“I can focus on my creator-owned stuff, Sweet Tooth, and write and draw that every month, but then also have a lot of fun writing for other artists on the superhero stuff and get into that a little bit. “The reality is I couldn’t write and draw three books a month, but I could write and draw one and then write a couple of other ones,” he says. Lemire says the decision to write stories he wouldn’t draw himself was motivated by a simple lack of hours in the day. I think that good comics are good comics and it doesn’t really matter the subject matter or what genre you’re working in.” I’ve done both things and I don’t really see that I don’t make that delineation. “I think there’s still a perspective out there that there’s a difference between mainstream superhero comics and more independent, literary stuff. “For me it’s all the same it’s all just comics - whether it’s a long-form story or a long story that’s serialized,” says the native of Woodslee, Ont.

While 2010 began with another edgy graphic novel from Lemire, The Nobody, it also took an interesting turn toward the mainstream as he signed an exclusive contract with DC Comics and began writing the Atom stories in Adventure Comics as well as the upcoming tales of Superboy. “But at the end of the day I just have so much work to do.”Īfter bursting onto the scene in 2008 with Tales From the Farm and Ghost Stories, the first two parts of the Essex County Trilogy - for which he earned a Doug Wright Award for best emerging talent and a Joe Shuster Award for best cartoonist - Lemire kept up his momentum in 2009 with the third part, The Country Nurse, and began his superb new ongoing series for DC/Vertigo, Sweet Tooth.

“I guess if you stop and think about all the early success, you can kind of get caught up in worrying about living up to it,” says the 34-year-old Toronto resident, a featured guest at this weekend’s Fan Expo 2010, the massive annual pop-culture extravaganza at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. The pressure to match all that might crush some people, but Jeff Lemire is too busy rocketing to the top of comic book industry to let it get to him.

His first major work won him two national awards, earned him sweeping critical acclaim and helped put Essex County, Ont., on the map.

Atoms alter ego