flannel animal

“Jeff Lemire’s Essex County” or “Why I Want To Make Comics”
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It’s almost 5:00 AM and I’m up because I my wife and I watched a horror movie.  I tried to sleep right after we finished watching, but I started hearing a succession of odd clicks coming from the kitchen…
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Anyway, since I had the time on my hands I was looking over my books in my apartment (one of my most prized collections) for something to re-read.  I landed on this book, Essex County.  And flipping through it again for the first time in a while, I remembered how it made me feel when I bought it.  I woke up that morning when I was still living in the town I graduated college in and got Chic-Fil-A for breakfast.  Then I went to the Books-A-Million down the street because this massive graphic novel I had seen a few weeks before would not leave my mind.  I mean it was huge.  I know exactly how this will sound, but the sheer weightiness of the thing got me really excited.  It was just 512 pages of gorgeous, expressive art, all done in crisp and understated black and white.  I had no idea what the story was about - something about Canada, I guess? - but the artwork and the quietness of the book stood out among all the others.  So that morning a few weeks later, full on chicken biscuits and coffee, I went straight to the Graphic Novel / Manga section, found the sucker where I had left it last time and bought the hell out of it.  It was definitely a decision I had been pondering for some time, because I had already gone over my limit in buying books at the time.  I believe I made the right decision.
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I won’t go into the details of the story any more than saying it’s definitely not what comics usually aspire to.  Basically, it’s a three-part epic about a county with interconnected stories and people.  The reason it’s an award-winning piece of literature is that it has an unbelievable emotional depth.  Something I had never seen in a comic, and still haven’t.  It’s perfectly, hauntingly slow in parts, and just so profound in the way the whole thing is calmly understated.  It’s beautiful, hopeful, and sad all at once. Recently, I read a review of the book where the reviewer and I had the same experience, both getting choked up at a particular scene, as a result of pages and pages of Jeff Lemire’s (the author) perfect pacing up until that crucial moment.   
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I think that there’s a piece of literature, or a film, or maybe a tv show, some piece of art that is responsible for giving creative people that final push into the specific thing they end up doing.  For myself, I had been confused for a long time as to what that was.  I had always loved stories, specifically in the film format, and as I graduated high school I was really set on going to film school somehow.  I had a handful of terrible ideas for characters and stories, and all kinds of “great” ideas for shots and camera angles.  But I also had been drawing my whole life, and I didn’t know how that was going to fit.  As I went to college and joined the art department, I eventually gave up on the filmmaker dream.  But after a while I started reading a lot of alternative comics and great fiction simultaneously.  I saw where these comics guys like Daniel Clowes and Adrian Tomine had these great drawing styles and were telling really unusual stories for what I thought comics were growing up.  And I was reading a lot of Michael Chabon at the time and seeing how epic and emotionally engaging characters could be in a good novel.  But it wasn’t until a year later when I finally bought Essex County that I realized how much potential the graphic novel format had.  This one book by Jeff Lemire showed me that if you want to write a story and draw it (i.e. make a comic book), it doesn’t have to be A) a flashy, meaningless superhero story or B) a tongue-in-cheek, quirky book like Daniel Clowes.  Comic writers could be more like Michael Chabon, or Zadie Smith.  You can strive for really meaningful stories, excruciatingly-real characters and most importantly, something important to say.
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I’ll finish this impromptu “review” of sorts with this: When I finished reading Essex County the first time, I was sitting in my car, eating (again, Chic-Fil-A weirdly enough), killing time before a job interview at the mall.  At this point in my life, I was finishing up college, was dating my girlfriend-now-wife, and trying to figure out what the next step was.  I finished the book about the same time I finished my sandwich that afternoon, and though it wasn’t a heaven-sent epiphany by any means, I remember realizing that that book was what I wanted to do.  That was the goal.  If I could put together one story, work on it for years, drawing every page until it was perfect, and somehow just get it made and maybe published, I’d be done.  That’s all I’d need creatively.  If I could just make something like that beautiful book in one lifetime, it’d be a lifetime well spent.  A realization like that, figuring out exactly what it is you wan to do, can take years.  Possibly years full of failing at every other thing.  But it clicked at the perfect time for me, and all because of this one book somehow.  So, for that, thank you, Mr. Lemire.