Royal City by Jeff Lemire Review

Jeff Lemire is one of the most perplexing comics professionals alive today. He produces material that seems so divorced from one another aesthetically, thematically, and in terms of sheer quality that you would swear on your mother's grave that half of his work is from an entirely different author.

To be precise, it happens that there are two sides of Jeff Lemire. The first being one of the premier  writers in the independent comics scene. A writer who, recycles the many motifs of his work, makes up for it with his propensity to weave some of the greatest familial and interpersonal dynamics in comics, and one who can pull at the readers heart strings more than any other.

The other Jeff Lemire, however is yet another by the numbers lackey of the Big Two. His superhero stories read like they were part of a promotional flipbook that came with a box of cereal. His independent comics are more sufficient than his bibliography at Marvel, DC,  or Valiant, but they still feel rather underdeveloped and struggling too hard to reach the greatness of the other Lemire.

A Jeff Lemire comic is like a coin toss, if you the odds were in your favor, you scored big, but if you lost, you just wasted away thirty minutes of your life on complete dreck. Fortunately, I am euphoric to say that Royal City is the former rather than the latter.

Within these pages, a gripping ghost story unravels. Admittedly, some of the key characters in Royal City are a tad stereotypical. You have the alcoholic failure, the aging father in the midst of a sexless marriage, etcetera. What makes redeems these potentially one note stock characters however, is the depth that Lemire gives to them. Jeff Lemire retains the ability to regurgitate old concepts and regift as to make them appear fresh and new. Under the hands of a less capable author, or perhaps Jeff Lemire wrote this book at DC or Marvel, these characters would be vexatiously dull, but Lemire performs a respectable task at making the denizens of Royal City well rounded.

The childlike, almost "outsider art" quality to Lemire's pencils  dazzle once again in the pages of this book. Just like great artists Gilbert Hernandez and Laurence Hubbard, the raw yet kinetic style of Jeff Lemire makes the act of drawing look easy. This method of drawing comes with it's hindrances as well. The landscapes are barren and vacuous and the poses the characters of the narrative make are at best that of a cheap Chinese action figure or at worst that of a third grader's stick figure drawing. Alas, both of these critiques can be percieved as part of Lemire's charm as an artist, and really boils down to personal preference.

Primarily I see Jeff Lemire as a sort of Woody Allen figure within the comics sphere. His oeuvre is drowned out by lesser works, so much so that it is all too easy to underestimate him. However, he always surprises you when he releases that one good comic every couple of years.

6/10