Essex County Vol. 1
Tales From the Farm
by Jeff Lemire

Superheroes, hockey, and separation. That's Tales From the Farm, in a nut shell. Don't get me wrong, that's an over-simplification of the entire story. It's like saying World War II was just a skirmish where some people died. Tales From the Farm is a story told in four parts. It's one whole year in the life of a few people in Essex County in Canada. It's touching, haunting, and there are moments when the world seems better because this book was written.

Lester just lost his mom to cancer. His mom was a single mother, Lester never knew his father and, once she is gone, he is made to live with his uncle. His uncle, a single man with no children of his own, takes in the son of his beloved sister to live on a farm in Canada that's very far removed from children and the childhood that we are brought up to believe in as the "perfect childhood." It's far from everything in the world.

Jeff Lemire's line work is thick and chunky. It's a teenage girl crying after the prom after her date leaves her for the girl that screwed the entire football team because she was bored. That's how chunky Lemire's art work is in Tales From the Farm. The line work is as chunky as it is expressive. So expressive that you want to try and remember your own childhood being that expressive. Instead... you get left with stick figures and blocks.

And yet this story is perfect.

A year out of the life of Lester.  Lester lives with an uncle that he's afraid of and becomes fast friends with the gas station attendant. There is already a strain on the relationship between uncle and nephew. It grows over time. And once you stretch something, it tends to either snap or come back together.

Tales from the Farm has emotional weight for all children who never knew their parents, that same emotional weight that Blankets had for the emo/love struck crowd. My parents are both alive and kicking, but I never knew them. I knew the motions that they repeated. I knew the parts that they played for me and my siblings. Tales From the Farm is a book that speaks to me. It was the moments in my entire childhood that happened to me compressed into a year.

Growing up.

To most kids (I'm lumping in people over the age of 18 here as well), growing up is a verboten word. To a hard-core Christian it's saying premarital sex. To a Hasidic Jew and Muslim, it's offering a pork sandwich. To kids, growing up is a something that happens to someone else, never you. Some will grow up and do so for the better and retain the same wonder that they had as children. Others just get older and lose their wonder but remain children.

Lemire crafts a wonderful story about a child growing up. That not the best part, it gets better… but if I told you that, I'd ruin the entire story.