Sweet Tooth: It has turned sour

Sweet Tooth, Volume 3: Animal Armies
By Jeff Lemire

I hate to complain about creators that I like, but this volume of Jeff Lemire's ongoing Vertigo series left such a bad taste in my mouth that I had to say (that is, write) something, at least to clear my head of the negative vibes. I had some reservations about the series in the first volume, and the second, while readable, didn't really get me excited, but this third volume was when I tipped into outright, eye-rolling negativity. While Lemire did an excellent job with his withdrawn characters in the Essex County Trilogy, he continues to display a lack of imagination here with his post-apocalyptic world, filling it with the standard ruined buildings, empty landscapes, and protective authority figures. The wispy art that worked so well on the empty vistas of rural Canada often seems hastily sketched here, and Lemire still has a problem depicting coherent action.

None of that has really changed since the beginning of the series, but what ends up being especially distasteful here are the attempts to shock, which seem ham-fisted and manipulative; The Road this ain't. The worst and most laughable involves a cult leader who keeps his five vicious dog-children on leashes. How he managed to build a city-conquering following of mask-wearing animal-worshipers is unexplained, but he's the type of cackling, violently crazy villain that shows up in B-grade action movies. We get to see how terrible he is when he explains that his wife died giving birth to her litter, so he let the babies eat her corpse. This is supposed to be repulsive, but all I could do was express disbelief at the thought that human, canine, or human/canine newborns would be eating meat. That's how well thought-through this world seems as a whole, really.

This volume's attempt at tragic poignancy in the climax is another bit that just seems manipulative (I'm going to spoil a big reveal from the ending of the volume here, so skip to the next paragraph if you really don't want to be surprised). The brutish Jepperd, who leads a rescue attack on the compound where deer-boy Gus is being held, finds out during a fight that his son, who he was told died in childbirth along with his mother, actually survived. Then, as he is rescuing Gus and some others, one of the kids, a horse-boy, gets caught by the evil dog-boys, and Jepperd forces everyone to leave him behind, but not before the boy (who hadn't spoken before this point) lets out a plaintive "Da?" Why, could this be Jepperd's long-lost son, which he just left for dead? Yes, it is, and we're all supposed to be so devastated. But we're not, we just sigh at the tiresome attempt at tear-jerking, which started with a sneering villain announcing the long-kept secret in the middle of a knife fight (which contains a page with an awkward panel arrangement that is read clockwise, stranding the reader's eye on the left side of the page) and ended with an escape that makes little sense in terms of where characters are situated in relation to each other. It's clumsy and poorly executed all around, and Lemire should be much better than this.

That's not the full extent of his ineptitude, however; much of the art and storytelling in general is poorly done. Action is often amateurishly done, with characters not moving or interacting believably. Take, for instance, this two-panel sequence from the middle of a fight scene, in which Jepperd is being held to the ground by a boot on his head:

That's a hell of an arm motion that can send a man flying like that. While not everything is so poorly done, Lemire does seem to struggle in the attempts to depict the violence that should be so essential to the series. Bad superhero artists often get made fun of for this sort of thing, and just because Lemire draws in a rougher style, he shouldn't get away with it.

The character work isn't much better, but it's fairly consistent, fitting in Lemire's standard style. However, the  cult leader once again provides an example of ugliness, being depicted with a more rendered, shaded face than the others:



It's a weird effect, like a Benjamin Marra version of an evil villain.

The odd pacing is another area of concern; Lemire can't seem to decide if he's going for propulsive action or slow contemplation. He wastes pages with pointless bits like a helicopter blade spinning:



Or a fly buzzing around a room:



Or, in an especially banal attempt at an Eisner-style title page, a scene that just makes one wonder why somebody would set up big letters in a field like that, and why the characters wander by them without noticing:



Other bits make one question the "reality" of the book as well; in one scene, a TV monitor displays an attacking horde of characters, but the image shown is obviously an image from the comic, and sure enough, it shows up a few pages later on what should be a big spread whose impact is dulled since we've already seen it (and also has the odd effect of making it seem like the attackers have been frozen in mid-charge for several pages).

The series seemed like it had some promise at the beginning, but this installment reveals that Lemire is well out of his depth here, and while it is admirable that he wants to stretch himself, the results definitely aren't worthwhile reading. It's surprising; Vertigo usually has better quality control than this. Maybe Lemire's attention has been drawn elsewhere by his work writing DC superhero comics; hopefully he'll finish this up soon and move on to something that is more his speed, but after this debacle, he's going to have to do something pretty good to get me back on his side.

The Signifiers: They signify my confusion

Elsewhere: I wrote about Iron Man 2 for The Factual Opinion, and in the first of what will hopefully be a bunch of regular pieces for Indie Pulp, I reviewed the first volume of Sweet Tooth, which I think I liked less than most.

Links: Kevin Church continues to expand his webcomics empire, starting a new series called FIGHT!, which is illustrated by Tracie Mauk.  Looks like fun.

I haven't read this one yet, but it looks neat: a prequel comic to the movie Inception, by Udon.

The Signifiers #1
By Michael Neno
Buy it on the official site

Jack Kirby imitators are a dime a dozen, and have been for a good forty years, but every so often, somebody manages to get it right, using stylistic techniques and the forward-looking sensibility that actually fits the King's legacy, rather than slavishly imitating his visual tics or marching out his characters to reenact yet another cosmic dust-up.  Michael Neno is definitely trying for something more substantial than brightly-colored guys punching each other here, and even if he's not fully successful, he's managed to take something familiar and recognizable and make it unique and strange all over again, which is not easy to do.

This 48-page self-published black and white pamphlet is actually broken up into three separate stories, although they may all take place in the same "universe".  The first one, which shares the series' title, is probably the strangest, and also the hardest to follow, starting off with a splash page of a woman's screaming face, then revealing that her head sits on the body of a dog, and she's being tortured by three guys in weird costumes.  She gets rescued by a band of outsiders in a Big Daddy Roth hot rod, then the scene abruptly shifts to five years later, with the rest of the story following those outsiders as they live in a sort of walled-off slum on the edge of a wasteland.  There are some attacks by more weird people, hushed conversations about an impending danger, a boy who apparently has some sort of destiny as a leader, and discussions of a strange force known as The Voyst, and while little of it makes much sense, it's pretty arresting stuff, a weird world that Neno drops readers into and expects them to keep up.  Maybe more will be explained in future issues, but even this small portion is enough to bring a vital, breathing world to life, one that merits further exploring.  The crazy designs and odd dialogue rhythms really stand out, and there are at least a couple bravura sequences, like a scene in which one of the trio of aforementioned torturers turns out to be an amnesiac who stole his equipment and is interrogated by benign-seeming agents of the government (?), making for a nice escalation of danger and a sense of paranoia. There's also a single page sequence that follows a missile being fired as it races toward its target, accompanied by captions bearing the lyrics of a rap song about a girl named Maria, which is a cool, surreal touch.

The second story is a short one called "Nellie of Cosmic Brook Farm or: Cosmic House on the Prairie", and it is presented on every page as five tiers of two small panels that see an alien attacking a farm and the titular Nellie donning some Kirbytech equipment to fly up into the sky and fight it.  It's weird and goofy, with the small panels making everything claustrophobic, yet bursting out of the space that confines it.  Who knows if this is just a one-off story or if it will be followed up on, but it works great for a sort of breather in the middle of the issue, something that's plenty strange and exciting, but not as confounding as everything else.

Finally, we get to spend time with "Landlark, the Heat-Seeking Dwarf", an odd story about the polka-dotted short fellow being imprisoned by some mean guys, then escaping, falling in with some free-spirited hippies, and playing music with them on the street.  As with everything else in the comic, it's somewhat inexplicable, but there's a feeling of art and emotion being used to escape oppression, with Landlark's repeated catch phrase of "I came here to love!" and the happiness he seems to find with people who don't disdain him or seek to use him for unpleasant ends.  As with the other stories, it should be interesting to see if or how Neno follows this up.

This might not be for everybody, but for those who like to see a bit of pushing the limits of expression, Neno has put together something pretty fascinating here.  He's using familiar Kirby motifs, from the crazy technology, to the stilted dialogue, to recognizable artistic flourishes, but he's not slavishly copying from his inspiration, but using it as a starting point for something new.  It should be fascinating to see what else he can come up with as the series continues.
-----

You can buy the comic from Neno's website (where it is also being serialized), and while you're there, be sure to check out his other ongoing bit of goofiness, a webcomic called The Mesh.

Essex County: I'm late to the party, but I'll still wear a lampshade on my head

Elsewhere: I reviewed Strange #2 at Comics Bulletin. No TV reviews this week, since neither show I write about had a new episode. Sorry, Brady-addicts.

Links: One Patrick Wensink informs me that he is having a coloring contest using images from his book, Sex Dungeon For Sale!, and one of the prizes is an autographed copy of Michael Kupperman's Tales Designed to Thrizzle collection. So go enter!

Check out the awesome Paul Pope illustrations for a GQ article about Japanese concept cars. Hey, wasn't Battling Boy supposed to come out this year?

I really liked this fumetti piece starring Harvey Pekar at the Graphic NYC blog. Good stuff.

Okay:

Essex County

By Jeff Lemire

Jeff Lemire has been getting a lot of acclaim over the past few years, and with this brick of a collection of his breakout series, it's easy to see why. Some (your not-necessarily-humble critic, for one) might have balked at his work, unsure about the odd artistic style, but once you dive into the stories here, it's easy to get lost in Lemire's world of placid settings and crushing loneliness. And while his intimate storytelling style might have gripped readers and plunged them into the lives of his characters in the single volumes, having them all smashed together really brings out the intricacies of the interconnected relationships and long-term plotting; it all ends up seeming like more than the sum of its parts, which, considering the affect those parts have had on readers, is really saying something.

Lemire starts out small with the first third of his trilogy, Tales from the Farm. It follows a young, orphaned boy who is struggling to deal with the death of his mother and the lack of a father figure throughout his life. He chafes against the unsure guidance of the uncle in whose care he was left, gravitating instead toward the hulking neighborhood gas station attendant, another lonely soul who once had a chance at glory as a pro hockey player before an injury sidelined him permanently. He's not helped either by a superhero comics obsession that leads him to wear a mask and cape everywhere he goes, but this does allow some escape through flights of fantasy.

The second book, Ghost Stories, sees a pair of hockey-playing brothers leave the rural county of the title in order to play in the minor leagues in Toronto, briefly finding a bit of athletic glory before managing to alienate each other and remain apart for most of the rest of their lives. The story is told in flashback, narrated by the lonelier of the brothers as he struggles to understand his surroundings when dementia sets in, causing him to confuse everything he sees with some moment from his past, adding an additional layer of poignance to the already-sad story of a lifetime of regret.

Finally, the third volume, The Country Nurse, ties everything together, revealing the deep connections between the first two sets of characters and allowing for a bit of closure, if not exactly a resolution. Lemire gives us two storylines here, with one in the present following the title character as she makes her rounds, inserting herself into others' lives and meddlesomely trying to help with their emotional issues, while still dealing with her own, which involve a dead husband and a rebellious son. This is intercut with a flashback to nearly a century before, as a nun who oversees a remote orphanage must lead her young charges through the snowy wilderness after a tragic fire; could they end up being the ancestors of all our present-day heroes? This wraps everything up in a possibly too-perfect bundle, but it does point out that there's no need for the loneliness and isolation these characters all force themselves into; they've got something in common, as does everybody on earth if you go back far enough.

The whole, huge tapestry ends up being a sad ensemble piece, with the first book setting the tone for the series early, and the rest of the stories continuing in a similar vein. Lemire catalogues myriad variations of poignant isolation, usually self-inflicted. But this is no simplistic, surface-only wallow in various bits of sadness; Lemire manages to make all the characters feel achingly real, through glimpses of their thoughts, examples of the way they go about their lives, flashbacks to revelatory moments, and interactions with each other that demonstrate their halting desire for connection. It's a very impressive example of character architecture, with the reader immersed in these people's lives and feeling transported to a very specific setting and emotional state.

That artwork, which is certainly uniquely idiosyncratic with its square noses and spindly, elongated limbs, ends up working wonderfully to define the setting and characters, and brings a surprising specificity of emotion to life along with wide-open landscapes that match the emptiness that everyone seems to feel. It might look somewhat crude at first glance, but the sketchy raggedness of the lines hides a firm grasp of technique that eventually leads to some astonishingly effective moments.

The second volume, especially, sees some wonderful, powerful scenes in which emotion is laid bare on characters' faces and Lemire comes up with beautiful artistic techniques to convey memory. The elderly Lou watching a key moment from his past play out as if he's just another observer in the room is heartbreaking:

And a bit of tearful recall at a moment of childhood happiness is equally sad:

Lemire returns to bravura artistic moments like these several times throughout the series, but he's even more effective at simple conversations, in which inner pain simmers behind his characters' eyes:

I've only scratched the surface here; there is much emotional richness to be encountered within these covers. Lemire has his own style of art and storytelling, but it's a pretty incredible one, able to work wonders to bring people to life, making us care about them and want happiness, forgetting that they're simple lines on paper. That's the mark of a great storyteller, and it's obvious that Lemire should have a long, fruitful artistic career ahead of him.