Jeff Lemire is a Canadian cartoonist whose Essex
County trilogy is an absolute must read: It’s a perceptive and
moving window into a tiny, frigid town in Ontario populated by
superhero-loving children and hockey-loving men.
With his newest, The Nobody, Lemire leaps from the local
indie publishers at Top Shelf to DC’s Vertigo imprint. The book is a
contemporary riff on H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man: Here, a
mysterious bandaged stranger, Griffen, takes up residence in a tiny
tourist town—Large Mouth, “Home of the World’s Biggest Bass.”
Griffen is, of course, invisible, thanks to an irreversible serum that
is also eating away at his sanity, and his elaborate bandages promptly
attract both the suspicion of the small, insular town and the interest
of a curious teenager named Vickie.
As Lemire’s three-color panels—black, white, and a chilly
blue—follow the storyline laid out by Wells, it’s hard to sustain
interest in Griffen himself: He’s a cipher, the cave wall on which the
town’s shadows are projected, but little more. As is abundantly
demonstrated in Essex County, Lemire’s real strength is in
conveying the clumsiness of reserved but well-meaning men. Vickie’s
father looks as though he walked straight out of Essex County, down to
his broad slab of a nose, and the relationship between he and Vickie is
the emotional core of the book.
Top Shelf just released a hardcover Essex County collection—those interested in exploring this fast-rising
cartoonist would be best served by starting there.