Jeff Lemire doesn’t write conventional comics. Often slow-paced and sketchy, his works are also intractably personal and deeply moving, even if he’s writing about the Invisible Man.
“I draw on a lot of cinematic influences like Ingmar Bergman and Wim Wenders, artists who let a story take its time,” the Toronto-based writer and artist told Wired.com ahead of his Comic-Con International appearances in San Diego on Thursday and Friday. “Comics are a visual medium, and visuals should be allowed to tell some of that story.”
Take The Nobody, released in hardcover this month from DC Comics’ mature imprint Vertigo. A retelling of H.G. Wells’ classic The Invisible Man transposed through the filter of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks to a tiny town resembling the rural farm where Lemire grew up in Canada, it probably has enough dialogue to fit into five pages, 10 tops.
But like Lynch’s Peaks before it, The Nobody‘s impressive science lies not in the mad experiments of the Invisible Man, or the Nobody, but in its subtle dissection of psychology and interpersonal relationships.