Mazebook by Jeff Lemire

Creators don't have the same views of their careers as outsiders do. From my side of the comics page, Jeff Lemire's career clearly divides fairly cleanly into two sections: the books he writes for other people to draw, mostly superheroes and overwhelmingly serialized adventure stories; and the ones he draws himself, dark Canadian-set literary explorations of death and regret and loss.

But in the now-typical sketchbook-and-background section of this book, Lemire talks through how he came to make this story, and he describes all of his projects as part of a general undifferentiated mass - basically interchangeable, as if they didn't use different skills or different parts of his brain. (He basically says he jumped into this project because a Black Hammer "Skulldigger" project wasn't gelling for him, which is just a wild tonal shift for me.)

That may be just part of the same overall creator mindset: the kind of thing you need to internalize if you're going to have a career making art in public. The same way that a creator, of any kind, in any medium or genre, always thinks of what they do as central and most important in that form - of course, it has to be, or else why would they spend that much time and energy on it?

So I may think Mazebook is more differentiated from other Jeff Lemire projects than he does: that's just the way it works. But, for other readers out there, this is Lemire in indy-comics mode, for all that it was originally a five-issue miniseries: dark, brooding, along the lines of The Underwater Welder or Frogcatchers or the "Essex County" books.

Mazebook is about death and loss. William Warren is a building inspector in Toronto: his daughter Wendy died about a decade ago, of the usual looking-sick-in-a-hospital-bed kind of thing. Wendy was a tween then, and her death wrecked her parent's marriage: her mother Elena is now remarried with a younger child. William, though, is stuck in his grief: getting through each day, exactly the same as the one before, sad and backwards-looking and utterly stuck.

The story starts as he's starting to worry that he's forgetting Wendy's face - that time is moving on, no matter how much he's trying to stop it. And then he gets a mysterious call, in the middle of the night, that seems to be from Wendy. She's trapped in a maze. She needs him to get her out. And so William sets out solve the last maze - the one Wendy had next to do when she died - to find her and save her. It doesn't quite go as he thought it would; this is a Lemire book.

Is that call real? Do all of the places William goes, the creatures he meets really exist as he sees them? Within the story, it's as real as it has to be - you can think of Mazebook as a psychological drama or a supernatural one, as you prefer, or some complex mix of the two - I think it's somewhere in that middle, myself. That it was Wendy, in some sense, that much of this did happen as we see it.

There is something like a happy ending, but I should say not the obvious one. Lemire's books about loss and death are about loss and death - and the point about loss is that something is lost, gone forever.

Lemire draws this in his usual scratchy, organic style - I love that look, it has a supple power and an immediacy to all of those rough-looking lines, and I love the way this book has such a real sense of place, how grounded the fantasy elements are in the reality of present-day Toronto.