Abstract
In Essex County, in Secret Path (his collaboration with Gord Downie), in Roughneck, and in his creation of the indigenous Canadian superhero Equinox for Justice League United: Canada, Jeff Lemire highlights a vision of the Canadian ‘north’ as transformative space. In Lemire’s hands, ‘the north’ is where Chanie Wenjack’s historical reality (Secret Path), Derek and Beth Ouelette’s personal demons (Roughneck), and Miiyahbin Marten’s life as an ordinary indigenous teen in Moose Factory, Ontario (Justice League United Volume 1: Justice League Canada) all undergo a transformation which speaks to shifting perceptions of identity, responsibility, and belonging in Canada. The north becomes a site where Lemire (and Lemire’s readers) directly confront how even a deliberate act of intended reconciliation between settler-colonial and indigenous peoples can effectively colonize the space in which it occurs. All three works, in different ways, deploy rhetorical strategies to minimize the ‘collateral damage’ that is probably unavoidable, and even perhaps necessary, in the articulation of the kind of anticolonial dialogue toward which Lemire’s work is oriented.
Highlights
In Essex County, in Secret Path, in Roughneck, and in his creation of the indigenous Canadian superhero Equinox for Justice League United: Canada, Jeff Lemire highlights a vision of the Canadian ‘north’ as transformative space
Nicole Pissowotzki writes that Canadian accounts typically treat the north as ‘an imaginary zone: a frontier, a wilderness, and empty “space” which, seen from southern Canada, is white, blank’ (2009, 81), defined by what Urban Wråkberg called ‘the sublime experience of nature’ (2007, 196)
Jeff Lemire is one of Canada’s most-celebrated artists working in the medium of comics and graphic novels. As both writer and as illustrator, his oeuvre crosses a wide range of genre boundaries, from mainstream superhero comics to science fiction and horror to a magic realism proceeding from a closely observed sense of daily life
Summary
Jeff Lemire is one of Canada’s most-celebrated artists working in the medium of comics and graphic novels As both writer and as illustrator, his oeuvre crosses a wide range of genre boundaries, from mainstream superhero comics to science fiction and horror to a magic realism proceeding from a closely observed sense of daily life. In Essex County and The Underwater Welder in particular, Lemire’s subtle, magic-realism-inflected exploration of rural and working-class life in Canada has been compared to the fiction of Nobel-prize winner Alice Munro (MacDonald 2017), with whom he shares roots in south-western Ontario. There is little that is revolutionary in this short story; it fits within the genre Urban Wråkberg (2007) identifies as the trip north for a sublime experience that transforms the self This small episode points to concerns and tropes which Lemire develops as he recrafts a vision of a new Canadian north
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