Sweet Tooth #34

Written by Jeff Lemire
Art by Jeff Lemire and Nate Powell

According to Jeff Lemire, being a nice person after the Apocalypse happens is just not feasible.  This issue shows us the full history of Doug and Johnny Abbot, two characters who have been with this series for quite a long time.

Doug Abbot, usually just called Abbot, has been the closest thing this series has had to a main villain.  He's the one who was capturing hybrid children and having them studied.  He's the one who killed Jeppard's wife, and who has been tracking down Gus, Jeppard, and Dr. Singh for the last little while.  Johnny is his younger brother, and the guy who let everyone escape (twice in Jeppard's case).

In this issue, the two brothers are face to face again, Abbot having found the Evergreen Dam where Johnny had decided to stay.  At that point, the story flips to a flashback (drawn by Nate Powell, whose name is not on the cover), and we see just how their relationship has always been, and we learn how Abbot came to be running the militia camp we first met him in.

This is a very good comic.  Powell's art fits well with Lemire's usual house style for this comic, and I enjoyed seeing him draw the scenes set around the time that people started dying all over the place.  Lemire's not shown us a lot of this transitional period, which is the type of thing I always find interesting.

Like many other Vertigo books that I read, Sweet Tooth is moving towards its finish, but it is doing so very well.

Any Empire

by Nate Powell

There are some stories that can only be told in comics, and Nate Powell's Any Empire is a perfect example of that.  His story, about childhood in the outer fringe of suburbia in the 80s, is about as impressionistic as a story can be.  I feel like I missed out on some of the nuance, but still enjoyed the originality of Powell's vision a great deal.

Lee is a solitary, self-absorbed child with a fascination for GI Joe and warfare.  He fills his days imagining daring assaults on the backyard barbeque or picturing helicopters circling overhead.  Powell shows his imaginings as taking place within the same frame as the real world, so while Lee walks one way through a field of tall grass, we see a patrol of grunts coming the other.  We see his slightly-altered Snakeyes and Lady Jayne going through the motions of attacking Cobra bases all over the backyard. 

In Lee's circle is a kid named Purdy, who is a vicious little guy.  He too shares some of Lee's interest in war, but he also always has to be the alpha male in any group; this leads to problems for him with The Twins, a couple of thugs in his age group who like to torture the box turtles that live throughout the area.

Sarah is a girl who lives around there as well, who is fixated on helping small animals, especially the turtles she keeps finding with cracked shells.  She fancies herself a young Nancy Drew, and so investigates the mutilations, and keeps a slightly disturbing journal.

As with most childhood acquaintances, these three kids circle each other without actually becoming friends.  As people move away, they drift apart, although eventually they all meet up in the book's conclusion, which I'll be honest, I'm not too sure of.  Powell's incorporation of fantastical visions makes his plot a little hard to trust; the reader is left asking if what he's reading is really happening, or is one character's flight of fancy.  Powell used similar techniques in his first graphic novel, Swallow Me Whole, which dealt with issues of mental health.  The two books work well together.

Any Empire is a solid read, even if I am coming away from it with more questions than answers.

Swallow Me Whole

by Nate Powell


Swallow Me Whole is a pretty surprising and powerful book, that leaves itself open to interpretation in a number of ways.  The book revolves around Ruth, an adolescent girl who lives with her mother, stepfather, stepbrother Perry, and her infirm grandmother, who everyone calls Memaw.

Mental illness runs rampant in this family.  Memaw is kind of senile, although she hints at having had some of her problems for her whole life.  Perry sees a little wizard, who commands him to draw for hours on end.  And Ruth has a thing about insects.  She's been stealing bugs preserved in jars from her school for ages, and constantly rearranges them on her shelves and in her room.  They speak to her, and she tries to make it through each day without stepping on any living thing.

Since much of this book is seen from Ruth's perspective, it becomes very hard to gauge where imagination is giving over to compulsion or delusion, which seems to be Powell's intent.  The story progresses in fits and starts, jumping over chunks of time, and leaving much for the reader to puzzle out.

Powell's art works well in this book.  He makes good use of negative and empty spaces, letting the art swirl in places like Ruth's thoughts do.  In the end, I'm not sure what this book tells us about obsessive compulsive disorder or schizophrenia, but it does portray these illnesses in a manner much less over-blown than most media.  This is recommended.

Sweet Tooth #19

by Jeff Lemire, Nate Powell, Emi Lenox, and Matt Kindt

Sweet Tooth often does something different (like last month's sideways issue), but it was a surprise to see that Jeff Lemire has invited a few other comics creators into his sandbox to play for a bit.

This issue has the three female characters that have joined Jeppard and Gus on their trip to Alaska wandering around in the woods and talking to each other, sharing parts of each of their stories.  Each story is written and drawn by a different cartoonist.

Nate Powell shares a little more about Lucy, who was a nurse in her previous life, before she was mysteriously abducted.  I've not read Powell's Swallow Me Whole yet, although it's been on my list of books I'm interested in for a few years now.  Emi Lenox, of Emitown, gives us a look at Becky and her memories from just before the plague.  This story follows her through a number of unfortunate events, as she's managed to survive where so many others didn't.

The final story is by Matt Kindt, who has done a number of books that I've read and enjoyed in the last year, and who I now consider to be a 'buy on sight' artist.  He shows us what life was like for Wendy, the pig-hybrid girl, before she was discovered by the militia.  His faded artwork is an interesting contrast for Lemire's pencils that follow it.

This issue is a very good place for a new reader to jump on the title, as it introduces these three characters very well, and leaves them hanging (literally) in an interesting position, which will help launch the next arc.  Sweet Tooth is one of Vertigo's better books, and is worth taking a look at.