Essex County native Jeff Lemire keeps it a mystery with two new titles

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Essex County’s own Jeff Lemire has released the debut issues for two mind-blowing new comic book titles.

If you know his work, you may be familiar with the first issue of the Mazebook, which Lemire writes and draws. It reminded me of his 2012 graphic novel The Undersea Welder, about a father’s anxieties as the birth of his son approaches.

Lemire, who grew up on a Woodslee farm, has said that Mazebook is the other side; tells the story of Will Warren, a middle-aged Toronto resident who failed at parenthood. Live in a daze.

“I’m nothing. Just routine. Too scary to be anything else,” thinks the protagonist. “People everywhere and none of them mean anything to me.”

That is, until Will starts receiving cell phone calls from the boy he thought he had lost.

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Everything is done in Lemire’s familiar scratchy style. And as the title indicates, the labyrinths feature prominently as a metaphor.

The first issue of Primordial, which is beautifully illustrated by Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino, is completely different, but just as mysterious.

The series is an alternate history tale in which Richard Nixon wins the 1960 presidential race and in 1961 both the United States and the Soviet Union abandoned the space race.

It reminded me mostly of The X-Files, not Lemire’s previous work. The reason the great powers stopped sending rockets into the sky: Some test flights with animals went disastrously wrong.

Or did they?

The only other thing I’ll tell you about Primordial is that I love talking cosmonaut dogs, so I loved the final panel of the first installment.

Primordial is a publication of Image, Dark Horse’s Mazebook.

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