The Nobody
By Jeff Lemire
Vertigo

There are only five stories in the world—or maybe six or seven. The number varies slightly between tellings, sure, but the adage remains more or less the same. When boiled down to their purest essence, mankind has, in a sense, been reliving the same basic conceits since the dawn of storytelling. The moral, of course, is that the skill ultimately lies not in the story itself so much as the way it’s told. It’s one of the first lessons a low-level instructor will impart on you toward the beginning of nearly any creative writing course.

The concept is embraced to its fullest when artists opt to eschew the illusion of fresh storytelling in favor of an open retelling of some much-loved piece of art. Upon wrapping up his oft-lauded Essex County trilogy for Top Shelf, that’s precisely where Jeff Lemire went, choosing as his jumping off point H.G. Wells’s beloved science fiction allegory, The Invisible Man.

In adapting (or perhaps more appropriately, reimagining) the story, Lemire embraced yet another bit of creative writing 101: write what you know. For a backdrop, the artist provides us with Large Mouth, a small, rural town though ought prove rather familiar to those acquainted with the streets and farms of Essex County.

In spinning his tale of invisibility, Lemire tackles small town living with a certain sense of irony, when Griffen (a name borrowed directly from the Wells story), recently transformed and wrapped in those iconic bandages, holes up in a hotel in Large Mouth in an attempt to embrace a form of invisibility not granted by his experiments. Naturally, the specter of a bandaged man wandering the streets of a tightly-knit small town community awakens in its residents something quite the opposite, with the freakish stranger becoming an almost instantaneous lightning road for its paranoia and prejudices.  The ultimate irony, of course, the ease with which our invisible protagonist could slip by, undetected in any setting, should he simply unravel the bandages around his face.

There’s an awful lot of subtext crammed into these 144 pages, which, like Griffen himself, seesaw between being overly subtle and potentially overbearing, but Lemire does often gracefully skirt the line, when flash-backs to a time before the accident intersect with reality, and his shaky lines take over the story, as when the protagonist leaps into an icy lake to save a drowning love and slowly unravels into nothingness in its rippling depths.

At times, however, Lemire seems almost too pre-occupied with exploring large scale themes, sometimes at the expense of the story itself. As such, the book will likely prove frustrating for those expecting more adventure from a Vertigo book starring the invisible man. More often than not, the book feels like addendum to Essex County, a subtle, if slow moving work that’s more about people than events.

After the epic sweep of Essex County’s combined 500-plus pages, The Nobody also feels a bit slight, a simultaneous palate-cleansing stab at genre work and perhaps an attempt to close the door on a book that has almost certainly consumed a good portion of its author’s life. It’s not a bad book by any means, of course, but it’s certainly one struggling to come to grips with exactly  what it wants to be.

In that sense, The Nobody feels like a transitional piece as Lemire gathers the pieces for his next major work.

–Brian Heater

In The Country Nurse, the final installment of Jeff Lemire’s Essex County trilogy, the artist is obsessed with images—the image of the open farmland of Essex County, the image of a crow flying in front of the moon, the image of a boy growing up and learning the truth about who he is. He uses these composite images to complete a larger picture, started in the first two books in the series, of Essex County, a fictionalized version of his hometown.

In a real sense, then, Essex County is the protagonist of the three books. Whereas so often in series based on locations—consider any TV show set in a particular locale, for starters—the plots of the characters’ lives become the focus of the story, here the reverse is true: The tales of these characters are woven into the larger fabric of the story of Essex County, and the stories are important not so much for what happens in them as for how they represent life in the county. The lives of the people in Essex County become emblematic of the place, rather than subsuming it with their own drama.

Thus Lemire tells about his characters and their pasts, but in a very unassuming, unhurried way. As we read, we do not feel like we are racing toward any plot conclusions; we are merely observing and taking in what is set before us. The book is a feat of controlled tone and atmosphere. Lemire sets a slow pace that in turn mimics the pace of life in Essex County, where little really “happens” from day to day.

Because the plot is not at the forefront of the novel, the art is extremely important; luckily, it doesn’t disappoint. Lemire’s black-and-white drawings are poignant and at times deeply personal. He often prefers that we get to know the characters by reading the expressions on their faces, and sometimes their thoughts, rather than relying on dialogue. In one especially well-done scene, for instance, when Lester, who we met as a younger boy in book one, finally finds out who his father is, Lemire skips the conversation between uncle Ken (who is raising Lester) and his nephew altogether. Instead, Ken tells Lester that “we need to talk,” and what follows is a silent two-page spread that beautifully renders the slight movements indicative of the conversation. Lemire even removes us from the room in which they are talking, placing us outside the window as spectators, along with a crow.

The wonderful thing about a passage like this is the balance that he strikes between story and form. We are engaged in what is happening—we have been waiting since book one for Ken to tell Lester about his father—but also how it is happening—the sparse, simple drawings that distill an emotionally charged conversation down to a handful of understated moments in time.

–Jillian Steinhauer

In which members of the rock community tearfully reveal their geeky comic obsessions, beneath their hardened irony-based exoskeleton.

“Modern art,” Eddie Argos proclaims unapologetically in the song of the same name, “makes me want to rock out.” The lead-singer (well, the lead talk-singer) of Art Brut naturally goes on to rattle off a number of side effects of said artistic period on his temperament, culminating with the head butting of a Matisse in Paris’s Pompidou.

The song is standard Art Brut—raucous, hilarious, and catchy as all get out. And naturally, anyone who has picked up the band’s self-titled debut on which the track appears, has little question about the frontman’s opinions on the world of fine art.

Most of us, however, didn’t catch wind about Argos’s sequential art obsessions until recently, when it was announced that the singer would be penning a column of comic criticism for St. Louis-based entertainment publication, PLAYBACK:stl. Argos, a self-proclaimed DC Comics junkie devoted the first installment of his
“Pow! To the People” column to superhero, Booster Gold. He’s subsequently tackled the world of Angel and Captain America.

After a too-long hiatus, we’re extremely excited to welcome The Daily Rock Hatch with a very special geeking out by Eddie Argos.

Who are you?

I am Eddie Argos. The “Singer” in Art Brut, and recently I’m also the “singer” in Everybody Was In The French Resistance..Now.

You should totally be my Myspace friend because:

You don’t want me as a Myspace friend. I never reply to messages and I’m always forgetting my password.

What are you reading [comic-wise, naturally]?

At the moment I’m enjoying Booster Gold. Jeff Katz and Geoff Johns have just finished there amazing run on it and I’m excited to see where it goes next. I’m about to start reading The Escapists by Brian K Vaughn. I really enjoyed the book by Michael Chabon and I love Brian K Vaughn’s writing so I’m really looking forward to it. I also read Fables/Jack Of Fables and the Angel comic regularly. I was a bit embarrassed about reading Angel as its based on a TV show and that somehow felt wrong but its pretty good and I’m still enjoying it although the issues do feel pretty short.

The comic shop that always makes me late for sound check:

I am genuinely often very late for sound checks because of Comic shops.The Comic shop that’s made me the latest, or in fact miss the sound check altogether, was in, I think, Winnipeg. It was a huge second-hand comic shop, full of very cheap comics that I’d been looking for for years. I stocked up on so many comics I had to buy an extra bag just to get them all home.

This time next year, I hope to be working on the soundtrack to major motion picture adaptation of which comic:

All three Essex County books by Jeff Lemire. They are a trilogy of books about the same small Canadian town. It’s a real place, but they’re fictional stories. Really, totally amazing. I can’t recommend these books enough. There on an independent called Top Shelf. I might write the songs anyway and release some sort of concept album so when it does inevitably turn into a film, I have a head start on everybody else

Assorted Eddie Argos-related comic fun facts:

Umm…I’m trying to write a book at the moment about DC comics. I don’t know if thats a “fun” fact though. There is also a song about DC comics on the next Art Brut album.

–Brian Heater

[Above, baggin' on indie books. Below, the portable Dispatch.

• Ryan Pequin’s The Walk debuts on Top Shelf 2.0.
• New York bookstore, The Strand unveils its Artist’s Series Tote Bags. A quick search of “Tote” on their website yields results from Art Spiegelman, Adriane Tomine, and David Hockney. The Spiegelman bag is a revised version of the one commissioned last year for The Strand’s 80th Anniversary, but the others are brand spankin’ new.
• The U.S. Constitution gets “graphic.” Hill & Wang, an imprint of FSG Books will be releasing a graphic adaptation of The Constitution in October. Next stop, manifest destiny!
• CBLDF has an upcoming benefit with Cory Doctorow and Paul Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky) for a multimedia speaking event. It takes place Thursday, August 21 at Helen Mills Theatre (137-139 W 26th St. NY). Tickets are $20 at CBLDF.org. There will also be an after-party at Sutra Lounge.
• Essex County keeps raking in the awards. This time Jeff Lemire’s graphic novel trilogy lands him a Best Emerging Talent Award.
• IndieReview revamps their site.
• Drawn and Quarterly has their August archive listed.

–Jason Owen

[Above, baggin' on indie books. Below, the portable Dispatch.

• Ryan Pequin’s The Walk debuts on Top Shelf 2.0.
• New York bookstore, The Strand unveils its Artist’s Series Tote Bags. A quick search of “Tote” on their website yields results from Art Spiegelman, Adriane Tomine, and David Hockney. The Spiegelman bag is a revised version of the one commissioned last year for The Strand’s 80th Anniversary, but the others are brand spankin’ new.
• The U.S. Constitution gets “graphic.” Hill & Wang, an imprint of FSG Books will be releasing a graphic adaptation of The Constitution in October. Next stop, manifest destiny!
• CBLDF has an upcoming benefit with Cory Doctorow and Paul Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky) for a multimedia speaking event. It takes place Thursday, August 21 at Helen Mills Theatre (137-139 W 26th St. NY). Tickets are $20 at CBLDF.org. There will also be an after-party at Sutra Lounge.
• Essex County keeps raking in the awards. This time Jeff Lemire’s graphic novel trilogy lands him a Best Emerging Talent Award.
• IndieReview revamps their site.
• Drawn and Quarterly has their August archive listed.

–Jason Owen