ROUGHNECK by Jeff Lemire

Many of you might snicker at the fact that I've been reading comic books lately. Or at least just straight-up ignore the reviews. But those serious readers of rural grit lit authors like Daniel Woodrell, Benjamin Whitmer, and Ron Rash would definitely do well by checking out this recent graphic novel by the inimitable Jeff Lemire.

This multi-faceted work of art is a focused and personal drama focusing on Derek Ouellette, a disgraced hockey player turned violent, lonely drunk, and his efforts to reconnect with his estranged drug addict sister after she stumbles back into his life.

I'm so damn impressed by how much Lemire can do with so little. One of the things I LOVED LOVED LOVED the most about Roughneck was its lack of any narration, which is a convention used in almost every comic book/graphic novel I've read, and is mostly used too much as a crutch to help convey backstory and inner thought, since prose is usually not an option. But Lemire doesn't take the easy route and gives us just the amount of info we need through dialogue, expressions, and most important: imagery. It was so refreshing. And speaking of the imagery, Lemire really knows how to tell a story in visuals. There are great motifs here and the Canadian landscapes are rendered in cold, gray/blue tones, only broken by elements of memory, the past, by the things that haunt the characters, all depicted in saturated color.

Roughneck is about the choices you make: the choices in the past and the ones in the present, how they're intrinsically related, and how the time will come when you must come to terms with them. Pimitamon, the name of the fictional town where the book takes place, is the Cree word for "crossroad." Jeff Lemire seems to basically is in a class of his own in the comic book world and shows everyone else how to do it.

GRADE: A