10,000 Ink Stains: A Memoir by Jeff Lemire

For some reason, I thought this book was in comics format - maybe just from an assumption that's how Lemire works, or that he draws so quickly that it would nearly as easy to do it that way as in text. But I was wrong: this is a conventional prose memoir, albeit one with lots of art (and an entire early self-published comic in the back).

10,000 Ink Stains is Jeff Lemire's memoir of what he calls the first twenty-five years of his comics career. I like a lot of what he's done, so I hope that isn't hubris - I'd like to think he has another twenty-five years or more ahead of him.

Lemire has done a lot of work in a lot of directions over those twenty-five years, so it's not surprising that his memoir is well-organized, even compartmentalized. He talks a bit up front, and occasionally later, about how hard it was to talk about his personal life here, particularly some struggles with anxiety and other mental-health issues - but that's a very small part of the book, partially because I don't think Lemire's readership ever noticed any slowing of work or lesser effort because of his problems. (He clearly has a ferocious work ethic - or maybe I mean he loves making stories in comics form, so that's what he spends most of his time on.)

There are nineteen chapters here, each covering one project or a small related cluster of projects, plus an introduction to set the scene and an epilogue to sum it all up. The first chapter is the usual memoir "how I got to zero" section, covering his childhood and education and all of that - up to the point where he decided to start getting serious about comics. The second chapter covers that self-published comic - Lemire put out two issues of Ashtray in the mid-Aughts - and his Xeric-winning first book, Lost Dogs. From there, Lemire has chapters on Essex County and The Nobody, on groups of smaller projects, on Sweet Tooth the comics series and Sweet Tooth the TV series, on his work for DC and then for Marvel, on The Underwater Welder and Trillium and Roughneck, on his adventure comics with other artists (Descender, Gideon Falls, and Plutona), on Black Hammer and Royal City, one chapter on both Frogcatchers and Mazebook, on the recent Essex County TV show, and one last chapter on his two current/upcoming projects, The Static Age and Minor Arcana.

That's a lot of comics, even for twenty-five years. Lemire did a lot of work - a lot of different, detailed, thoughtful, often excellent work. I might make fun of Black Hammer, and suspect I would be similarly dismissive of most of his Marvel and DC work, but Lemire puts in the time and effort to do stories he cares about and do them well, even when some readers (yours truly, for example) might not be as excited by all of them.

There's not a lot of detail about any single project, which might disappoint some readers: if you're a massive Underwater Welder fan, for example, you'll only get about ten pages about it. Lemire generally has liked all of his immediate collaborators and most of his editors - there are some left-unnamed editorial functionaries and fellow writers for DC and Marvel who were less than collegial, but Lemire keeps it vague enough that I think even people more plugged in than me will only have suspicions of who he's talking about - and he mostly likes the work he did, and focuses on the things he learned or did differently on each project.

There's some insights into how he draws each project, including how one early art teacher encouraged him to use the back of a pen nib, the source of some of those chunky, dynamic Lemire lines - but I'm not an artist, so I can only point and say he does talk about that, which may be of interest to people who understand the topic.

All in all, 10,000 Ink Stains is a comprehensive, thorough look at a busy career, by a writer I think was not overly given to this kind of introspection before. If you like Lemire's comics, you'll probably like hearing how he made them.