The Complete Essex County (2009) - Plot & Excerpts
"Essex County" is flat-out perfect! Weaving together stories about family, farming, and hockey, Lemire has created not only a fantastic comic but a textured and deep piece of literature. It's a remarkable feat, completely deserving of all the hype and awards it has garnered.Lemire has a wonderfully sloppy and expressive inking style, using shaky lines and big splotches of ink to render everything from frozen farmlands to intense hockey action to intricate city vistas. It's deceptively hard to draw this simplistically and evocatively. He also does an amazing job of aging his characters across decades and linking families through the use of nose and face shapes. Lemire's Essex County may be fictional but it's completely believable. As far as the story goes, Lemire easily creates scenes that are emotional and heartfelt without lapsing into corniness (the scene where the hockey players tap their sticks? WOW!). Everything in this book is done with a deftness and subtlety that is truly awe-inspiring.You don't have to be Canadian and/or a hockey fan to enjoy "Essex County." Those elements are just the foundation on which Lemire builds a tender interconnected story about people, their joys, and their sorrows. It's a huge accomplishment in the medium of comics. I'm not very good at graphic novels (I read them too quickly and don't really look at the pictures and they're not really literature are they?) but my brother keeps leaving them lying around my parents' house so I do read them on the rare occasions that I'm there. This one is very good indeed - subtle, moving, very Canadian, sparse. I find all graphic novels are rather flat. Maybe if I looked at the pictures? Anyway this presents a rural family/community history, very carefully and parsimoniously laid out, and the flatness suits it.
What do You think about The Complete Essex County (2009)?
There is no rating high enough for this graphic novel. Absolutely amazing.
—dtw1999
Tender, moving, beautiful. I am officially a Jeff Lemire fan.
—zuzana899
Beautiful stories. The Ammores Perros of comics.
—Steph
