I’ve been reading Jeff Lemire‘s comics for over twenty years now, ranging from the psychological complexity of Royal City to the unnerving road narrative of Phantom Road. I’d spoken with Lemire once before, and had the opportunity to chat with him again about the release of his new memoir, 10,000 Ink Stains, a candid and insightful look at his career in comics thus far.
In your book, you discuss writing this to mark 25 years of making comics. When did you first get the idea to commemorate that milestone? And then how did you decide that it would be in a format you hadn’t done before as opposed to a comic or a film?
It kind of happened unexpectedly. In 2020, 2021, Substack approached a bunch of comic artists about doing content for Substack. And at the time I was working on a book called Fishflies, which I was serializing. I thought it would be a great opportunity to go back into my sketchbooks and go through different projects I had done and talk about the creation of them a bit. It started as that. And after I
did several of those, I started to see a shape to it, you know, and, and then it started to dawn on me that it had been almost 25 years since I started doing this. At that same time, in addition to the Substack thing, I think I was going through whatever midlife stuff people go through.
I hadn’t really looked back at my work all that much. I tend to be right onto the next project all the time for better or for worse. And I don’t really reread the old stuff or anything. It just felt like a good time to do that a bit and take stock of things. When I conceived of it as a book, there wasn’t like a brief inkling of maybe it could be an autobiographical comic. None of my work is really that directly autobiographical. My comics work, I’ve always filtered reality through characters and other worlds and things. That just seems to be what I am more drawn to. And just doing direct autobiographies as comics never really appealed to me. So it just felt like this could be a hybrid thing where I could be a little more honest just by writing prose and then sharing the process work. And I felt like that, in a way, could reveal more than if I tried to fictionalize it in some way.
I do love the idea of a very meta version of the not-quite-Jeff character writing a comic that is similar to, but not, something like Old Man Logan. Maybe one day that’ll happen, but yeah, this, it just felt like this was a good chance to sort of do this and say, “Here, this is what I’ve done, and now it’s on to the next step.”
In your chapter on Royal City, you mention that it was something you saved until late in the process to write. Were you writing everything chronologically or was it more a case of, “This week, I’m going to reflect on The Underwater Welder”?
I did it chronologically. And I think for whatever reason, when you start looking back on things and remembering stuff, it triggers other memories. It just started to seem to work that way where I would, and it seemed to be the only way for me to organize it, too. I felt like it would be a little too erratic to be jumping all over.
Was there anything that surprised you as you were going back through it — insights into past projects or creative relationships?
I don’t know if anything really surprised me. Maybe the one thing that surprised me a little bit was that I didn’t have a real inkling to return to any of those worlds. I didn’t have any sort of strong feelings to do a a new Essex County or a new Sweet Tooth. Writing about them and writing about what was going on in my life when I was doing each book felt like a nice closure to each project, in a way. And it kind of set me up to figure out what was next.
There are excerpts from your work in here and a short comic in the back, but this is a prose work overall. Was there any resistance from Dark Horse on that side of it?
No, not really. To be honest, I just did the project on my own. I wrote the whole thing before I even thought about who was going to publish it. So it was already written and put together before I even approached Dark Horse. I asked them, “Do you want to publish this?” And they said, “Yeah.”
I worked with Eric Harper, who I know from doing comics, to give it a good proofread and give me some feedback on what sections he might like to know more about. And then Courtney Menard did a great job. I gave her all this material. I spent a year scanning so much stuff and put it into folders and shoved it at her, and she did an incredible job of making it look good and making it feel like one of my books, which I thought was really cool.
Sitting down and writing the prose was something I didn’t want to do. And then as soon as I started doing it, you get into a flow with it and then you don’t want to stop, you know? So it was a different thing, but it was cool to do something so different from comics or TV. It was definitely its own thing.
In the chapter about The Nobody, you mentioned that since you have the publishing rights to it now, you were thinking about possibly bringing a new version of that into the world.
We are republishing it with Dark Horse. I did a new cover for it and touched up some of the artwork a little bit. It’d be a nice compliment to 10,000 Ink Stains, I think.
One of the aspects of the book that was most interesting for me was when you discussed your background in film, and your work on the television adaptation of Essex County. As someone who watched and enjoyed the Disney+ Moon Knight series, I also thought that that felt more like your run on the book than any other comics I’d read wit the character.
I can’t speak too much to that because I wasn’t involved with it directly, but I have had someone who was in the writers room tell me that they were handed my comics the first day. And I know that the showrunner did speak about my run a couple of times in interviews. So I don’t think you’re off base there.
Having seen your work adapted by other people in the Netflix adaptation of Sweet Tooth, you’ve gone on to adapt your own work. If you return to film or TV, would you rather it be an adaptation of one of your existing works, or would you rather create something specific for the medium?
It’s an interesting journey I’ve been on with that stuff for the last five or six years. Each experience was really different and they all informed where it’s going. With Sweet Tooth, I was not directly involved with that creatively. It was out of my hands due to the contract I signed with Vertigo back in the day. So while I own the property, I don’t control it, if that makes sense. I didn’t have any choice other than to sit back and watch it happen and hope for the best.
A lot of it was very positive; the producers and everyone really tried to make me feel involved and brought me to set. They all really cared about the property and did their version of it the way they wanted to. It’s definitely more family-friendly than the comic, but I think there’s a lot of love put into it. And so that was that experience of something that was so personal to me being taken out of my hands and adapted.
And then with Essex County, it was sort of the opposite where I was intimately involved with every stage and minutiae of that adaptation of writing, producing and showwriting it. And the learning curve on that for me was pretty steep where I hadn’t really done that before. I think I made a lot of mistakes and I did some things right. I think I learned a lot about how I would handle it again. Where I’m at now is being a lot more careful about who I option stuff to. Especially the stuff I’ve drawn myself, if I can’t do it myself, I’m not super keen on letting someone else adapt.
I am working on an adaptation of one of my recent books right now, myself, as a film. We’ll see where that goes. But I’m at the point where unless I can maintain control, I don’t really have interest in seeing it adapted.
10,000 Ink Stains covers both your creator-owned work and your work for hire for Marvel and DC. As you went back through these books, were there any industry trends that came into focus for you?
If you kind of look at my career a bit, you can see how the industry really changed from when I started. I was doing Essex County at Top Shelf. The mainstream comics, meaning Marvel and DC, and the independent comics world were very separate then. They did not mingle at all, you know, and independent comics were not typically genre books, though there were exceptions.
And so it was really weird when I went from one to the other. I was doing these slice of life, very personal literary graphic novels, and then all of a sudden, I was working at DC. There was a big gap between those two things. And then a decade later, when I was doing Black Hammer and Descender, all of a sudden, the two worlds kind of merged, where the independent world became Image and Boom!, and it became much more like an elevated genre.
Now, I think we’re in a weird limbo where I don’t know where it’s going. We seem to be in a spot now where, unfortunately, it’s become a bit like the world of cinema, where the only movies being made are superhero movies, or really, really familiar, existing IP. It’s hard to get anything smaller made, and unfortunately, that seems to be a moment that’s happening in comics, where Transformers and the Ninja Turtles and the Marvel and DC stuff —which I do a little bit of, yeah — is selling, but the Image stuff that I did a decade ago is not as viable as it was. It’s a scary time for that. And that real independent comics world that I started in, where there was Top Shelf and Oni and Slave Labor Graphics and Fantagraphics, that’s so small now.
It’s an odd spot. Now, for someone like me, I’m just glad that I’ve had a career where I was able to straddle the different worlds, because I have a spot right now. But it’s different, for sure.
In your book, you mentioned your fondness for Haruki Murakami’s fiction. Are there any other cases of novels or movies or books where their influences popped up in your work in unexpected ways?
Sometimes it can be the littlest thing. Music is big for me. And hard to quantify, because sometimes the feeling a song gives you triggers some kind of feeling you want to convey in a story. Or just some weird lyric that you hear a certain way, where some combination of words can trigger a whole other world or idea for you.
Murakami hit me really hard about six or seven years ago, and I got really into him. And I think Mazebook really came out of that desire. Going back to what we were just talking about, walking that world between genre and non-genre, but making it subtle the way he does. You’re always looking for those jolts of inspiration. I haven’t had one lately. Hopefully, there’s one coming soon.
One of the names of the artists you’ve worked with that stuck out for me was Phil Hester, because he’s also someone who’s done a lot of work as a writer working with other artists. Is it a different experience when you are working with an artist who is themselves a writer on a project like that?
Yeah, it’s interesting. Phil is one of the few artists that was also a writer that I’ve ever written for. It’s a little more intimidating, because they can see through you a little bit more. But Phil’s super generous. He was really easy to work with, honestly. So any fears I may have had, they disappeared immediately. He never made me feel self-conscious about any of that stuff. He just went with the story and had fun drawing it.
I do think people who draw and write tend to be better writers sometimes, because they can understand the whole process a little more than someone who just writes comics and has never drawn anything. They can’t really understand how hard it is to draw comics and how labor intensive and how much it takes out of you. Even just having that understanding with an artist, even if it doesn’t translate directly into how I write, I think it’s a valuable sort of thing.
In the book, you discuss collaborating with Gord Downie and Eddie Vedder. Are you open to doing something like that again?
I love music, so I definitely am. I’ve gotten to become friends with Warren Ellis from the Bad Seeds a little bit. And I have mentioned some things here and there. I’m always open to it, especially if it’s a musician I love. Music is funny. It’s a little more like poetry where it’s not as linear. It’s more interpretive and it can create some really interesting things with comics where you can let go of the traditional narrative structure of comics and adapt other things. You can find some surprising things that you wouldn’t discover otherwise. I certainly did.
Photo: Jaime Hogge