemire “knows when to pan the camera back and let his layouts project the vivid imagination bustling inside of him. And that’s what makes Trillium such a special work: this is a piece of an artist pulled from a deep place nobody’s ever seen before. And for Lemire to share that, all we can say is thank you.”
In The Valiant, Lemire collaborates with writer Matt Kindt and illustrator Paolo Rivera to tell the tale of the Eternal Warrior who has protected Earth for ten thousand years. Only three times in this long battle against the evil force of nature, Immortal Enemy, has he failed, ushering in a dark age. Now the Immortal Enemy appears again, but this time Eternal Warrior will be ready for the battle. A Publishers Weekly reviewer termed The Valiant a “classic adventure story that hits all the right notes.”
Lemire teams with illustrators Emi Lenox and Jordie Bellaire on the graphic novel Plutona, targeted at a young adult audience. When five school friends discover the body of Plutona in the woods, they have a difficult decision to make. She is the greatest superhero in the world and they fear for the world’s safety if it is known she is dead. So they decide to keep it a secret, but this secret soon will tear apart the friendship of these five, as each has a different idea of how to proceed. Writing in Express Reviews, Laura McKinley had a varied assessment of this work, noting: “While the adventure through this character-driven story is highly enjoyable, the ending leaves readers flat.”
Lemire serves as author/illustrator of the graphic novel Roughneck, about a brother and sister who must face the truths of their troubled family history in order to move on in life. Derek Ouelette was once a professional hockey player; now he is reduced to washing dishes. When he gets drunk, he beats people up. He was a thug even as a hockey player. When his sister returns to their Canadian hometown, she is on the run from OxyContin addiction as well as a boyfriend who beats her. Together, brother and sister flee north to a hunting cabin deep in the woods to regroup and salvage the wrecks of their lives.
“Atypically, Lemire ends things hopefully,” noted Booklist reviewer Jesse Karp of Roughneck. “The story overall offers tremendous emotional satisfaction.” Similarly, a Publishers Weekly contributor observed: “It is a pleasure to watch Lemire explore the emotional landscape of lives many prefer to forget—and to demonstrate anew how valuable they are.” Likewise, online Comics Journal writer Irene Velentzas commented: “[This] is a journey each one of us has been familiar with at one point or another, which is what makes Lemire’s expression of this particular journey so poignant. Roughneck is a journey which details a minute and intimate conflict that expresses the land of Canada entire and all of its peoples, the desire to move forward step by excruciating small step to find a better future in spite of our troubled past.”
“Essex County Trilogy”
The “Essex County Trilogy” is comprised of three volumes, the first of which is Essex County, Volume 1: Tales from the Farm. Essex County is based on the town where Lemire grew up, and he illustrated many of the buildings from his hometown when working on the comic book. The plot, however, is pure fiction, and tells the story of Lester, a ten-year-old who recently lost his mother to cancer. This leaves him all alone, as he never knew his father, and so he ends up going to live with his Uncle Ken on his farm in Essex County, Ontario, in Canada. Lonely and miserable, he finds himself making friends with the man who runs the town gas station, Jimmy Lebeuf, who used to play professional hockey. Lester’s relationship with his uncle is strained, as they barely know each other and are both struggling in their own way to cope with the loss of Lester’s mother, who was Ken’s sister. Reviewers praised this first installment of Lemire’s series. Keith A. Gordon, writing on the Trademark of Quality website, remarked that “Lemire is a natural storyteller, able to convey a great deal of emotion and thought with a simple line or facial expression.”
Essex County, Volume 2: Ghost Stories is the next installment in Lemire’s series. In this book, Lemire shares the background story of the Lebeuf family, to whom Jimmy was introduced in the previous volume. The ghosts here are purely mental, primarily coming in the form of regrets—steps taken, and other things left undone. Ray Olson, writing in Booklist, opined that “Lemire handles the stuff of a Willa Cather novel with equal poetry, though in images made of lines and spaces.” Lemire ties up the series with Essex County, Volume 3: The Country Nurse.
“Sweet Tooth” Series
Lemire is also the author of the “Sweet Tooth” comics series, which includes Sweet Tooth, Sweet Tooth—Out of the Deep Woods, and Sweet Tooth—In Captivity. The series is set after the nuclear holocaust, and it features animal-human genetic mutants. The hero is a deer-human named after Lemire’s son, Gus. The author discussed his love for postapocalyptic scenarios in a Death and Taxes website interview with Andrew Belonsky: “I’ve been a big fan of post-apocalyptic stories since a young age. … I just love how these worlds take everything—survival, human relationships—and amp it up. They automatically make everything more immediate and raw. The stakes are higher for all the characters. It’s such a great setting and metaphor to draw from and reflect turmoil with your characters.” Lemire also remarked: “I think I like to take ‘B-Movie’ kind of ideas, like ‘The Invisible Man’ or the post-apocalyptic world, but then execute them in a really quiet, human way. Focus on characters, rather than the setting or genre. I try to create an emotional connection within these typically plot-driven genres.”
In Sweet Tooth—Out of the Deep Woods, Gus is being chased down by hunters when he is rescued by Jepperd, a man who has formed a preserve for hybrids. Gus and Jepperd travel the ravaged country together, encountering violence at nearly every turn. Yet, while Jepperd saves Gus’s life more than once, it is not clear that he can be trusted. Assessing the story in School Library Journal, Andrea Lipinski found that it “is often visually stunning and even cinematic.” She also called the book “an outstanding choice for most collections.” Olson, again writing in Booklist, was also impressed, remarking: “Looks like Lemire’s third commanding success in a row.”
Assessing the series in the online Broken Pencil, Brooke Ford found that “what’s most exciting about ‘Sweet Tooth’ is its culmination of some of Lemire’s most frequent artistic motifs. While his illustrative style has changed from a thoroughly gritty and aggressive approach, with panels drawn in thick, intrusive lines, to what in ‘Sweet Tooth’ becomes a gentler style with arresting subtleties, there are compelling recurrences.” Ford then explained: “Most noticeably, Lemire’s trademarks can be found in the faces of his characters, especially in the more brutish ones, their drive to be beaten and punished for an unspoken burden evoked by hands that are consistently wrapped up as fists eager for anger and provocation.”
<start.new>The “Sweet Tooth” series was optioned and produced as content for Netflix, and the finished miniseries began streaming on the online provider in 2021. Lemire, who served as a consultant for a part of the series, noted in an interview with Susana Polo in Polygon, that the version of the story produced for online streaming differed in significant respects from the original postapocalyptic comic book series. “Sweet Tooth has a vastly different tone in its TV incarnation,” Polo stated. “It’s still about a half-human half-deer boy named Gus, who joins a world-weary bounty hunter to venture out of his childhood sanctuary and into a big, dangerous, post-apocalyptic world—but it’s much brighter and hopeful than the 2009 comic series of the same name.” “I do think that there’s still quite a bit of darkness in the show,” Lemire told Polo, “it’s just presented in a different way.” The rethinking required by the production of the streaming show led Lemire to create a new series of comic books called Sweet Tooth–The Return. <end.new>
“Descender” Series
Lemire works with illustrator Dustin Nguyen on the “Descender” series about a young robot and his fellow robots who try to stay in one piece in a universe where androids are outlawed. Bounty hunters scour all planets to destroy them. The first volume in the series, Tin Stars, set in the far future, sees the Harvesters, planet-sized mechanical beings, attacking the United Galactic Council, killing billions. Later, the young robot, Tim-21, a companion to a human boy, awakens to find his family gone and worlds destroyed. Now the survivors develop a distrust for any robot and it seems Tim-21 may have a connection to the Harvesters, so the race is on to destroy him and all his kind. “I got more and more involved and intrigued by this story as it went on. There are a lot of interesting concepts here,” noted an online Chapter 2 Books contributor who further commented, “Lemire does a good job of creating and presenting this universe to the reader.” A Comics Alliance website contributor also had praise, noting: “There’s an epic quality to ‘Descender’ from the get-go, establishing a vast scope and epic stakes in this, the first issue of what’s planned as an ongoing series.
Descender, Volume 2: Machine Moon finds Tim-21 and his companions still struggling for survival in this universe that is determined to eradicate all androids. Tim-21 is brought to the planet Gnish by the robot underground, Hardwire. Meanwhile, on a distant planet, Tim-21’s human brother, Andy, accepts the bounty to hunt Tim-21 down. “This great sf tale belongs in most graphic novel collections,” noted Xpress Reviews writer Eric Norton.
“Royal City” Series and “Black Hammer” Series
In his “Royal City” series, Lemire returns to the realistic realms of story-telling of his “Essex County Trilogy.” In the first volume of the series, Next of Kin, once promising writer Patrick Pike returns to his factory hometown that is in decline when his father suffers a stroke. He is reluctant to do so, with an overbearing mother and brother and sister who still live there. And there is a ghost from the past that still haunts the family—the drowning death decades ago of the family golden boy, Tommy. This death still infects the family, with each member trying to come to terms with his or her guilt over the death. Lemire is both author and illustrator of this series. “Lemire leaves readers eager to see what lies ahead for the troubled Pike family,” noted Booklist reviewer Gordon Flagg of this first installment. Xpress Reviews writer Alger C. Newberry III also had a high assessment, commenting: “It is impossible not to feel something genuine about the trials and tribulations of the Pikes and Royal City.”
Lemire’s superhero series “Black Hammer” begins with Secret Origins, in which the age of such heroes is long in the past. The former superheroes of Spiral City are now trapped in a farming village that is out of time. They lead simple lives, but dream of escaping this strange prison to return once again as champions. Unknown to them, a mysterious stranger is working behind the scenes to bring them back to their former stature. A Publishers Weekly reviewer had praise for this series launch, noting: “If ‘Black Hammer’ lives up to its early promise, it will deserve a place on the shelf right next to the ‘Watchmen’ series.” Similarly, Xpress Reviews contributor Tom Batten felt that Lemire “combines his talent for both high-concept sf and gothic tales of country living to craft a strange and melancholy tale of larger-than-life characters.”
Mazebook
<start.new> As Lemire branched out from telling stories through the medium of comic books into television and film, he says in his interview with Polo, he began to tire of the dystopian future world tropes in which he had found such great success. He did not give up the comic-book format, but later titles introduced stories that were even more character-driven than his previous works. In Mazebook, for instance, the author and illustrator takes up the story of a man named Will who is trying desperately to deal with the death of his young daughter Wendy a decade after her passing. One day, out of the blue, Will receives a mysterious telephone call he believes is from his daughter, and he sets out with a puzzle-map of the city to locate the place where, he believes, she is waiting for him. “The fading memory of his daughter is another thing Will struggles with,” declared Joe Grunenwald in Comics Beat “Ten years on from her death, he remembers specifics about Wendy’s personality, how she dressed, and what she loved, but is unable to bring forth what her face looked like. At other times, Lemire will present a memory Will is having of Wendy in the years before she got sick, only for a panel featuring hospital equipment or Wendy’s frail hand to appear in the middle of the sequence.”
Critics appreciated Lemire’s handling of Will’s story in Mazebook. “Lemire, in his trademark watercolor and loose lines,” stated Booklist reviewer Matthew Noe, “charts a path through Will’s maze of grief.” “The overall atmosphere here is one of isolation, rumination, and a screaming intensity of emotion broiling just under the surface,” wrote Kerry Vineberg in Comics Beat. “If you like cerebral, surreal books that don’t spell everything out for you, I think you’ll find Mazebook rewarding. If you’re already a fan of Lemire, you’ll almost certainly like this too.” “Mazebook is undeniably Jeff Lemire,” asserted Adam Barnhardt in the website Comicbook. “It has all of the standard hallmarks of a comic this creator would write, yet it somehow still breaks the mold and stands apart from any of the other creator-owned books Lemire has crafted.” “There’s plenty to appreciate about Mazebook, from the engaging characters, to the often-trippy imagery, to the interesting page layouts,” Grunenwald concluded.<end.new>
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 15, 2007, Ray Olson, review of Essex County, Volume 1: Tales from the Farm, p. 39; January 1, 2008, Ray Olson, review of Essex County, Volume 2: Ghost Stories, p. 52; October 1, 2008, Ray Olson, review of Essex County, Volume 3: The Country Nurse, p. 33; May 1, 2009, Ray Olson, review of The Nobody, p. 71; January 1, 2011, Ian Chipman, review of Sweet Tooth—In Captivity, p. 68; June 1, 2011, Ian Chipman, review of Sweet Tooth—Animal Armies, p. 50; February 15, 2012, Ian Chipman, review of Sweet Tooth—Endangered Species, p. 37; August 1, 2012, Jesse Karp, review of Animal Man, Volume 1: The Hunt, p. 57; September 15, 2012, Ray Olson, review of The Underwater Welder, p. 58; September 15, 2013, Ben Spanner, review of Sweet Tooth—Wild Game, p. 58; December 15, 2016, Jesse Karp, review of Extraordinary X-Men, Volume 2: Apocalypse Wars, p. 36; January 1, 2017, review of A.D.: After Death, Volume 1, p. 54; May 15, 2017, Jesse Karp, review of Roughneck, p. 38; November 15, 2017, Gordon Flagg, review of Royal City, Volume 1: Next of Kin, p. 37; February 1, 2022, Suzanne Temple, review of Snow Angels, p. 36; June 1, 2022, Matthew Noe, review of Mazebook, p. 56.
Broken Pencil, summer, 2010, Brooke Ford, “Canadian Gothic: Whether He’s Working with an Indie Press or a Large Comic Publisher, Graphic Novelist and Comic Artist Jeff Lemire Creates Characters and Settings Both Unsettling and Familiar”; January, 2013, Nick Hutcheson, review of The Underwater Welder, p. 51.
Canadian Dimension, November-December, 2014, Sean Carleton, “Justice League United Comes to Canada: Introducing Equinox, a Cree Superheroine,” p. 50.
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2009, review of The Nobody.
Kliatt, July 1, 2007, review of Essex County, Volume 1, p. 35.
Publishers Weekly, August 25, 2008, review of Essex County, Volume 3, p. 58; March 29, 2010, review of Sweet Tooth—Out of the Deep Woods, p. 45; May 28, 2012, review of Animal Man, Volume 1, p. 78; July 23, 2012, review of The Underwater Welder, p. 41; March 3, 2014, review of Constantine, Volume 1: The Spark and the Flame, p. 52; March 31, 2014, review of Justice League: The Trinity War, p. 48; August 18, 2014, review of Trillium, p. 62; August 18, 2014, review of Trillium, p. 62; May 11, 2015, review of The Valiant, p. 44; March 6, 2017, review of Black Hammer: Secret Origins, p. 48; April 17, 2017, review of Roughneck, p. 55; April 22, 2019, review of The Quantum Age, p. 89; August 5, 2019, review of Frogcatchers, p. 54.
School Library Journal, November 1, 2007, review of Essex County, Volume 1, p. 159; January, 2009, Matthew L. Moffett, review of Essex County, Volume 3, p. 136; November, 2009, Alana Joli Abbott, review of The Nobody, p. 139; September, 2010, Andrea Lipinski, review of Sweet Tooth—Out of the Deep Woods, p. 181; January, 2015, Annalise Ammer, review of Teen Titans: Earth One, p. 118;
Teacher Librarian, February, 2009, Joe Sutliff Sanders, review of Essex County, Volume 3, p. 25.
Toronto Life, April, 2014, “A League of Our Own: Justice League United Brings a Troupe of DC Comics Superheroes North of the Border,” p. 74.
Xpress Reviews, June 3, 2016, Eric Norton, review of Descender, Volume 2: Machine Moon; August 12, 2016, Laura McKinley, review of Plutona; May 19, 2017, Tom Batten, review of Black Hammer, Volume 1: Secret Origins; October 13, 2017, Alger C. Newberry III, review of Royal City, Volume 1: Next of Kin.
ONLINE
About.com, http://comicbooks.about.com/ (April 17, 2007), Aaron Albert, “Jeff Lemire Interview.”
Bookslut, http://www.bookslut.com/ (January 1, 2008), Benjamin Jacob Hollars, review of Essex County, Volume 2.
Chapter 2 Books, https://www.chapter2winona.com/ (August 8, 2017), Dustin Nguyen, review of Descender, Volume 1.
Chicago Review of Books, https://chireviewofbooks.com/ (April 20, 2017), Adam Morgan, author interview.
Comicbook, https://comicbook.com/ (September 8, 2021), Adam Barnhardt, “Mazebook #1 Review: Another Spellbinding Debut from the Labyrinthine Mind of Jeff Lemire.”
Comics Alliance, http://comicsalliance.com/ (February 4, 2015), review of Descender, Volume 1.
Comics Beat, https://www.comicsbeat.com/ (September 2, 2021), Kerry Vineberg, review of Mazebook; (January 6, 2022), Heidi MacDonald, “Jeff Lemire Inks Exclusive Deal with Image Comics”; (August 4, 2022) Joe Grunenwald, review of Mazebook.
Comics Journal, http://www.tcj.com/ (April 6, 2017), Irene Velentzas, review of Roughneck; (February 5, 2020), Irene Velentzas, review of Frogcatchers.
ComicMix Website, http://www.comicmix.com/ (July 29, 2008), Andrew Wheeler, review of Essex County, Volume 3.
Daily Cross Hatch, http://thedailycrosshatch.com/ (December 6, 2007), Brian Heater, review of Essex County, Volume 2.
DC Comics Website, http://www.dccomics.com/ (December 15, 2017), “Jeff Lemire.”
Death and Taxes, http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/ (November 8, 2010), Andrew Belonsky, author interview.
Huntsville Forester, https://www.muskokaregion.com/ (October 6, 2017), Julie Manczak, review of Roughneck.
Jeff Lemire Blog, http://jefflemire.blogspot.com/ (December 15, 2017).
Jeff Lemire website, http://www.jefflemire.com (September 22, 2022), author profile.
Macleans, http://www.macleans.ca/ (March 6, 2016), Scott Reid, “Meet Jeff Lemire.”
Nerdist, https://nerdist.com/ (November 13, 2017), Rosie Knight, “Jeff Lemire Talks Creation, Comics, and Expanding the World of Black Hammer.”
Newsarama, http://forum.newsarama.com/ (April 12, 2007), Daniel Robert Epstein, “Jeff Lemire on Tales from the Farm.”
Occasional Superheroine Blog, http://occasionalsuperheroine.blogspot.com/ (October 9, 2007), “Occasional Interviews: Tales from the Farm’s Jeff Lemire.”
Paste, http://www.pastemagazine.com/ (August 8, 2013), Sean Edgar, review of Trillium.
Polygon, https://www.polygon.com/ (June 17, 2021), Susana Polo, “Sweet Tooth Creator Jeff Lemire Says He’s Burnt Out on the Post-Apocalypse.”
Spire, http://comicspire.com/ (August 6, 2014), review of Trillium.
Talking with Tim, http://talkingwithtim.wordpress.com/ (January 28, 2008), Tim O’Shea, author interview.
Trademark of Quality, http://www.thedevilmusic.com/ (May 6, 2007), Keith A. Gordon, review of Essex County, Volume 2.
Vancouver Writers Festival Website, http://writersfest.bc.ca/ (December 15, 2017), “Jeff Lemire.”
Vulture, http://www.vulture.com/ (December 1, 2017), Abraham Riesman, “Jeff Lemire Is the Hardest-Working Man in Comics.”
Jeff Lemire
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Jeff Lemire
Jeff Lemire - Lucca 2017.jpg
Lemire at Lucca Comics & Games 2017
Born March 21, 1976 (age 46)
Essex County, Ontario, Canada
Nationality Canadian
Area(s) Cartoonist, Writer, Penciller
Notable works Sweet Tooth
Essex County Trilogy
Green Arrow
Animal Man
Black Hammer
Gideon Falls
Descender
Awards Xeric Award, 2005
YALSA Alex Award, 2008
Joe Shuster Award, 2008
Doug Wright Award, 2008
Joe Shuster Award, 2013
Eisner Award, 2017
YALSA Alex Award, 2018
Eisner Award, 2019
Eisner Award, 2022
https://jefflemire.substack.com/
Jeff Lemire (d͡ʒɛf ɫɘˈmɪːɹ; born March 21, 1976)[1] is a Canadian comic book writer, artist, and television producer. He is the author of critically acclaimed titles including the Essex County Trilogy, Sweet Tooth, and The Nobody.[2] His written work includes All-New Hawkeye, Extraordinary X-Men, Moon Knight and Old Man Logan for Marvel; Superboy, Animal Man, Justice League Dark, and Green Arrow for DC; Black Hammer and Mazebook for Dark Horse; Descender and Gideon Falls for Image Comics; and Bloodshot Reborn for Valiant.
In 2021, Sweet Tooth was adapted as a Netflix television series through Susan and Robert Downey Jr.'s production company Team Downey,[3][4] with Lemire serving as an on-set consultant.[5]
Lemire has also collaborated with musicians such as Eddie Vedder on his Matter of Time animated video and Gord Downie on Secret Path, a multimedia storytelling project.
Contents
1 Early life
2 Career
2.1 2000s
2.1.1 Early work
2.1.2 Essex County
2.1.3 The Nobody
2.1.4 Sweet Tooth
2.2 2010s
2.2.1 DC Comics
2.2.2 Marvel Comics
2.2.3 Valiant Entertainment
2.2.4 Descender
2.2.5 The World of Black Hammer
2.2.6 Plutona
2.2.7 Roughneck and AD: After Death
2.2.8 Secret Path
2.2.9 Royal City
2.2.10 Sentient
2.3 2020s
2.3.1 Snow Angels
2.3.2 Mazebook
2.3.3 Tales from the Farm newsletter
2.3.4 Primordial
2.3.5 The Bone Orchard Mythos
2.3.6 Cosmic Detective
2.3.7 "Project Jackknife/Headlights"
2.3.8 Little Monsters
3 Awards
4 Personal life
5 Bibliography
5.1 Early work
5.2 Top Shelf Productions
5.3 Vertigo
5.4 DC Comics
5.5 Marvel Comics
5.6 Image Comics
5.7 Dark Horse Comics
5.8 TKO Studios
5.9 Other US publishers
6 References
6.1 General references
6.2 Inline citations
7 External links
7.1 Interviews
Early life
Lemire was born and raised in Woodslee, Ontario in Essex County, near Lake St. Clair.[6] Lemire attended film school, but decided to pursue comics when he realized that filmmaking did not suit his solitary personality.[7]
Career
2000s
Early work
After self-publishing the Xeric Award-winning comic book Lost Dogs in 2005 via his Ashtray Press imprint, Lemire found a home at Top Shelf Productions.
Lemire serialized a science-fiction strip called Fortress in the quarterly UR Magazine.
In 2006 Lemire's work was included in an international symposium gathering artists, scholars, curators, publishers, librarians, critics, and writers at the Banff Centre. Lemire's work was part of the "Comic Craze" exhibit, which showcased Canadian comics and narrative fiction.[1]
Essex County
Lemire wrote and illustrated the Eisner and Harvey Award-nominated Essex County Trilogy for Top Shelf in 2008–2009.
In June 2011 it was announced that visual effects artist John Dykstra will direct an adaptation of Essex County entitled Super Zero.[8]
2012 saw the publication of a new graphic novel from Top Shelf called The Underwater Welder, which was released to critical acclaim.[9][10][11]
In December 2015, it was announced that First Generation Films had optioned the rights to Essex County to develop the graphic novel as a television series from Canada's CBC.[12] Aaron Martin was set as writer and showrunner, as well as executive producing with Lemire.[13]
In October 2020, Lemire revealed that the show will commence filming in 2022 as a 6-episode mini-series with himself serving as writer, showrunner, and producer.[14]
The Nobody
In 2009, DC Comics' Vertigo imprint published Lemire's The Nobody, a two-colour tale of identity, fear and paranoia in a small community.
Sweet Tooth
Lemire wrote and illustrated the full-colour Vertigo series Sweet Tooth, published September 2009 to January 2013.[15][16]
In May 2020, Netflix confirmed the release of the movie adaptation of Sweet Tooth as a series of eight episodes. Susan and Robert Downey Jr. take part in the project through their own production company Team Downey. While on set during the filming of the pilot in New Zealand, Lemire was hit with an inspiration for how to revisit the world of Sweet Tooth in comics, which led to the 2020 six-issue miniseries Sweet Tooth: The Return.[17][18]
2010s
DC Comics
Lemire signed an exclusivity contract with DC Comics in December 2010.[19][20] He moved over to the DC Universe to write the one-shot Brightest Day: Atom, with Turkish artist Mahmud Asrar, designed to act as a springboard for an Atom story to co-feature in Adventure Comics.[21] He also relaunched the Superboy series featuring the character Conner Kent.[22] During Flashpoint he wrote Frankenstein and the Creatures of the Unknown miniseries,[23] then, as part of The New 52, he wrote the ongoing series Animal Man[24] and Frankenstein, Agent of S.H.A.D.E..[25][26]
Further into the launch of The New 52 Lemire took over the writing duties on Justice League Dark with issue #9, while leaving Frankenstein: Agent of S.H.A.D.E. to newcomer Matt Kindt.[27][28] He continued to write Animal Man into 2012, including teaming up with Swamp Thing writer Scott Snyder for a crossover between the two books called "Rotworld."[29][30] In February 2013, Lemire replaced Ann Nocenti as the writer of Green Arrow. His work on the title, which had not been well-received under previous writers, was widely praised by critics and fans, and lasted until September 2014.
Lemire drew a Rip Hunter story for Time Warp #1 (May 2013) which was written by Damon Lindelof and published by Vertigo.[31][32][33]
In 2014, Lemire joined a team of writers composed of Brian Azzarello, Keith Giffen, and Dan Jurgens to co-write The New 52: Futures End, a new weekly series set five years into the New 52's future.[34] It ran from May 2014 through April 2015.[35]
Lemire wrote Teen Titans: Earth One, an original graphic novel with art by Terry and Rachel Dodson published by DC Comics in November 2014.[36][37] As part of DC's Earth One line, Teen Titans: Earth One takes place in an alternate continuity-free universe that re-imagines DC's characters.[38]
Marvel Comics
After his exclusivity contract with DC came to an end, Lemire began working with other publishers.[39] At the 2014 New York Comic Con, it was announced that Lemire would be writing All-New Hawkeye, his first Marvel Comics title, with artist Ramón Pérez, which began in March 2015, a follow-up to Matt Fraction's and David Aja's acclaimed run.[40] The series ran for five issues until September 2015 before being relaunched as part of All-New All-Different Marvel.
Bleedingcool reported in April 2015 that Lemire had signed an exclusivity contract with Marvel, which excluded his creator-owned work with Image and Dark Horse Comics, as well as his work with Valiant Entertainment.[41]
In June 2015, Lemire was announced as a writer for three titles in the All-New, All-Different Marvel branding: All-New Hawkeye, with artist Ramón Pérez, Extraordinary X-Men, with artist Humberto Ramos, and Old Man Logan, with artist Andrea Sorrentino.[42] Three months later, it was announced he would pen the relaunched Moon Knight title, with artist Greg Smallwood.[43] His work on the character served as inspiration for the 2022 Disney+ television series adaptation.[44] Series directors Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson said of the Lemire/Smallwood run's influence:
“When we got together [...] and we cracked open that run in particular, that was when the visuals of the show really crystallized for us [...] The highly formal composition, the bright colors — there’s actually a sense of match cutting, so it even informed our editing a little bit. The blending of realities and all of that, that was a big, big part of it. That’s why we just obsessed over that run.”
— Aaron Moorhead
“There’s obviously a pretty big focus on human emotion in that run in ways that are not kinetic on the page [...] That’s why we respected it even more. It’s so hard to just have two people in a panel just having an emotional moment, but that was obviously a big inspiration for the show.”
— Justin Benson
Extraordinary X-Men, billed as the flagship X-Men title, features a team led by Storm, deals with the fallout of the Terrigen Mist, and launched in November 2015.[45][46] All-New Hawkeye debuted in November 2015, continuing with the story-line established in Lemire's and Pérez's previous run on the title.[47] Old Man Logan launched in January 2016, and features a future version of Wolverine.[48]
Valiant Entertainment
In December 2014, Lemire launched The Valiant, a four-issue limited series, featuring characters from all over the Valiant line, co-written with Matt Kindt with art by Paolo Rivera.[49] His first work for Valiant Comics, the series sets the stage for the Valiant Universe moving forward.[50]
Spinning out of The Valiant, Lemire began writing the ongoing series Bloodshot Reborn alongside artist Mico Suayan, with the first issue being released in April 2015.[51] The series features Bloodshot, a character Lemire approached by distilling the issues he had him and twisting the prototypical action hero into a more emotionally-driven story.[52] The second story arc, starting with issue 6 in September, featured art by Butch Guice.[53] The third arc, debuting with issue 10 in January 2016, began publishing in the Valiant Prestige format, with art by Lewis LaRosa.[54]
Descender
In March 2015, Lemire launched Descender, a creator-owned science fiction series with art by Dustin Nguyen, from Image Comics.[55] Announced on San Diego Comic-Con 2014, the ongoing series follows a robot named Tim-21 through his adventures in space.[56][57] The series is Lemire's first creator-owned ongoing series not illustrated by himself.[58] Descender ran thirty-two issues from March 2015 to July 2018. A sequel series, Ascender, set ten years after the original series, launched April 2019.[59]
In January 2015, Sony Pictures acquired the movie rights to Descender after a competitive bidding war.[60] Josh Bratman is producing, with Lemire and Nguyen serving as executive producers.[61] Jesse Wigutow, writer of the Tron: Legacy sequel, was announced as the screenwriter adapting Descender in February 2016.[62]
The World of Black Hammer
In July 2014, Dark Horse Comics announced a new creator-owned superhero series written by Lemire with art by Dean Ormston, titled Black Hammer, set to be released in March 2015.[63] However, in April 2015 Lemire stated that the series had been delayed indefinitely due to a cerebral hemorrhage suffered by Ormston.[64] In February 2016 it was announced that the series would be launching on July of that same year.[65][66] In 2017 it won the Eisner award for Best New Series.[67]
In 2017, Jeff Lemire launched The World of Black Hammer, a series of Black Hammer spinoff titles.[68]
In 2018, the title was optioned as a "multiplatform franchise" by Legendary Entertainment, with television and film adaptations in the works.[69]
Plutona
Plutona, a five-issue limited series from Image Comics co-written with artist Emi Lenox, was released in September 2015 to critical acclaim.[70][71] Announced at Image Expo 2015, the series follows a group of kids who find the body of a dead superhero in the woods, and features colors by Jordie Bellaire.[72] Lemire will be drawing backup stories featuring the last adventures of Plutona.[73]
Roughneck and AD: After Death
In September 2013, Simon & Schuster acquired world rights to Lemire's newest graphic novel, Roughneck, for publication in 2016.[74] The graphic novel, which Lemire wrote, illustrated, and painted, follows a former hockey player's slide into depression as interrupted by the arrival of his sister, and was scheduled to be published in October 2016.[75][76] Comparing the project to Essex County, a book that found success in the mainstream literary world, Lemire stated that he chose Simon & Schuster because he wanted to find a publisher that would treat Roughneck as a novel instead of a comic, with his goal being finding success outside of the direct market.[76]
AD: After Death, a graphic novel written by Scott Snyder and illustrated by Lemire, was announced at Image Expo 2015 for release on November of that same year.[77]
Secret Path
In 2016, Lemire collaborated with musician Gord Downie on Secret Path, a graphic novel accompaniment to Downie's solo album of the same name.[78]
Royal City
In March 2017, Lemire released a new ongoing series entitled Royal City through Image Comics. He is the sole writer and illustrator. The series follows Royal City resident the Pike family, who live with the ghost of the young Tommy Pike, who "is quite literally haunting them all still and holding them all back."[79] Lemire originally intended the series to be much longer. He later said of the series' premature ending:
Of all the books I have done, this one feels like a failure of sorts. I had huge ambitions for the Royal City series. I wanted it to be a place where I could tell all sorts of stories and a place that I could return to throughout my career, and check in on the characters at different points in their lives. But the truth is, the schedule of trying to write, draw and watercolor paint a monthly comic myself, while also writing all my other series for other artists, was just too much. I can do a lot, but doing that really pushed me to exhaustion and I had to wrap up Royal City sooner than I wanted just to keep my sanity.[80]
Royal City is set to continue in Fall 2023.[81][82]
Sentient
In October 2019, TKO Studios released Sentient as both a six-issue miniseries and an original graphic novel. Written by Jeff Lemire with art by Gabriel Hernández Walta, Sentient was nominated for the Eisner Award for Best Limited Series in 2020.[83]
2020s
Snow Angels
On February 16, 2021, writer Jeff Lemire and artist Jock's Snow Angels launched as a comiXology Original.[84] It is a ten-issue limited series divided into two miniseries of four and six issues respectively. Additionally, a prose short story written by Lemire was released on Amazon's Kindle and Audible to tie in with the comic's release.[85] The series was republished in trade paperback form by Dark Horse Comics in 2022.[86] The series won the Best Digital Comic Eisner Award in 2022.[87]
Mazebook
Lemire originally announced this series in his newsletter, Tales from the Farm, in January 2021 before the official announcement the following June.[88][89] It is a five-issue monthly miniseries, published by Dark Horse Comics. Written and drawn by Lemire, the story follows a man looking for his daughter ten years after she originally went missing. The first issue was published September 8, 2021.
Tales from the Farm newsletter
In early September 2021, Lemire announced his Tales from the Farm email newsletter would be moving to Substack, where he would be serializing a new story, Fishflies.[90] It began September 10, with Lemire projecting the series to run about five hundred pages, with each update being around five pages long.[91]
In addition to the World of Black Hammer stories published with Dark Horse Comics, Lemire will be debuting new stories through his Tales from the Farm newsletter. Several are already in the works.[90]
Primordial
This was initially announced as collaboration with illustrator Andrea Sorentino codenamed "Project Bark".[92] It was published as a six-issue miniseries by Image Comics beginning in September 15, 2021.[93]
The Bone Orchard Mythos
In his Tales from the Farm newsletter, Lemire has said he and Sorrentino are already at work on their next project after Primordial, teasing an announcement to coming in the Fall of 2021. Lemire claimed it will be "the most ambitious thing he and I have done together."[94] In November 2021, Lemire announced the project as The Bone Orchard Mythos, a "shared horror universe of interconnected stories taking place across multiple books and in different formats" from him and Sorrentino at Image Comics. The first three books will be a graphic novel in June 2022 called The Passageway, a mini-series in Fall 2022 called Ten Thousand Black Feathers, and another hardcover graphic novel in mid-2023 called Tenement, with a Free Comic Book Day prelude issue debuting in May 2022.[95]
Cosmic Detective
In May 2020, Jeff Lemire and Matt Kindt announced the opening of a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for a graphic novel entitled Cosmic Detective, for which they will be writers with David Rubín on board as artist.[96] The book was completed in November 2021, with the digital edition releasing in December 2021 and the physical edition set to release in 2022.
"Project Jackknife/Headlights"
Announced collaboration with illustrator Gabriel Walta, which Lemire calls "ambitious" and a "longer story" with at least three different story arcs,[92] currently planned for a November 2022 release.[94]
Little Monsters
Lemire announced plans to re-team with Descender and Ascender illustrator Dustin Nguyen for a project initially known under the working title of Project Pavement.[97][94] The project's name was eventually revealed to be Little Monsters, an ongoing series at Image Comics, and the first issue came out in March 2022.[98]
Most recently, he had signed an exclusive deal with Image Comics.[99]
Awards
Lemire won a Xeric Award in 2005 for his book Lost Dogs.[100] He was a 2008 recipient of a Young Adult Library Services Association Alex Award for Essex County Volume 1: Tales from the Farm.[101] Lemire received a Joe Shuster Canadian Comic Book Creator Award for Outstanding Cartoonist in 2008,[102] and the Doug Wright Award for Best Emerging Talent in 2008.[103] 2013 saw Lemire win another Joe Shuster Award for Outstanding Cartoonist (recognizing his work on Sweet Tooth and The Underwater Welder).[104] Lemire won an Eisner Award for Best New Series in 2017 for his work on Black Hammer.[67]
Lemire has also been nominated for an Ignatz, a Harvey, and multiple other Eisner Awards (most recently for Barbalien: Red Planet by Dark Horse).[105]
In 2011 Essex County was selected as one of five titles for Canada Reads, with the theme of "The Essential Canadian Novels of the Decade." Its celebrity champion was Sara Quin.[106] Essex County was eliminated in the first round, but later placed #1 in a "People's Choice" poll with more votes than all other books combined.[107]
Personal life
As of 2009, Lemire lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He is married and has a son.[108]
Bibliography
Early work
Ashtray #1–2 (writer/artist, Ashtray Press, 2003)
Lost Dogs (writer/artist, graphic novel, Ashtray Press, 2005) republished by Top Shelf Productions as Lost Dogs (tpb, 104 pages, 2012, ISBN 978-1603091541)
Beowulf #6–7 (writer/artist, Speakeasy, 2006)
The Fortress (writer/artist, strip in UR Magazine, 2006)
Bio-Graphical (writer/artist, strip in Driven, 2008)
Top Shelf Productions
The Complete Essex County (hc, 512 pages, 2009, ISBN 1-60309-046-0; tpb, 2009, ISBN 1-60309-038-X) collects:
Tales from the Farm (writer/artist, graphic novel, tpb, 112 pages, 2007, ISBN 1-891830-88-0)
Ghost Stories (writer/artist, graphic novel, tpb, 224 pages, 2007, ISBN 1-891830-94-5)
The Essex County Boxing Club (writer/artist, one-shot, 2008)
The Sad and Lonely Life of Eddie Elephant Ears: A Tale from Essex County (writer/artist, one-shot, 2008)
The Country Nurse (writer/artist, graphic novel, tpb, 128 pages, 2008, ISBN 1-891830-95-3)
Awesome 2: Awesomer: "The Horseless Rider" (writer/artist, anthology graphic novel, tpb, 200 pages, 2009, ISBN 1-60309-039-8)
The Underwater Welder (writer/artist, graphic novel, tpb, 224 pages, 2012, ISBN 1-6030-9074-6)
Vertigo
The Nobody (writer/artist, graphic novel, hc, 144 pages, 2009, ISBN 1-4012-2080-0)
Sweet Tooth (writer/artist, September 2009–January 2013) collected as:
Out of the Deep Woods (collects #1–5, tpb, 128 pages, 2010, ISBN 1-4012-2696-5)
In Captivity (collects #6–11, tpb, 144 pages, 2010, ISBN 1-4012-2854-2)
Animal Armies (collects #12–17, tpb, 144 pages, 2011, ISBN 1-4012-3170-5)
Endangered Species (collects #18–25, tpb, 176 pages, 2012, ISBN 1-4012-3361-9)
Unnatural Habit (collects #26–32, tpb, 160 pages, 2012, ISBN 1-4012-3723-1)
Wild Game (collects #33–40, tpb, 200 pages, 2013, ISBN 1-4012-4029-1)
Sweet Tooth Compendium (collects #1-40, 920 pages, 2021, ISBN 978-1779510242)
House of Mystery #18: "The Tale of Brutus the Bold" (a, with Lilah Sturges, October 2009) collected in Volume 4 (tpb, 160 pages, 2010, ISBN 1-4012-2756-2)
Strange Adventures vol. 2 #1: "Ultra the Multi-Alien: The Life and Death of Ace Arn" (writer/artist, one-shot, May 2011) collected in Strange Adventures (tpb, 160 pages, 2014, ISBN 978-1401243937)
Ghosts #1: "Ghost-for-Hire" (a, with Geoff Johns, October 2012)
Time Warp #1: "R. I. P." (a, with Damon Lindelof, March 2013)
American Vampire Anthology #1: "Canadian Vampire" (w, with Ray Fawkes, August 2013) collected in Volume 6 (hc, 144 pages, 2014, ISBN 978-1401247089)
Trillium (writer/artist, eight-issue limited series, August 2013–April 2014)
Trillium (tpb, 192 pages, 2014, ISBN 1-4012-4900-0) collects:
"The Scientist/The Soldier" (in #1, 2013)
"Binary Systems" (in #2, 2013)
"Telemetry" (in #3, 2013)
"Entropy" (in #4, 2014)
"Starcrossed" (in #5, 2014)
"Escape Velocity" (in #6, 2014)
"All the Shadows Have Stars in Them..." (in #7, 2014)
"Two Stars Become One" (in #8, 2014)
Vertigo Quarterly: Black: "Sweet Tooth: Black" (w/a, January 2015) collected in CMYK (tpb, 296 pages, 2015, ISBN 978-1401253363)
DC Comics
Atom:
Brightest Day: The Atom Special #1: "Nucleus, Prologue" (w, with Mahmud Asrar, one-shot, July 2010)
Adventure Comics #516–521 (w, with Mahmud Asrar, co-feature, July 2010–December 2010):
"Splitting the Atom" (in #516)
"Atom Strange" (in #517)
"We are All Atoms" (in #518)
"Colonized" (in #519)
"Atom-Ant" (in #520)
"Weapons of Mass-Reduction" (in #521)
Giant-Size Atom #1: "Nucleus, Conclusion" (w, with Mahmud Asrar, Allan Goldman and Robson Rocha, one-shot, March 2011)
Action Comics vol. 1 #892: "A look at things to come in... Superboy" (with Pier Gallo, August 2010)
Superboy vol. 4 #1–11 (November 2010–August 2011)
Superboy: Smallville Attacks #1-11 (tpb, 256 pages, 2011, ISBN 1-4012-3251-5)
Flashpoint: Frankenstein and the Creatures of the Unknown #1–3 (w, with Ibraim Roberson, June 2011–August 2011) collected in Flashpoint: The World of Flashpoint Featuring Green Lantern (tpb, 232 pages, 2012, ISBN 1-4012-3406-2)
Jonah Hex vol. 2 #69 (a, with Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti, July 2011) collected in Bury Me in Hell (tpb, 224 pages, 2011, ISBN 1-4012-3249-3)
Animal Man vol. 2 #0–29, Annual #1–2 (w [with Scott Snyder]/a, with Travel Foreman, John Paul Leon, Steve Pugh, Alberto Ponticelli, Timothy Green II, Francis Portela, Rafael Albuquerque, and Cully Hamner, September 2011–March 2014)
Volume 1: The Hunt #1-6 (tpb, 144 pages, 2012, ISBN 1-4012-3507-7)
Volume 2: Animal vs. Man #7-11 (tpb, 160 pages, 2012, ISBN 1-4012-3800-9)
Volume 3: Rotworld: The Red Kingdom #12-17 (tpb, 232 pages, 2013, ISBN 1-4012-4262-6)
Volume 4: Splinter Species #18-23 (tpb, 144 pages, 2014, ISBN 1-4012-4644-3)
Volume 5: Evolve or Die! #24-29 (tpb, 144 pages, 2014, ISBN 1-4012-4994-9)
Animal Man by Jeff Lemire Omnibus #0-29, Annual #1-2, and Swamp Thing #12 and #17 (hc, 816 pages, 2019, ISBN 978-1401289416)
Frankenstein, Agent of S.H.A.D.E. #1–9 (w, with Alberto Ponticelli, September 2011–May 2012) collected as:
War of the Monsters (collects #1–6, tpb, 144 pages, 2012, ISBN 1-4012-3471-2)
Son of Satan's Ring (collects #7–9, tpb, 144 pages, 2013, ISBN 1-4012-3818-1)
O.M.A.C. #5 (w [with Dan DiDio and Keith Giffen], January 2012) collected in O.M.A.C. Vol. 1: Omactivate! (tpb, 192 pages, 2012, ISBN 978-1401234829)
Men of War #8 (w, with Matt Kindt and Thomas Derenick, April 2012) collected in Men of War: Uneasy Company (tpb, 256 pages, 2012, ISBN 1-4012-3499-2)
Justice League Dark #9–23, 0, Annual #1 (w, May 2012–August 2013) collected in Justice League Dark: The New 52 Omnibus (hc, 1648 pages, 2021, ISBN 978-1779513137)
Volume 2: The Books of Magic #7–13 (tpb, 224 pages, 2013, ISBN 1-4012-4024-0)
Volume 3: The Death of Magic #12–21 (tpb, 192 pages, 2014, ISBN 1-4012-4245-6)
Justice League: Trinity War (tpb, 320 pages, 2014, ISBN 1-4012-4519-6) collects:
"Trinity War" (with Mikel Janín, in #22–23, 2013)
National Comics: Eternity #1 (w, with Cully Hamner, one-shot, July 2012)
Swamp Thing #12, 17 (w [with Scott Snyder] with Marco Rudy and Andrew Belanger, October 2012 – April 2013) collected in Swamp Thing Vol. 3: Rotworld (tpb, 208 pages, 2013, ISBN 978-1401242640), Swamp Thing By Scott Snyder: Deluxe Edition (hc, 512 pages, 2015, ISBN 978-1401258702), Animal Man by Jeff Lemire Omnibus, and Swamp Thing: The New 52 Omnibus (hc, 1160 pages, 2021, ISBN 978-1779508140)
Legends of the Dark Knight #1: "The Butler Did It" (a, with Damon Lindelof, October 2012)
Justice League vol. 2 #13: "On the Outs" (w [with Geoff Johns], October 2012) collected in Volume 3: Throne of Atlantis (hc, 192 pages, 2013, ISBN 978-1401242404)
Green Arrow vol. 5 #17–34 (w, with Andrea Sorrentino and Denys Cowan, February 2013–August 2014)
Volume 4: The Kill Machine #17–24, 23.1: Count Vertigo (tpb, 208 pages, 2014, ISBN 1-4012-4690-7)
Volume 5: The Outsiders War #25–31 (tpb, 176 pages, 2014, ISBN 1-4012-5044-0)
Volume 6: Broken #32–34, Green Arrow: Future's End #1, Secret Origins #4 (tpb, 128 pages, 2015, ISBN 1-4012-5474-8)
Green Arrow By Jeff Lemire & Andrea Sorrentino Deluxe Edition #17–34, 23.1: Count Vertigo, Green Arrow: Future's End #1, Secret Origins #4 (hc, 464 pages, 2016, ISBN 978-1401257613)
Constantine #1–4 (w, with Ray Fawkes (w), Renato Guedes (a) & Fabiano Neves (a), March 2013–June 2013)
Volume 1: The Spark and the Flame #1–6 (tpb, 144 pages, 2014, ISBN 1-4012-4323-1)
Adventures of Superman vol. 2 #1: "Fortress" (w/a, May 2013) collected in Volume 1 (tpb, 168 pages, 2014, ISBN 978-1401246884)
Batman Black and White vol. 2 #2: "Winter's End" (w, with Alex Niño, October 2013) collected in Volume 4 (hc, 288 pages, 2014, ISBN 1-4012-4643-5)
Justice League United #0–10, Annual #1, Futures End #1 (w, April 2014–March 2015):
Volume 1: Justice League Canada #0-5 (hc, 192 pages, 2015, ISBN 1-4012-5235-4)
Volume 2: The Infinitus Saga #6-10 (hc, 232 pages, 2015, ISBN 1-4012-5766-6)
The New 52: Futures End #1–48 (w [with Keith Giffen, Brian Azzarello, and Dan Jurgens], April 2014–April 2015)
Volume 1 #0–17 (tpb, 416 pages, 2014, ISBN 1-4012-5244-3)
Volume 2 #18-30 (tpb, 304 pages, 2015, ISBN 1-4012-5602-3)
Volume 3 #31-48 (tpb, 408 pages, 2015, ISBN 1-4012-5878-6)
Batman/Superman #10: "Enter the Microverse" (w, with Karl Kerschl and Scott Hepburn, May, 2014) collected in Second Chance (hc, 160 pages, 2015, ISBN 1-4012-5424-1)
Teen Titans: Earth One (w, with Terry Dodson, graphic novel)
Volume One (hc, 144 pages, November 2014, ISBN 1-4012-4556-0)
Volume Two (hc, 144 pages, August 2016, ISBN 978-1401259068)
DC Holiday Special 2017 #1: "The Reminder" (w, one-shot with Giuseppe Camuncoli, December 2017)
Hawkman: Found #1 (w, with Bryan Hitch and Kevin Nowlan, December 2017) collected in Dark Nights: Metal: The Resistance (tpb, 128 pages, 2018, ISBN 978-1401282981)
The Terrifics (w, with Ivan Reis, Jose Luis, Joe Bennett, Doc Shaner, Dale Eaglesham, and Viktor Bogdanovic, February 2018 – March 2019)
Volume 1: Meet the Terrifics #1–6 (tpb, 144 pages, 2018, ISBN 978-1401283360)
Volume 2: Tom Strong and the Terrifics #7–14 (tpb, 184 pages, 2019, ISBN 978-1401291488)
Inferior Five: "Peacemaker" (writer/artist, September 2019–April 2021) collected in Inferior Five (tpb, 144 pages, 2021, ISBN 978-1779513472)
Joker: Killer Smile #1–3 (w, with Andrea Sorrentino, October 2019 – February 2020) collected in Joker: Killer Smile (hc, 152 pages, 2020, ISBN 978-1779502698)
The Question: The Deaths of Vic Sage #1–4 (w, with Denys Cowan and Bill Sienkiewicz, November 2019 – August 2020) collected in The Question: The Deaths of Vic Sage (hc, 200 pages, 2020, ISBN 978-1779505583)
Batman: The Smile Killer #1 (w, one-shot with Andrea Sorrentino, June 2020) collected in Joker: Killer Smile (hc, 152 pages, 2020, ISBN 978-1779502698)
Legion of Super-Heroes #8 (a, with Brian Michael Bendis, August 2020) collected in Legion of Super-Heroes Vol. 2: The Trial of the Legion (tpb, 160 pages, 2020, ISBN 978-1779505637)
Sweet Tooth: The Return #1–6 (w/a, limited series November 2020 – April 2021) collected in Sweet Tooth: The Return (tpb, 152 pages, 2021, ISBN 978-1779510327)
Dark Nights: Death Metal - The Last Stories of the DC Universe #1: "Green Lantern in "Last Knights"" (w, one-shot with Rafael Albuquerque, December 2020) collected in Dark Nights: Death Metal: War of the Multiverses (tpb, 176 pages, 2021, ISBN 978-1779510068)
Green Arrow 80th Anniversary 100-Page Super Spectacular #1: "The Last Green Arrow Story" (w, one-shot with Andrea Sorrentino, June 2021)
Robin & Batman #1–3 (w, Dustin Nguyen, November 2021 – January 2022) collected in Robin & Batman (tpb, 144 pages, 2022, ISBN 978-1779516596)
Swamp Thing: Green Hell #1–3 (w, limited series with Doug Mahnke, December 2021 – May 2022)
Marvel Comics
Strange Tales II #1: "A Civilized-Thing" (writer/artist, 2010, collected in ST2, hc, 144 pages, 2011, ISBN 0-7851-4822-1; tpb, 2011, ISBN 0-7851-4823-X)
All-New Hawkeye vol. 1 (March 2015–September 2015)
Volume 5: All-New Hawkeye (tpb, 112 pages, 2015, ISBN 0-7851-9403-7) collects:
"Wunderkammer" (w, with Ramon K. Perez, in #1–5, 2015)
All-New Hawkeye vol. 2 #1–6 (w, with Ramon K. Perez, November 2015–April 2016)
Volume 6: Hawkeyes #1-6 (tpb, 136 pages, 2016, ISBN 0-7851-9946-2)
Extraordinary X-Men #1–20 (w, November 2015–March 2017)
Volume 1: X-Haven #1-5 (with Humberto Ramos, tpb, 120 pages, ISBN 0-7851-9934-9, 2016)
Volume 2: Apocalypse Wars #6-12 (with Victor Ibáñez and Humberto Ramos, tpb, 168 pages, 2016, ISBN 0-7851-9935-7)
Volume 3: Kingdoms Fall #13-16, Annual (with Victor Ibáñez, tpb, 128 pages, 2017, ISBN 0-7851-9936-5)
Volume 4: IvX #17-20 (with Eric Koda, Victor Ibáñez, Andrea Sorrentino, tpb, 112 pages, 2017, ISBN 0-7851-9937-3)
Old Man Logan vol. 2 #1–24 (w, January 2016–May 2017)
Volume 1: Berzerker #1-4 (tpb, 128 pages, 2016, ISBN 0-7851-9620-X)
Volume 2: Bordertown #5-8 (tpb, 112 pages, 2016, ISBN 0-7851-9621-8)
Volume 3: The Last Ronin #9-13 (tpb, 112 pages, 2017, ISBN 1-30290-314-4)
Volume 4: Old Monsters #14-18 (tpb, 112 pages, 2017, ISBN 1-30290-573-2)
Volume 5: Past Lives #19-24 (tpb, 136 pages, 2017, ISBN 1-30290-574-0)
Moon Knight vol. 8 #1–14 (w, April 2016-May 2017)
Volume 1: Lunatic #1-5 (tpb, 120 pages, 2016, ISBN 0-7851-9953-5)
Volume 2: Reincarnations #6-9 (tpb, 112 pages, 2017, ISBN 0-7851-9954-3)
Volume 3: Birth and Death #10-14 (tpb, 112 pages, 2017, ISBN 1-30290-288-1)
Moon Knight By Lemire & Smallwood: The Complete Collection (tpb, 320 pages, 2022, ISBN 978-1302933630)
Death of X (w, 4-issue limited series, with Charles Soule, Aaron Kuder and Javier Garrón, October–November 2016) collected in Death of X (tpb, 136 pages, 2017, ISBN 1-30290-337-3)
Thanos vol. 2 #1-12 (w, November 2016-October 2017)
Volume 1: Thanos Returns #1-6 (tpb, 136 pages, 2017, ISBN 1-30290-557-0)
Volume 2: The God Quarry #7-12 (tpb, 112 pages, 2018, ISBN 9781302905583)
Inhumans vs. X-Men (w, 6-issue limited series, with Charles Soule, Leinil Francis Yu and Javier Garrón, December 2016–March 2017) collected in Inhumans Vs. X-Men (hc, 208 pages, 2017, ISBN 1-30290-653-4)
Sentry vol. 3 #1-5 (w, with Kim Jacinto and Joshua Cassara June 2018-October 2018)
Sentry: Man of Two Worlds #1-5 (tpb, 112 pages, 2018, ISBN 1-30291-338-7)
Immortal Hulk: The Threshing Place #1 (w, one-shot, with Mike Del Mundo, September 2020) collected in Immortal Hulk: Great Power (tpb, 112 pages, 2021, ISBN 978-1302931179)
Image Comics
Outlaw Territory – Volume 2: "Coffin for Mr. Bishell" (a, with Joshua Hale Fialkov, anthology graphic novel, tpb, 240 pages, 2011, ISBN 9781607063216)
The CBLDF Presents Liberty Annual ’11: "Being Normal" (a, with Mark Waid, 2011)
Descender #1–32 (w, with Dustin Nguyen, March 2015 – July 2018)
Volume 1: Tin Stars #1–6 (tpb, 160 pages, 2015, ISBN 9781632154262)
Volume 2: Machine Moon #7–11 (tpb, 116 pages, 2016, ISBN 9781632156761)
Volume 3: Singularities #12–16 (tpb, 128 pages, 2016, ISBN 9781632158789)
Volume 4: Orbital Mechanics #17–21 (tpb, 120 pages, 2017, ISBN 9781534301931)
Volume 5: Rise of The Robots #22–26 (tpb, 120 pages, 2018, ISBN 9781534303454)
Volume 6: The Machine War #27–32 (tpb, 120 pages, 2018, ISBN 9781534306905)
Descender: The Deluxe Edition Volume 1 #1–16 (hc, 400 pages, 2017, ISBN 9781534303461)
Descender: The Deluxe Edition Volume 2 #17–32 (hc, 424 pages, 2019, ISBN 9781534314559)
Ascender #1–18 (w, with Dustin Nguyen, April 2019 – August 2021)
Volume 1: The Haunted Galaxy #1–5 (tpb, 136 pages, 2019, ISBN 9781534313484)
Volume 2: The Dead Sea #6–10 (tpb, 128 pages, 2020, ISBN 9781534315938)
Volume 3: The Digital Mage #11–14 (tpb, 104 pages, 2020, ISBN 9781534317260)
Volume 4: Star Seed #15–18 (tpb, 104 pages, 2021, ISBN 978-1534319226)
Ascender: The Deluxe Edition, Volume 1 #1–10 (hc, 448 pages, 2022, ISBN 978-1534322363)
Plutona #1–5 (w, with Emi Lenox, five-issue miniseries, September 2015 – January 2016) collected in Plutona (tpb, 152 pages, 2016, ISBN 9781632156013)
A.D. After Death Books 1–3 (a, with Scott Snyder, 3 books, November 2016 – May 2017) collected in A.D. After Death (hc, 256 pages, 2017, ISBN 9781632158680)
Royal City #1–14 (w/a, March 2017 – August 2018)
Volume 1: Next of Kin #1–5 (tpb, 160 pages, 2017, ISBN 9781534302624)
Volume 2: Sonic Youth #6–10 (tpb, 128 pages, 2018, ISBN 9781534305526)
Volume 3: We All Float On #11–14 (tpb, 120 pages, 2018, ISBN 9781534308497)
Royal City Book 1: The Complete Collection (hc, 408 pages, 2020, ISBN 978-1534316058)
Gideon Falls #1–27 (w, with Andrea Sorrentino, March 2018 – December 2020)
Volume 1: The Black Barn #1–6 (tpb, 160 pages, 2018, ISBN 9781534308527)
Volume 2: Original Sins #7–11 (tpb, 136 pages, 2019, ISBN 9781534310674)
Volume 3: Stations of The Cross #12–16 (tpb, 136 pages, 2019, ISBN 9781534313446)
Volume 4: The Pentoculus #17–21 (tpb, 128 pages, 2020, ISBN 9781534315136)
Volume 5: Wicked Worlds #22–26 (tpb, 120 pages, 2020, ISBN 9781534317222)
Volume 6: The End #27 (tpb, 120 pages, 2021, ISBN 9781534318670)
Gideon Falls Deluxe Edition, Book One #1–16 (hc, 432 pages, 2021, ISBN 9781534319189)
Gideon Falls Deluxe Edition, Book Two #17–27 (hc, 336 pages, 2022, ISBN 9781534323292)
Family Tree #1–12 (w, with Phil Hester, November 2019 – March 2021)
Volume 1: Sapling #1–4 (tpb, 96 pages, 2020, ISBN 9781534316492)
Volume 2: Seeds #5–8 (tpb, 96 pages, 2020, ISBN 9781534316966)
Volume 3: Forest #9–12 (tpb, 120 pages, 2021, ISBN 9781534318632)
The Silver Coin #4 (w, with Michael Walsh, July 2021) collected in The Silver Coin, Volume 1 (tpb, 144 pages, 2021, ISBN 978-1534319929)
Primordial #1–6 (w, with Andrea Sorrentino, six-issue miniseries, September 2021 – February 2022) collected in Primordial (hc, 160 pages, 2022, ISBN 9781534321250)
Little Monsters #1–ongoing (w, with Dustin Nguyen, March 2022 – )
The Bone Orchard Mythos (w, with Andrea Sorrentino, May 2022 – )
Free Comic Book Day 2022: The Bone Orchard Mythos—Prelude (May 2022)
The Bone Orchard Mythos: The Passageway (hc, 96 pages, June 2022, ISBN 978-1534322240)
Dark Horse Comics
Noir: A Collection of Crime Comics: "The Old Silo" (w/a, anthology graphic novel, tpb, 104 pages, 2009, ISBN 1595823581)
The World of Black Hammer
Black Hammer #1–13 (w, with Dean Ormston, June 2016 – September 2017) collected in Black Hammer Library Edition Volume 1 (hc, 408 pages, 2018, ISBN 978-1506710730)
Black Hammer – Volume 1: Secret Origins #1–6 (tpb, 184 pages, 2017, ISBN 1616557869)
Black Hammer – Volume 2: The Event #7–11, #13 (tpb, 176 pages, 2017, ISBN 1506701981)
Black Hammer: Age of Doom #1–12 (w, with Dean Ormston, April 2018 – September 2019) collected in Black Hammer Library Edition Volume 2 (hc, 400 pages, 2020, ISBN 978-1506711850)
Black Hammer – Volume 3: Age of Doom, Part One #1–5 (tpb, 136 pages, 2019, ISBN 1506703895)
Black Hammer – Volume 4: Age of Doom, Part Two #6–12 (tpb, 192 pages, 2019, ISBN 1506708161)
Black Hammer: Streets of Spiral (tpb, 128 pages, 2019, ISBN 1506709419) collected
Black Hammer: Giant Sized Annual (w, one-shot, with Dustin Nguyen, Emi Lenox, Nate Powell, Matt Kindt, and Ray Fawkes, January 2017) collected in Black Hammer Library Edition Volume 1 (hc, 408 pages, 2018, ISBN 978-1506710730)
Black Hammer: Cthu-Louise (w, one-shot, with Emi Lenox, December 2018) collected in Black Hammer Library Edition Volume 2 (hc, 400 pages, 2020, ISBN 978-1506711850)
"Horrors to Come" (w, short story, with David Rubín in Free Comic Book Day 2019: Stranger Things / Black Hammer, May 2019)
The World of Black Hammer Encyclopedia (w, one-shot, with Tate Brombal and various artists, July 2019) collected in Black Hammer Library Edition Volume 2 (hc, 400 pages, 2020, ISBN 978-1506711850)
Black Hammer / Justice League: Hammer of Justice! #1–5 (w, limited series, with Michael Walsh, July 2019 – November 2019) collected in Black Hammer / Justice League: Hammer of Justice! (hc, 168 pages, 2020, ISBN 1506710999)
Sherlock Frankenstein and the Legion of Evil #1–4 (w, limited series, with David Rubín, October 2017 – January 2018) collected with Black Hammer #12 in Sherlock Frankenstein and the Legion of Evil (tpb, 152 pages, 2018, ISBN 150670526X) and The World of Black Hammer Library Edition Volume 1 (hc, 256 pages, 2020, ISBN 978-1506719955)
Doctor Star and the Kingdom of Lost Tomorrows #1–4 (w, limited series, with Max Fiumara, March–June 2018) collected in Doctor Star and the Kingdom of Lost Tomorrows: From the World of Black Hammer (tpb, 128 pages, 2018, ISBN 1506706592), Doctor Andromeda and the Kingdom of Lost Tomorrows: From the World of Black Hammer (tpb, 104 pages, 2021, ISBN 978-1506723297), and The World of Black Hammer Library Edition Volume 1 (hc, 256 pages, 2020, ISBN 978-1506719955)
The Quantum Age #1–6 (w, limited series, with Wilfredo Torres, July 2018 – January 2019) collected in The Quantum Age (tpb, 176 pages, 2019, ISBN 1506708412) and The World of Black Hammer Library Edition Volume 2 (hc, 296 pages, 2021, ISBN 978-1506719962)
Black Hammer ’45 #1–4 (w, limited series, with Ray Fawkes and Matt Kindt, March 2019 – June 2019) collected in Black Hammer ’45 (tpb, 120 pages, 2019, ISBN 1506708501) and The World of Black Hammer Library Edition Volume 2 (hc, 296 pages, 2021, ISBN 978-1506719962)
Skulldigger + Skeleton Boy #1–6 (w, limited series, with Tonci Zonjic, December 2019 – January 2021) collected in Skulldigger + Skeleton Boy (tpb, 168 pages, 2021, ISBN 9781506710334) and The World of Black Hammer Library Edition Volume 4 (hc, 288 pages, 2022, ISBN 978-1506726014)
Colonel Weird: Cosmagog #1–4 (w, limited series, with Tyler Crook, October 2020 – January 2021) collected in Colonel Weird: Cosmagog (tpb, 112 pages, 2021, ISBN 9781506715162) and The World of Black Hammer Library Edition Volume 3 (hc, 248 pages, 2021, ISBN 978-1506719979)
Barbalien: Red Planet #1–5 (w [with Tate Brombal], limited series with Gabriel Hernández Walta, November 2020 – March 2021) collected in Barbalien: Red Planet (tpb, 120 pages, 2021, ISBN 9781506715803) and The World of Black Hammer Library Edition Volume 3 (hc, 248 pages, 2021, ISBN 978-1506719979)
Black Hammer: Reborn #1–12 (w, with Caitlin Yarsky, Malachi Ward, Matthew Sheean, and Rich Tomasso, June 2021 – May 2022)
Black Hammer Volume 5: Reborn Part One #1–4 (tpb, 112 pages, 2022, ISBN 978-1506714264)
Black Hammer Volume 5: Reborn Part Two #5–8 (tpb, 112 pages, 2022, ISBN 978-1506715155)
Black Hammer Volume 5: Reborn Part Three #9–12 (tpb, 104 pages, 2022, ISBN 978-1506720159)
The Unbelievable Unteens #1–4 (w, limited series, with Tyler Crook, August 2021 – January 2021) collected in The Unbelievable Unteens: From the World of Black Hammer Volume 1 (tpb, 128 pages, 2022, ISBN 978-1506724362) and The World of Black Hammer Library Edition Volume 4 (hc, 288 pages, 2022, ISBN 978-1506726014)
Berserker Unbound (w, limited series, with Mike Deodato, August 2019 – November 2019) collected in Berserker Unbound (hc, 136 pages, 2020, ISBN 9781506713373)
Mazebook (writer/artist, limited series, September 2021 – January 2022) collected in Mazebook (hc, 256 pages, 2022, ISBN 9781506723662)
TKO Studios
Sentient (December 2019) In 2020 Sentient became the first title from TKO to be nominated for an Eisner Award, when the series picked up a nomination for Best Limited Series.
Other US publishers
Roughneck (w/a, graphic novel, 272 pages, Simon & Schuster, 2017, ISBN 1501160990)
Frogcatchers (w/a, graphic novel, 112 pages, Gallery 13 imprint of Simon & Schuster, 2019, ISBN 9781982107376 [109])
Snow Angels (w, 10-issue limited series, with Jock, ComiXology Originals, February – November 2021) republished by Dark Horse Comics as:
Snow Angels Volume 1 #1–4 (tpb, 104 pages, 2022, ISBN 9781506726489)
Snow Angels Volume 2 #5–10 (tpb, 160 pages, 2022, ISBN 9781506726496)
Fishflies (w/a, Substack, September 2021 – )
The Last Days of Black Hammer (w, limited series with Stefano Simeone, 110 pages, Substack, January 2022 – )
Valiant Comics:
The Valiant (w, 4-issue limited series, with Matt Kindt and Paolo Rivera, December 2014–March 2015) collected in The Valiant (tpb, 112 pages, 2015, ISBN 1939346606)
Bloodshot Reborn #0–18, Annual #1 (w, April 2015–October 2016)
Volume 1: Colorado #1–5 (with Mico Suayan and Raúl Allén, tpb, 144 pages, 2015, ISBN 1939346673)
Volume 2: The Hunt #6–9 (with Butch Guice, tpb, 112 pages, 2016, ISBN 1939346827)
Volume 3: The Analog Man #10–13 (with Lewis LaRosa, tpb, 112 pages, 2016, ISBN 1682151336)
Volume 4: Bloodshot Island #14–18, Annual #1 (with Mico Suayan and Tomás Giorello, tpb, 192 pages, 2017, ISBN 1682151670)
Book of Death: The Fall of Bloodshot #1 (w, with Doug Braithwaite, July 2015) collected in Book of Death: The Fall of the Valiant Universe (tpb, 112 pages, 2016, ISBN 1939346983)
4001 AD: Bloodshot #1 (w, with Doug Braithwaite, June 2016), collected in 4001 A.D.: Beyond New Japan (tpb, 112 pages, 2016, ISBN 1682151468)
Bloodshot U.S.A. #1–4 (w, with Doug Braithwaite, October 2016 – January 2017) collected in Bloodshot U.S.A. (tpb, 112 pages, 2017, ISBN 1682151956)
Divinity III: Komandar Bloodshot #1 (w, with Clayton Crain, December 2016) collected in Divinity III: Heroes of the Glorious Stalinverse (tpb, 112 pages, 2017, ISBN 1682152073)
Bloodshot Salvation #1–12 (September 2017 – August 2018)
Jeff Lemire is a New York Times bestselling and award winning author, and creator of the acclaimed graphic novels Sweet Tooth, Essex County, The Underwater Welder, Trillium, Plutona, Black Hammer, Descender, Royal City, and Gideon Falls. His upcoming projects include a host of series and original graphic novels, including the fantasy series Ascender with Dustin Nguyen.
Jeff Lemire
Credited as: Writer, Colorist, Inker, Penciller, Cover Colorist, Artist, Cover, Variant Cover,
New York Times Bestselling author Jeff Lemire is the writer and artist beind the acclaimed graphic novels SWEET TOOTH, Essex County, The Underwater Welder and the popular sci-fi love story, TRILLIUM. Jeff is also a prominent writer for DC Comics where he currently writes the monthly adventures of GREEN ARROW and JUSTICE LEAGUE UNITED. He has also written the monthly adventures of ANIMAL MAN, SUPERBOY, JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK, FRANKENSTEIN: Agent of S.H.A.D.E. and THE ATOM.
In 2009 and in 2013 Jeff won the Schuster Award for Best Canadian Cartoonist. He has also won The Doug Wright Award for Best Emerging Talent. He also won the American Library Association's prestigious Alex Award, recognizing books for adults with specific teen appeal. He has also been nominated for 6 Eisner Awards, 5 Harvey Awards and 6 Shuster Awards. in 2010 Essex County was named as one of the five Essential Canadian Novels of the Decade. He currently lives and works in Toronto with his wife and son.
Jeff Lemire is the award winning, New York Times bestselling author of such graphic novels as Essex County, Sweet Tooth, The Underwater Welder, and Roughneck, as well as the cocreator of Descender with Dustin Nguyen, Black Hammer with Dean Ormston, Gideon Falls with Andrea Sorrentino, and many others. He also collaborated with celebrated musician Gord Downie on the graphic novel and album The Secret Path, which was made into an animated film in 2016. Jeff has won numerous awards, including an Eisner Award and Juno Award in 2017. Jeff has also written extensively for both Marvel and DC Comics. Many of his books are currently in development for film and television, including both Descender and A.D. After Death at Sony Pictures, Essex County at the CBC, The Underwater Welder and Plutona at Waypoint Entertainment, and Gideon Falls with Hivemind Media, as well as the Eisner-Award winning Black Hammer at Legendary Entertainment. He lives in Toronto, Canada, with his wife and son, and their troublesome pug, Lola. Visit him at JefLemireComics.com or on Twitter @JeffLemire.
New York Times Bestselling author Jeff Lemire has built a unique career as both the writer and artist of acclaimed literary graphic novels like Essex County, The Underwater Welder, Sweet Tooth and Trillium and also as one of the most popular writers of mainstream superhero comics with acclaimed runs on such titles as Green Arrow, Animal Man, Justice League and Hawkeye for Marvel and DC Comics.
Current projects include the original graphic novel ROUGHNECK to be published by Simon and Schuster in 2016, as well as the science fiction series DESCENDER with Dustin Nguyen and A.D. with Scott Snyder.
In 2008 and in 2013 Jeff won the Schuster Award for Best Canadian Cartoonist. He has also received The Doug Wright Award for Best Emerging Talent and the American Library Association’s prestigious Alex Award, recognizing books for adults with specific teen appeal. He has also been nominated for 8 Eisner awards, 7 Harvey Awards and 8 Shuster Awards.
In 2010 Essex County became the first graphic novel to be included in the prestigious Canada Reads contest making it to the final five and winning the people’s choice vote as best Canadian novel of the decade.
He lives in Toronto with his wife and son.
Sweet Tooth creator Jeff Lemire says he’s burnt out on the post-apocalypse
The Netflix series builds a more hopeful post-post-apocalypse than the comic
By Susana Polo@NerdGerhl Jun 17, 2021, 1:44pm EDT
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Christian Convery as Gus in the first episode of Sweet Tooth
Photo by Kirsty Griffin / 2019 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
Netflix’s Sweet Tooth is a surprising departure from its source material, the comic series written and drawn by Jeff Lemire. But unlike most comic book adaptations that change a lot in the transfer, it’s not about simplified character origins or costume tweaks.
Sweet Tooth has a vastly different tone in its TV incarnation. It’s still about a half-human half-deer boy named Gus, who joins a world-weary bounty hunter to venture out of his childhood sanctuary and into a big, dangerous, post-apocalyptic world — but it’s much brighter and hopeful than the 2009 comic series of the same name.
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To Lemire, that’s ideal.
Polygon spoke to the writer-artist over Zoom, where he said that given his own experience with adapting other work to television himself, he knows that stories tend to change in the process. Sweet Tooth is no exception, and some of those differences have naturally made a comic about a virus-borne collapse of civilization and human children transforming into persecuted animal hybrids — into a television series that’s lighter than his original.
“My drawing style is pretty stark, as opposed to this lush photography in New Zealand, right?” he said with a laugh. “That alone creates a visual difference, that’s pretty dramatic. And then the violence, obviously, is much more suggested in the show than in the comic. [...] You can actually show things in a drawing on a piece of paper with child characters around, that feel more appropriate or acceptable than if we had child actors [around] that same level of violence. It can be much more shocking [in live action], and not in a good way, necessarily.”
But most of all, according to Lemire, Sweet Tooth on TV is more colorful and optimistic because of how much pop culture has embraced stories about dark post-apocalypses since the comic first hit shelves.
Gus sits in a tunnel underground, hugging his knees, his antlers growing up into the dirt into blood-red roots, on the cover of Sweet Tooth #9 (2010).
Gus on the cover of Sweet Tooth #9 (2010). Image: Jeff Lemire/DC Comics
2009, Sweet Tooth was Lemire’s way of making his mark on a sci-fi subgenre that he’d eagerly devoured while growing up. “I mean, it’s only been 12 years or whatever, but in that 12 years the world’s changed a lot. And also we’ve seen a ton of post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction on screen since then. Jim [Mickle, who created the Sweet Tooth series,] felt, and I agreed, that if we were going to do a post-apocalyptic thing on TV, you needed to find a new angle on it, or else some of that visual language would start to feel a bit tired.”
He also simply feels burnt out on post-apocalypse as a fan, not just a creator. “I loved it growing up, but I don’t find myself seeking it out anymore. [...] I like that the show feels like a fresh take on it, where it’s kind of a welcoming place to go to.” And then, of course, there’s the perspective of living through an actual global pandemic and the changes it forced on society. The first episode of Sweet Tooth was filmed in 2019, with the crew only able to return to New Zealand to continue filming in fall of 2020.
And so like its traveling protagonists, the Sweet Tooth TV series strives to discover something new in an environment already well-scavenged.
“[We were] thinking of it as a post-post-apocalyptic world,” Lemire said, “where you’re coming out of the ugliness, and the world is starting to return to nature; it seemed to fit really well with the themes that were already baked into the story. [...] I do think that there’s still quite a bit of darkness in the show, it’s just presented in a different way, and likewise, there’s a lot of heart in the comic was just presented maybe in a slightly different way. In the end it’s all the same characters, and they’re gonna be hitting all the same story beats. They might get there in a different way, or they might have added new characters and things, but on a whole, I feel like it really is still Sweet Tooth and I feel really happy with it.”
But the best part of having a sweeter Sweet Tooth on Netflix is that its creator gets to share it with his own son, Gus, who was born as he was working on the first few issues of Sweet Tooth the comic.
“Now, my Gus is basically the same age as the character Gus, and surviving a pandemic,” Lemire told Polygon. “So it’s the weirdest thing, but it’s cool to sit there and be able to watch it with him, and for him to ask me questions about it. ‘Is this in the book? Is that part in the book?’ and just me explaining ‘Oh, this part’s in the book, that part was a little different.’”
Jeff Lemire inks exclusive deal with Image Comics
Lemire has several projects on tap for 2022 already
By Heidi MacDonald -01/06/2022 1:15 pm0
lemireUltra prolific creator Jeff Lemire has inked an exclusive deal with Image Comics as his home publisher for all forthcoming projects launching in 2022 and beyond.
Lemire already has a number of projects at Image, but is also known for his Black Hammer superhero universe which is published at Dark Horse. Presumably that will stay at Dark Horse. His DC project Sweet Tooth has been turned into a popular streaming series, and he has many other projects in development. He also announced a project for Substack last year.
2022 comics projects include Little Monsters with Dustin Nguyen in March and The Bone Orchard Mythos, a shared horror universe created with Andrea Sorrentino. Yes, that’s two shared universes…and counting – how Lemire manages to turn out so much quality work is one of the great mysteries of comics.
He has a number of new projects coming from Image as well, including solo projects and collaborations with new-to-Image creators.
little-monsters-lemire-nguyen
The upcoming Little Monsters
Lemire’s Image backlist includes Descender and Ascender with Dustin Nguyen, Gideon Falls and Primordial with Andrea Sorrentino, A.D.: After Death with Scott Snyder, Family Tree with Phil Hester, Plutona with Emi Lenox, and his solo project Royal City. Projects published elsewhere include Trillium, Essex County, The Underwater Welder, Black Hammer.
“Having worked with Image on so many projects over the last decade, I’ve come to appreciate the complete creative freedom and support that they’ve provided me,” said Lemire in a statement. “I’m excited to make Image the exclusive home for all my projects in the years to come, both solo projects that I will draw myself, and my various collaborations. Bone Orchard and Little Monsters are just the start of what I have planned this year and beyond.”
Projects in media development include Essex County in development at CBC, Underwater Welder at Waypoint Entertainment with Ryan Gosling attached as producer, Snow Angels at AMC, Gideon Falls with Hivemind, Descender at Lark and NBC Universal, and Family Tree with Orion.
Quantum Age: From the World of Black Hammer
Jeff Lemire and Wilfredo Torres. Dark Horse, $19.99 trade paper (176p) ISBN 978-1-5067-0841-6
The Eisner Award--winning Black Hammer series by Lemire (Essex County) returns with a new cast of retro-futuristic characters. The once-teenage heroes of the Quantum League series have become a ragtag band of rebels, striving to save the universe from a galactic dystopia brought by the betrayal of one of their own. As Martian exile Barbali-Teen gathers retired and hidden ex-Leaguers, Lemire fits together plot puzzle pieces (which will make better sense to those familiar with the already extensive line of comics). The arc also cleverly pays homage to DCs Legion of Super-Heroes, with appearances by Martian Manhunter and Swamp Thing. The crisp art by Torres (Black Panther) is vibrant even during quiet pauses, and his panel sequences flow smoothly, with more nuanced coloring than typical genre fare. Boasting a diverse cast of characters (and inter-species romance), sly moments of humor, and smart scripting, this fastpaced saga chock-full of heroes puts a fresh spin on familiar themes of rebellion. It's a welcome tour through an entertaining sci-fi universe in the vein of Mike Mignola's Hellboy comics. Agent: Charlie Olson, InkWell (May)
Editor's note: Reviews noted as "BookLife" are for self-published hooks received via BookLife. PW's program for indie authors.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"Quantum Age: From the World of Black Hammer." Publishers Weekly, vol. 266, no. 16, 22 Apr. 2019, p. 89. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A583735899/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2ff7c2ca. Accessed 10 Sept. 2022.
Frogcatchers
Jeff Lemire. Gallery 13, $19.99 (96p) ISBN 978-1-982-10737-6
Eisner Award-winner Lemire {Sweet Tooth) hooks the reader with a mystery in this slim, dreamy fable in which a man wakes up in a hotel room with no memory of how he got there. This scene is preceded by a seemingly unconnected one of a boy catching frogs, who sees an IV drip in the water, which segues into a series oi strange images that include a chest X-ray. Together, these passages telegraph, rather unsubtly, the crux of the narrative. The man's subsequent encounters with the frog-catching boy at the hotel and his attempts at avoiding the dreaded Frog King provide more clues. The man and the boy dodge the agents of the Frog King, enter his forbidden chamber, and escape out the window. Lemire's scratchy lines and bursts of color in the "real world" add a visceral quality to this meditation on coping with mortality. The book's puzzle structure points rather obviously to the pay-off; but more affecting is how Lemire simply depicts the man coming to terms with regrets and his fate. This cathartic reverie is carried off with striking visual themes, if sometimes with a heavy hand. Agent: Charlie Olsen, InkWell Management. (Sept.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"Frogcatchers." Publishers Weekly, vol. 266, no. 31, 5 Aug. 2019, p. 54. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A596104164/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c7727f7e. Accessed 10 Sept. 2022.
Snow Angels, v.1. By Jeff Lemire. Art by Jock. Feb. 2022. i04p. Dark Horse, paper, $19.99 (9781506726489). 741.5.
There are three rules to living in the trench: it provides, no one leaves, and it is endless. Milliken lives in the trench with her father and younger sister, Mae Mae. When the trio arrives back at their camp after a hunting trip, they find everyone else dead. Furthermore, the legend of the Snowman (described by Milli as "death incarnate") is true, and he is seeking vengeance because someone has broken the rules. Artist Jock uses a mostly blue-gray and white palette to depict the characters and their dystopian tundra landscape; the more violent scenes stand out as they are accented in red. The illustrations are detailed, especially the characters, while the setting is somewhat hazy, as is the landscape, adding to the sense of place. This first volume ends on a major cliff-hanger, and readers will be eager to get their hands on volume two. In the meantime, recommend Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette's Snowpiercer series for those who like the icy environment, and Jonathan Maberry's Rot & Ruin comic series for those who like stories about teen survivors. --Suzanne Temple
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Temple, Suzanne. "Snow Angels, v.1." Booklist, vol. 118, no. 11, 1 Feb. 2022, pp. 36+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A693527457/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c8df7b64. Accessed 10 Sept. 2022.
Mazebook. By Jeff Lemire. Art by the author. Aug. 2022.256p. Dark Horse, $29.99 (9781506723662). 741.5.
"When is it too late to try and find the starting point and begin again?" asks Lemire in this surreal journey through one man's loss, memories, and grief. At the outset, readers meet Will, a man whose life has become nothing but routine, spending day after day on autopilot-something he begins to think is a kind of death itself--and at first it seems no one else in the comic is of consequence. Things take a turn for the strange when Will answers, impossibly, a call from his daughter Wendy, a master of mazes and puzzles, who has been dead for a decade. Lemire, in his trademark watercolor and loose lines, charts a path through Will's maze of grief, seeking the center of all things where he finds what he needs, though perhaps not what he knowingly sought. A good fictional read-alike for readers of Tom Hart's memoir about the death of his daughter, Rosalie Lightning (2016). --Matthew Noe
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Noe, Matthew. "Mazebook." Booklist, vol. 118, no. 19-20, 1 June 2022, p. 56. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A708840681/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1174dc40. Accessed 10 Sept. 2022.
Mazebook #1 Review: Another Spellbinding Debut From the Labyrinthine Mind of Jeff Lemire
By ADAM BARNHARDT - September 8, 2021 03:45 am EDT
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Essex County, Sweet Tooth, Moon Knight, and Plutona are just some of the many stories from the mind of Jeff Lemire that turned out to be much larger than readers initially expected. Only one issue in, you better prepare to add Mazebook to that list as another mind-bending tale promising to cross space and time despite taking the appearance of a grounded and gritty tale.
You pick up Mazebook #1 and realize it's a behemoth compared to the other comics on your pull list. Instead of the standard 20-page pamphlet, Mazebook #1 clocks in at a hefty 50-plus pages. Don't let the size fool you, however, as it's not a tale heavy enough to drown in. Compared to other works from Lemire's bibliography, this story is immediately easy to trace. I don't want to say "dumbed down" or elementary, but the plot (so far) of Mazebook isn't cumbersome enough to weigh readers down.
In a comic that could be filed as a workplace drama, readers instantly meet Will, a city inspector who's fallen into his daily routine. By the end of the issue, readers discover his daughter has been missing for a decade, as he either begins to show signs of dementia or some other physical illness. Or, perhaps, it's just been so long he's beginning to forget the details of his daughter's appearance.
That's neither here nor there because the mystery begins when this Average Joe's daily routine is interrupted in the middle of the night by a call - from the very daughter who's been missing for ten years.
In terms of stories and plotting, the script of Mazebook is about as microscopic as one can get. While there are some supporting characters along the way, nearly every page of this oversized comic focuses on Will and his internal monologue. By the time the mystery is introduced via the aforementioned phone call, it's already time to close the back cover.
Lemire handles both the writing and art on this, and the latter may be the most intriguing part of it all. It's portrayed almost entirely in a monotonal scheme with greys and browns, except when Will's daughter and her bright red sweater are involved. There's a theme and story going on with a singular red thread which, again, is something that adds to the mystery of it all.
Mazebook is undeniably Jeff Lemire. It has all of the standard hallmarks of a comic this creator would write, yet it somehow still breaks the mold and stands apart from any of the other creator-owned books Lemire has crafted. Despite being a double-sized debut, the plot moves forward at a crawl yet it never grows stale. Through clever design work and ground-breaking panel layouts, Mazebook #1 is amongst some of Lemire's easiest books to read, though you'll still want to instantly re-read it to try cracking this mystery for yourself.
Published on September 8, 2021
By Dark Horse Comics
Written by Jeff Lemire
Art by Jeff Lemire
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COMMENTS
Letters by Steve Wands
Cover by Jeff Lemire
REVIEW: Jeff Lemire’s MAZEBOOK #1 is a hypnotic opener that mines the depths of grief
Don’t be surprised if you get the wind knocked out of you.
By Kerry Vineberg -09/02/2021 11:30 am0
Mazebook #1 CoverMazebook #1
Writer, Artist, Colorist, Cover Artist: Jeff Lemire
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
It’s clear the hard-working comics veteran Jeff Lemire plays well with other creators. But he’s equally comfortable building an entire creation himself, as he does in Mazebook, a haunting new five-issue series about family and loss. Its first issue hits shelves September 8 from Dark Horse.
The series comes hot on the heels of a packed season for Lemire: the Sweet Tooth Netflix series based on his Vertigo comics (which has brought him to a new level of name recognition), new issues from Snow Angels and Ascender, The Unbelievable Unteens kickoff, and much more to come. And somehow, the award-winning creator brings his matchless focus to each. Lucky us!
He delivers a gut punch of an entrance in Mazebook #1: a father’s grim daily grind as he desperately tries to hold onto fading memories of his lost child, Wendy. In a recent interview on Mazebook with The Beat, Lemire (a father himself) noted that he was interested in exploring how a person dealt with trauma years later. Here he looks at the life of Will, father of Wendy, a decade after tragedy.
Interior panel from Mazebook #1
Lemire’s loose lines and organic, somber watercolors paint a picture of a man rendered numb by pain. Will goes about his work as a building inspector in a trance of routine, moving through an urban landscape (with a subtle nod to Lemire’s home base of Toronto) and shutting out others’ attempts to connect. His only anchor is the vivid red of his daughter’s old sweater.
A cheery start this is not. But in Lemire’s skilled hands, it’s fascinating, stirring, eerie. Will’s blurred memories of Wendy take on a reality stronger than his physical life, and symbols begin to emerge… lines, puzzles, and maps. The end ups the ante by introducing a dark mystery.
Lemire’s color choices, pacing, and lettering are on point, as is his seamless interweaving of Will’s thoughts and actions. The overall atmosphere here is one of isolation, rumination, and a screaming intensity of emotion broiling just under the surface.
If you like cerebral, surreal books that don’t spell everything out for you, I think you’ll find Mazebook rewarding. If you’re already a fan of Lemire, you’ll almost certainly like this too.
Mazebook #1 feels spiritually similar to Lemire’s solo books Essex County and The Underwater Welder in its examination of memory. The motif of Will’s faceless daughter drives home a maddening truth: In time, we lose the sharpness of our most precious recollections, like a second death. How will Will cope? Knowing Lemire, the answer is likely to be a worthwhile journey.
Lemire envisioned Mazebook as a graphic novel first, and settled on releasing extra-long “chapters”. The issue’s length (48 pages) gives us a satisfyingly meaty first installment that still provides a lot of suspense. Can we really wait a whole month to find out what happens next?
Published by Dark Horse Comics, Mazebook #1 arrives in stores and digitally on September 8.
REVIEW: Jeff Lemire’s MAZEBOOK offers a path through grief
MAZEBOOK is a thematically rich book that can also offer comfort in the wake of unimaginable loss.
By Joe Grunenwald -08/04/2022 1:00 pm2
Mazebook
Writer & Artist: Jeff Lemire
Letterer: Steve Wands
Cover Artist: Jeff Lemire
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
I’ve been thinking about Mazebook a lot lately. The latest graphic novel from cartoonist Jeff Lemire follows Will, a father who is trying to find his way forward ten years after the death of his puzzle-loving daughter, Wendy. One night Will receives a phone call that he believes is from Wendy, and he sets off on a journey to find her by using her last, unfinished maze as a map through Toronto. It’s ultimately a book about a man coming to terms with the grief of an inconceivable loss, and figuring out how to live a life beyond it.
There’s a reason this book has been on my mind. My wife, Jennie, died last month. She’d been diagnosed with cancer not quite two years ago, and her journey with it finally ended a few weeks ago. The emotion and trauma of the past two years, and of the final weeks and days of her life, is still incredibly fresh in my mind, and I’ve been flailing around since her death trying to figure out how to keep going and, perhaps more pressingly, why I should even bother.
I first read the opening chapter of Mazebook, which was released in five extra-long issues by Dark Horse Comics before coming out in hardcover format in June, about a year ago, and it just absolutely wrecked me. Will begins the book as a broken man, going through the motions of his life with no affect or interest, simply filling the time of the day, and all the time asking questions of an unfair universe that are bound to go unanswered.
At the time I read the first issue, I saw a vision of my future on the page, and it has turned out to be remarkably accurate in capturing how this feels. Routine has become a refuge and a welcome distraction from my own thoughts, which tend to spiral if I spend too much time alone with them. I feel hollow inside, like there’s an empty space in my chest where something crucial to my existence should be. I worry that I’ll always feel this way, that there will always be a dark cloud following me around even if I do somehow manage to figure out how to keep going.
The fading memory of his daughter is another thing Will struggles with. Ten years on from her death, he remembers specifics about Wendy’s personality, how she dressed, and what she loved, but is unable to bring forth what her face looked like. At other times, Lemire will present a memory Will is having of Wendy in the years before she got sick, only for a panel featuring hospital equipment or Wendy’s frail hand to appear in the middle of the sequence. Now on the other side of Jennie’s cancer, that memory creep is something I find myself experiencing as well. Her illness played such an outsized part in the last two years of her life that it’s occasionally a struggle to remember a time before it, and even when I do it feels like my mind always ends up back in that hospital room at the end. The trauma of the loss is hard to shake, and I imagine it will be for a long, long time.
Still, there are elements of Mazebook that give me hope – and even, in some instances, valuable suggestions – for my path forward. Will is able to reconnect with the memory of his daughter after engaging in one of her favorite activities: completing a complicated maze. I’ve also found myself gravitating towards some of Jennie’s favorite things, be they books, TV, or music, in a way that has made me feel closer to her. Just thinking of her while I read or watch something has been a nice reminder that, even though she’s physically no longer here, she’ll never really be gone from my life.
The visual of the maze is a striking design element, and one that is used to great effect throughout the book. Lemire frequently links panels with the corridors of a maze, in effect making the gutters between them a simple maze on the page. At other times Lemire’s panel layouts mirror the pathways of a maze, leading the reader’s eye down, then across, then up, then back, then forward. It’s disorienting in a good way, and it brings readers into Will’s headspace as he navigates his way through the maze.
They say there are five stages of grief – Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance – and they’re always laid out in that linear path, but the truth of the process is much more complicated. For the past few weeks (and really, in retrospect, for the past few months as things got worse instead of better), I’ve been slingshotting through all five stages pretty regularly. I’m pissed off at everyone and everything that this has happened, and I’m stunned that any of this is real, and sometimes I think I’m equipped to handle it and move forward, and mostly I’m just numb and sad and desperately missing my wife. Sometimes I’m multiple of those things at once, and sometimes I’m all of them, and sometimes I’m none of them, but in a way it feels like I’m trying to find my way through a maze. I find a path that feels like it might be okay, and then I hit a dead-end and have to backtrack or just completely start over. It’s not a perfect metaphor, but it has helped me navigate these feelings as well as I can, hoping that, eventually, I will find myself on the right path.
It feels significant that the maze Will completes in Mazebook is not one with an entrance and an exit, which is what I typically think of when I think of a maze. Instead, it’s a labyrinth-like maze that leads to a center, which is where Will ultimately finds Wendy. There’s no exit from grief, either, as far as I can tell – from talking with others who have experienced similar losses it’s a thing that will never, ever go away, but that you can eventually learn to live with. Being in the center of my grief sounds impossible right now, but, if you think about it, once you’re in the center of the maze you’re surrounded by equal parts of all of the paths that led you there, and maybe finding some sense of equilibrium between all of the conflicting things I’m feeling will be the best way to live with my grief.
For readers who are not currently grieving the loss of a loved one, there’s plenty to appreciate about Mazebook, from the engaging characters, to the often-trippy imagery, to the interesting page layouts, to the talking dog (how did I get this far without mentioning the talking dog). It’s a thematically rich book that I’m certain I’ll return to as I continue to figure out my own path forward.
FROGCATCHERS
Irene Velentzas | February 5, 2020 | 0 comments
FROGCATCHERS
JEFF LEMIRE
$22.99
112 pages
Buy Now
It often seems unfair that an artist’s year(s)-long labour can be read in a disproportionally short span of time. I cannot say how long or short artistic appreciation should take, but I can say that when Jeff Lemire is the storyteller, even the smallest amount of time spent reading his creator-owned work leaves the reader with a lasting emotional impact. While the rough style of his artistry may not appeal to some, the almost painfully honest quality of his line perfectly complements the poignant nature of his original graphic novels. Frogcatchers, Lemire’s latest graphic narrative with Gallery 13, pulls together similar considerations found throughout his other original graphic novels such as Essex County, Lost Dogs, The Underwater Welder, and Roughneck. Like these prior works, Frogcatchers reflects upon life, loss, change, letting go, regret, and the awful truth of the human condition: the ephemerality of life. While most of the aforementioned works focus on the fraught nature of various relationships – parent/child, siblings, lovers, friends, or foes – this quiet little tale focuses on the complicated relationship one has with themselves. In the simplest of ways, Frogcatchers asks: Who are we? Are we a past, present, or future versions of ourselves? Are we some sort of combination that surpasses any of these? What part of our inner-selves guides us onwards?
I describe Frogcatchers as a ‘quiet’ little tale because the first quarter of Lemire’s work is silent, pulling the reader through memory, dream, reality, and the unconscious with nothing but the soundscape of creaking, splashing, and beeping for company. The decision to tell so much of the introductory portion of the work in silence adds to the spatial and temporal confusion between the conscious and unconscious realm, between past, present, future, real, or imagined moments. The reader, like the character, remains fluid between these states, unhinged from any markers that might bring stability or certainty. Lacking verbal specificity allows the mystery of the unnamed protagonist to become the mystery of the self and the universal journey one takes towards self-understanding.
Lemire’s tale opens with a small figure hunched within a tunnel at the center of a double-page spread. The landscape beyond is empty and lush, quiet and pastoral, perhaps a young boy’s personal utopia. This image immerses the reader into the protagonist’s imagination from the outset. Much depends on the unobserved, unimportant space under the bridge, where the creek passes on its course unnoticed by those traveling along the main road above. But as Lemire draws the reader into the scene, they are compelled to pause and take notice that such a creek, like the flow of time, is teeming with life and possibility.
Lemire pushes the narrative focus forward from this establishing image to demonstrate the immensity that can encompass a single moment. Deep within the underpass tunnel a boy and a frog stare at one another in shot-reverse-shot. Lemire’s visual metaphor of “frog-catching” suggests that sometimes, if you’re quick and lucky, you can catch hold of the fleeting moments that define a lifetime. However, Lemire’s composition suggests that such moments are not everlasting, opportunities have a life of their own, existing in motion all around us. As the episode between boy and frog repeats itself in the subsequent panels, opportunity eludes him. Later in the tale, those opportunities – missed or captured – take demonic form as the Frog King’s agents, haunting the character’s psyche. Through such narrative repetitions and transformational visual metaphors, the story suggests that an entire life can be similarly defined through unassuming moments of gained or lost opportunities. The second of these early shot-reverse-shots between boy and frog visually give way to a deeper self-examination. The boy, gazing after the escaped frog, notices his reflection upon the surface’s water and must reach underneath that reflective surface to discover the potential that lies within him.
Though some may criticize Lemire’s rough hewn comics line, it is this coarse quality that bolsters his thematic approach to storytelling. The rough quality of Lemire’s line permits a thematic fluidity between states of consciousness, temporality, and even visual objects, as precisely rendered objects and characters would be too visually defined to transform themselves into other shapes, times, states, and ideas. Furthermore, the dreamlike quality of the storyworld defies specificity much like dreams provide only enough information to describe the dreamworld and its events. In this way, Lemire’s fluid artistic style plays with the very visual properties that might define objects in time and space. Manipulating contours, light and shadows, Lemire stretches and redefines the boundaries of the visualized object, turning fingers into ribs, underwater environments into x-rays, and bones into a man’s face. The slow artistic transformation that coaxes one image to emerge from another further suggests the cyclical and undivided nature of the self at the heart of Lemire’s story: external properties become internalized and internalized properties become externalized as a matter of course. Lemire’s fluid visualization suggests that our self-definition endlessly relies on this inseparable cycle. The only certainty of this cycle is its process of continual transformation. In Frogcatchers, a few haphazard changes in brushstrokes is all it takes to become something completely unrecognizable, something new, something other than what you were or will become.
Lemire’s artistic fluidity also extends to other compositional techniques such as his use of framing. Like his visual style, Lemire’s structural technique belies instability, calling a sort of meta-awareness to the ideological structuring with which we surround our life’s story. Lemire uses panels to describe portals between states of consciousness, states of being, temporal states, and invisible boundaries that can be traversed. By controlling the story’s visual framing, Lemire controls the reader’s perspective into and movement through the storyworld. For example, Lemire’s recurrent play with shot-reverse-shot throughout the narrative continually turns the tables on the reader’s perspective of whether the present moment of the story is told through dream, waking, memory, or present reality. As soon as the reader becomes familiar with the established perspective, the perspective changes once again, shifting from an external perspective of the storyworld to the internal perspective of the character. This relentless perceptual shifting creates deepening states of confusion for both the reader and the protagonist. These perceptual transformations, which continually destabilize the storyworld and the characters within it, are masterfully controlled through the narrative’s framing and position the visual narrative to metaphorically operate like the current established in the story’s early symbolic images.
The narrative’s circular ending also serves to emphasize the infinity encompassed within the single moment. The narrative current that sweeps the reader along the tale finally returns them to its opening scene – much like a creek’s water changes in its ceaseless flow, but somehow remains the same stream. So too operates the stream of consciousness that encompasses the protagonist’s choices, regrets, and memories. These both live inside of him as he simultaneously lives within them. Lemire’s few double-page spreads remind us of this human condition by situating the location of the story within the self from the outset. The difficulty lies in achieving the correct perspective to recognize that there are multiple selves within the self to be explored, understood, lived through, and supported by. The challenge may lie in trying to coexist with all of these selves and do right by each of them.
Lemire’s Frogcatchers, is a visually and narratively rich tale that suggests the key to navigating life and the self is to remain amphibious, to see under the surface of things, to grasp at opportunities, and to remain open to the constant change found within life’s current. That Lemire is able to unfold the mysteries of the human condition so fully, so seemingly simply, and so impactfully in a scant one hundred pages is the magic of his particular brand of visual storytelling. Perhaps it is less that Lemire tells a story and more that he articulates the invisible currents surrounding our lives through story. Perhaps some stories seem to unfold so quickly in their narrative current because they are universal and timeless. Perhaps – much like a current – this is why it is so difficult to remain unmoved by such skillful and emotional storytelling as Lemire’s.
REVIEWED BY
Irene Velentzas
POSTED
February 5, 2020
TOPICS
Irene Velentzas, jeff lemire, Review