By: Jeff Lemire (story/art), Jose Villarrubia (colors), Carlos M. Mangual (letters), Gregory Lockard (assistant editor) & Mark Doyle (editor)
The Story: The big showdown between the evil Abbot and Jepperd & Sweet Tooth.
Review (with SPOILERS): This issue was a perfect example of the sadness and melancholy that has set Sweet Tooth apart from pretty much every comic on the market. There is just something to the way that Jeff Lemire creates and builds his characters and stories that lends itself to sadness and longing. He certainly doesn’t give a happy feeling, but Sweet Tooth is special and different and that’s something worth celebrating in a comic market that is 95% about people in spandex.
Like a lot of Lemire’s works, Sweet Tooth is really about fathers and sons. Here you have Mr. Jepperd who seems like he was a good man once….until he lost his family and became angry with the world. That led Jepperd into a spiral of nastiness that we’ve only seen glimpses of in the pages of Sweet Tooth. However, all of that bitterness wasn’t able to stand up to his feelings of devotion to Gus who became a surrogate child to Jepperd. In the climactic scene of this issue – and the series, for that matter – we see Gus saving Jepperd by stabbing the evil Abbot. What’s special about this scene is that Gus really saved Jepperd a long time ago, just by rekindling the humanity in this big, mean and bitter man. This scene where he physically saves Jepperd is more of a passing of the torch: Now Gus has to protect Jepperd’s son.
This whole issue was a kinda catharsis for Jepperd. As he rips into Abbot’s Dog-Boys, Lemire shows us all the pain and heartache that have affected Jepperd over his life. It’s such a special scene as we alternate between visions of Jepperd burying his wife or losing Gus for the first time and him snapping the necks of the Dog-Boys. In the end, I don’t think it was surprising that Jepperd died. After all, he’d done his job.
Which brings us to Gus. Remember back to how pathetic little Gus was? Little, naive boy in the woods who had just lost his father, until Jepperd stepped into that role. Over the last couple years we’ve watched as Gus trusted Jepperd, had that trust betrayed and slowly watched as he and Jepperd built a more mature relationship. By the end of this issue, Gus isn’t a cringing violet anymore; he can take care of himself and the others.
And, I don’t even know what to say about Jepperd’s true son. He’s never really been anything but a pathetic blank slate and now it’s going to fall to Gus to be at least a big-brother to this child who has known such sadness at Abbot’s hands. I mean, this deer-child doesn’t even really emote. He’s just got big deer eyes, so the reader can kinda dump in whatever emotions they want.
The art is classic Lemire stuff. To say he’s among the best at communicating sadness is nothing new, but what struck me in this issue is how he conveys violence. I really don’t even know the proper way to comment on it. When Lemire draws someone being shot or stabbed or snapping their leg in two, it just looks SO fundamentally different than the type of stylized image that we get when Wolverine skewers someone on his claws. Lemire draws these images almost like a child; they’re almost intentionally devoid of style. I’m not saying this to imply that Lemire can’t draw (he clearly can), but these images of violence have that almost childlike purity about them. Maybe that’s why they are so arresting? Perhaps it’s like coming across some disturbing images in a 2nd grader’s art book? Whatever it is, it’s like nothing else and it provokes emotions where those stylized images of Wolverine just evoke yawns.
Conclusion: Even if the ending is a little expected, it is still very well done. Lemire is able to provoke stronger emotions with his work than most creators.
Grade: A
– Dean Stell
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Conclusion