ONTARIO GOTHIC
A rootless cultural nomad reviews Jeff Lemire’s rural family drama The Collected Essex County.
originally published on the Multiply page of Sputnik Fantastic, November 2009
One measure of a truly skilled comic creator is their ability to make their readers care about people or characters that may be radically different from themselves. With the rural family drama of The Collected Essex County, Jeff Lemire doesn’t just meet this criteria; he positively surpasses it.
At its heart, Essex County is a nuanced but ultimately romantic saga about the landscape Lemire grew up in: the desolate farmlands of Ontario, in east-central Canada. More specifically, it’s about the ways an agricultural community is shaped by this harsh, unforgiving geography. Over the course of three main stories, and two loosely related shorts, Lemire gives us a sense of a close-knit small town, whose inhabitants’ lives are marked by shared traditions (hockey), fantasies (comic book superheroics), and the unpleasant secrets that lurk just below the surface of their rural idyll.
Lemire achieves this by taking full advantage of the medium. His rich, expressive linework is perfectly suited to a narrative built on the conflict between roots (the town itself) and wings (the urge to escape, or metaphorically fly away from it all). Page layouts are used to emphasize the vastness of an environment that looms over the cast, sometimes ominous, but just as often providing a comforting solitude. “Decompressed” six-panel grids allow small but crucial moments to linger, heightening the emotional weight of family secrets revealed. In scenes where dialog is kept at a minimum, close-ups often provide more hints at genuine resolution than any conversation could hope to achieve.
I’ll confess that that I kept expecting hints of magical realism, or maybe supernatural elements. Indeed, some of the recurring visual themes are positively haunting: the footprints in snow, and those seemingly omnipresent crows.
However, that just belies my own expectations derived from pop culture’s small town narratives: the everyday weirdness of TV’s Amazing Stories, the sinister hamlets that populate the Lovecraft mythos and Stephen King’s early work, or even just the oddball happenings in the Palomar stories of Gilbert Hernandez.
But there is very little that’s otherworldy in Essex County. Instead, Lemire hooks readers in with understated drama: a kid in a superhero costume dreaming up an elaborate alien invasion plot, as he longs to escape the humdrum routine of farm life; a failed hockey player dealing with senility, as past and present blur into a hazy miasma; a nurse compensating for a personal loss by making a difference in the lives of her patients. All of their stories are uniquely human, and yet integral to their connection with Essex County, the place.
For a reader like me – a perennial metropolitan boy who grew up in various South East Asian mega-cities, with no single “province” that my family calls home – Essex County would ordinarily be a difficult sell. To Lemire’s credit, he got me to care about a tale that is unapologetically pastoral by focusing on some of the most universal human emotions: loss, hope, a thirst for new experiences, or a sense of belonging. But most of all, Essex County is about the tension between holding on to a familiar past, and dealing with today’s unpleasant realities. That’s something even a cultural nomad can relate to.