Essex County Volume 2: Ghost Stories - p247

Date-Stamped 28 Dec 2006

Jeff Lemire on his substack:
"I am often asked how autobiographical Essex County is. And really it is mostly fiction. Lester is definitely a surrogate for me, a kid lost in his comics and his imagination, longing for something else. But his circumstances in the story are total fiction. I wasn’t an orphan, I wasn’t an only child and I had two loving parents and never befriended a hulking ex-hockey star. But what was real was the drawings of locations from around Essex County and the farm I grew up on. And I would steal little personality traits from people I knew growing up and combine them into different characters. Like all fiction you work the truth in there, but not always in a one for one sort of way. It all gets mixed up and Filtered through the story in different ways."

I know that working on the second part of Essex County wasn’t effortless. Like with anything, there were good days and bad working on it and things I struggled with creatively. But even so, when I think back at my time drawing Ghost Stories, which would become the second volume of the Essex County Trilogy, I only have good memories. There was a real sense of wanting to do something truly great and having the confidence to actually reach for that.

I embraced the “hockey-ness” of the book and immersed myself in books about hockey in the 50’s and 60’s. And with the First book, Tales From The Farm, I also embraced the weird “back of the pen” style I had been experimenting with at Sheridan. This basically means I was using the backs of steel-point dip pens to draw rather than the intended pen tip. This led to really odd lines that weren’t always predictable and added a really strange, angular quality to the drawings that I just loved. I also started drawing this book really big. The norm is to draw comic pages about 1 ½ times the size of printed comic. And that’s pretty much how I draw them now. But with Essex and this unpredictable pen and ink style, I needed a bigger canvas to really let loose and I drew all of Tales and Ghost Stories on huge paper about twenty by thirty inches."


"Ghost Stories was also the longest book I had ever attempted at close to 250-pages. So it was a marathon. It took me close to a year to draw. That dates on the original art I still have (I started stamping the dates on every page I drew then as well, a trick I stole from Seth after seeing this in his sketchbooks). I tried to pencil and ink one page a day. Some days I would be in a groove and I could do three or four. Other days I would only get half a page done. I didn’t have a script, just a loose outline and ideas for scenes with little bits of dialogue scribbled down and I would take it one scene at a time, thumbnailing the whole scene and then drawing it one page at a time always in chronological order (I still mostly work this way now)."