Do you even comic, with Logan Naugle. For this segment I recommend comics that I have read and enjoyed. I wanted to bring back the word of mouth approach, like when you tell your friends to check out a video game or movie, it's not about spoiling the book or recommending stuff everyone has heard of. No; This is me explaining how I discovered the comics and why I recommend them.
Alright, we got the intro out of the way, my first recommendation is Essex County, words and art by Jeff Lemire. The book is a collection of stories of a fictional eccentric farm community in Essex County, Ontario, Canada. They range from a young boy lost in the world, a nurse revealing the scars of a whole community and two brothers that become estranged.
The story
Essex County is a book someone let me borrow. This was four years ago and I was passing around the book "Y the Last Man"(by the way go read that too) to all my friends who hadn't already read it. At this point a friend borrowed "Y" and asked if I had read Essex County to which replied "No, what's that?" She handed me the book and said, "It's about people in Canada". I hadn't really read too many non-cape books at this point so I flipped through this book by a writer I had never heard of and art style I had never seen and I was intrigued.
Why this book?
Now this is going to sound a bit pretentious. I explained what Essex County is about, but that isn't all that this book is. This book is more than a few stories about a small town; It's about intimate moments in lives, really focussing in on what is happening at the emotional level, and that's something that made me fall in love with Jeff Lemire's work. Somehow, Lemire can strike the emotional chords of his characters and make you feel for them all. He has since gone on to write Animal Man, and the Justice League as well as several other creator owned projects.
Essex County showed me that stories can be more than a concept and plot based, and that you can write something interesting without it being huge or grandiose. Jeff Lemire is a writer who inspires me and this book is what exposed me to him.
If you think this is something that interests you or if your open to non-caped comics then click the link below and give this a shot.
If this sounded like a book for you then get it here:
