Essex County Volume 2: Ghost Stories - Softcover

Jeff Lemire is a prolific, award-winning comic book writer and artist from Ontario, who's known for creating literary stories depicting the frailties, fears, and hopes of the human condition.

He's worked extensively with all the major comic book publishers, penning well-received runs on Animal Man, Green Arrow, Hawkeye, and Old Man Logan for DC and Marvel. His creator-owned works, which are even more highly aclaimed, include The Underwater Welder, The Essex County Trilogy, and Lost Dogs from Top Shelf Productions; Descender, A.D. After Death (with Scott Snyder,) and Royal City, from Image; and Sweet Tooth, Trillium, and The Nobody from Vertigo. His original graphic novel Roughneck was published by Simon and Schuster in 2017.

Jeff won the Joe Shuster Award for Outstanding Canadian Comic Book Cartoonist in 2008 for Essex County, and again in 2013 for The Underwater Welder and Sweet Tooth. He's been a nominee for multiple Eisner awards, a Harvery Award, and the Ignatz Award. Descender and The Underwater Welder have both been optioned for major motion pictures.

He lives in Toronto with his family.

Old Lou Lebeuf wanders in and out of the past in the house on the family farm where he and Vince grew up. After a brief fling in pro hockey, Vince, though good enough to have a real career, married and went back to the farm. Not Lou, who kept playing until his knee gave out. Eventually he wound up in Toronto, only going home after 25 years, when Mom died, and then not again until an accident left Vince crippled and widowed. When Vince died, that left Lou alone. As always, Lou thinks, also thinking he knows why: the night he made out with Vince's fiancée definitely the reason Vince wouldn t have Lou coming back after Mom was buried. Lemire handles the stuff of a Willa Cather novel with equal poetry, though in images made of lines and spaces rather than words. He renders emotion and temperament in a cartoon face with breathtaking, masterful economy. He manages transitions between present and past and sequences of magic realism as deftly and hauntingly as Ingmar Bergman in Wild Strawberries and Orson Welles in Citizen Kane. Is it too soon to say that Lemire is a major graphic novelist? --Booklist (starred review)

Lemire's pen renders the town and farm land in the bleakest black and white, with lines that are like gashes in the characters' souls. Their pasts are reflected in their faces, craggy and broken like the earth they walk on -- it's a stylistic triumph of sequential illustration. --John E. Mitchell, North Adams (MA) Transcript

I just finished a great graphic novel called Ghost Stories by Jeff Lemire. I had tears in my eyes when I was done, and I really didn't expect it to take that kind of toll; after all, it's about an old man who used to be a hockey player. Lemire is a gifted storyteller, and his book is equal parts Field of Dreams and, say, Fried Green Tomatoes. It gave me a new appreciation for life on the ice. --Whitney Matheson, USA Today