Jeff Lemire
Jeff Lemire
Jeff Lemireis a Canadian cartoonist. He is the author of titles including the Essex County Trilogy, Sweet Tooth, The Nobody, and Animal Man. Lemire is known for his moody, humanistic stories and sketchy, cinematic, black-and-white art. As of early 2016, Lemire writes All-New Hawkeye, Extraordinary X-Men, Moon Knight and Old Man Logan for Marvel, Descender and Plutona for Image, and Bloodshot Reborn for Valiant...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionArtist
Date of Birth21 March 1976
CountryCanada
alan hard history moore revere run swamp
Sometimes, if you have a lot of history with a character and a lot of affection, it's hard for you to do anything with that character. Like with Swamp Thing, for instance, I revere the Alan Moore run so much that it would be hard for me to do my own Swamp Thing. I care too much about the way it was done before.
exploring fiction flying guns ray science shooting worlds
I think when science fiction is at its worst, it's just spaceships flying around shooting at each other. There has to be a lot more going on than that... science fiction is about exploring new worlds and new ideas, not about ray guns and action, necessarily.
I think being an archer is much more integral to Green Arrow and his mythos than it is to Hawkeye.
guns horrible obsession society
I think America's obsession with guns and with violence in media and society is a horrible sickness.
until
I write and draw from the gut. I often don't know what my stories are about until they're done.
almost batman draw jeff love stop trying versions
There are so many versions of Batman that I love so much from different artists that I had to almost stop trying to draw those versions and get past that and just draw the Jeff Lemire version of Batman eventually.
alan books eddie indie love
There are so many books I love for different reasons. For superhero stuff, I always go back to Alan Moore's 'Watchmen' or his 'Swamp Thing' run. Those are my two favorites, and there are indie books that I really love, like Eddie Campbell's 'Alec' books and 'From Hell.'
animal feels flash knows limited man open people
People like Superman, The Flash - they just feel limited in who they are and what you can do with them because everyone knows who they are and what they do. Someone like Animal Man feels very open to interpretation.
art characters comics love people scared talk walk
Art should walk a tightrope. That's what art should be. Art should be dangerous. You can't be scared to say something with it. People love to talk about how comics are real art and real literature, so why not use these characters to talk about real things, even if it is dangerous?
computers gap houses huge iphone relationship six technology using wildly
I look at my son and his relationship to technology, and I think back to when I was six and how wildly different the world is in that regard. I see him using an iPhone and all this stuff, and then I think back to when I was six. We didn't even have computers in our houses at all yet. This is a huge gap between our experiences as children.
people
I know a lot of people who read 'Sweet Tooth' are the kind of people who don't read a lot of other comics. Whatever it was, I'm just glad it happened.
approach bit certain characters deeper emotion maybe project starts themes until writers
I never really approach any project or story thinking of themes first or what a certain character 'represents.' Maybe other writers do, but for me, it just starts with the characters and a certain emotion I want to convey. It usually isn't until I get deeper into a book and look back a bit that I start to see the themes, etc.
contradict issues origin pick series vertigo writer
If you read the whole Vertigo 'Animal Man' series of 89 issues or whatever, each writer has a completely different take on his origin. If you try to put them all together, they contradict one another. I had to pick and choose to make up a new origin that makes sense to new readers.
career games maintain video
I don't play video games because I know that if I ever started, I'd never be able to maintain a career again.