Sweet Tooth...

[fajrdrako]

I just read the first volume of the graphic novel Sweet Tooth by Jeff Lemire. Lemire is a brilliant comic book storytelling; I'm not sure I like his art, but it's strong and expressive, and the story is compelling and disturbing.



It's the story of Gus, a human-deer hybrid (or a boy who looks like a deer), raised alone by his Dad in a cabin in the middle of the woods. Gus has never seen another human, but he knows they exist, even after a plague killed most people. His father, a Bible-reading vegetarian, has made him promise never to leave the woods. Outside the woods, he said, there is disease - everyone dies, as Gus's mother died. And there are bad men.

But when his Dad dies, Gus goes out of the woods, because he doesn't want to be alone. He certainly encounters bad men. He starts to travel with a rough, gruff, tough man named Jeppard - who looks like Cable and fights like Wolverine. No, not with claws, but leaving a trail of blood behind him... So much of the book is about an innocent in danger, that I found it difficult to read. But I still plan to find the next volume: this ends on a cliffhanger.

One site describes the book as Bambi meets The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Wikipedia calls it "a post-apocalyptic parable", though what it's a parable of, I have yet to see.